At four or five in the morning, almost 24 hours in, Marcus and Shawn Milione’s father came down to the basement with his coffee and sat. He had gone to bed the night before. His sons had not. 

It was Minted New York’s first holiday season, and the brand Marcus started at his parents’ house in Virginia was releasing its first Minted New York Run Club hoodie. Determined to get orders out fast, the brothers worked 27 hours straight. “Shawn and I are delirious at this point, trying to just keep working through everything and make sure everything’s good to go,” Marcus says. The release was, in his words, “insanely good”. Their mother, who had witnessed the logistical effort firsthand, was equally proud but ready for a more sustainable setup. “I think it’s time to get a warehouse,” Marcus remembers her saying.

Six years on, Minted NY has done exactly that, and a good deal more. The New York label now has a designer, an office, collaborations with Saucony and a following that turns out for pop-ups from SoHo to London. It still has no investors. And on 22 October it releases its Fall Performance Running ’26 collection, which head designer Clay Barckholtz calls “the biggest yet”. 

TWO CHAINS AND A HOODIE

The broad strokes of Minted NY’s development are familiar to Marcus’ followers. Sent home from their corporate jobs in New York at the start of the pandemic for what was meant to be a long weekend, the brothers drove back to Virginia and stayed. With the family working under one roof at the dining table, Marcus went looking for a creative outlet and began posting about men’s fashion and fitness. Commenters kept asking about the 18-inch sterling silver chains he wore, which he had made in the Diamond District. “I kept seeing the same comment over and over, it’s like, ‘Okay, maybe something’s here,’” he says. 

The first drop was a small supply of just two styles of 18-inch chains, shipped in rudimentary packaging. It sold out. The restock added 20-inch and 22-inch lengths. Then came Minted NY’s first piece of apparel, the Minted New York Run Club hoodie. What they couldn’t have known at the time was just how much the Run Club Hoodie would change the trajectory of the business. 

TALKING TO THE CAMERA

Content built Minted NY, and it still sustains it. “At the beginning it was the whole foundation that the business was built off of,” Marcus says. In those early days he filmed on lunchtime walks, where he would “just talk to the camera, essentially”, documenting his training as much as his outfits. 

He still makes a lot of content about the business and the decisions behind it. “It’s much easier to make that type of content when you’re passionate about it, because you can speak freely and share what’s on your mind,” he says. “It feels very natural.” And because the team lives what it sells, the story is never hard to find. “We really live the brand and live the product, so it’s easy for us to storytell,” he says. 

The payoff is an audience that arrives already invested. Minted NY rarely wins customers through cold ads, Marcus says. Instead, people come to it through friends or organically through social media. “We hope it’s because they relate to what they are consuming,” he says. “It’s also nice because they’re already a bit more bought in than someone who knows nothing about the brand.” 

These days, the camera is shared around. Clay has his process videos, and videographer Sam Snowden follows the team for their YouTube channel, with little in the way of a shot list. “What we really want to portray is, ‘This is our life. This is real,’ ” Shawn says. “There’s no fabrication to what we’re doing.” That philosophy extends beyond the content itself. “Who we are online and who we are in our videos is who we are in real life,” he says. “It’s a lot easier to run a brand like that because you don’t have to worry about maintaining an image that isn’t authentic.” 

THE ASPIRING LAW STUDENT AND THE SOPHOMORE

For about a year, Minted NY was Marcus alone. Shawn, meanwhile, had finished a two-year commitment as a paralegal and was studying full-time for the law school admission test. He sat the exam, and then never even looked at his score. 

He had been packing orders for a little pay between study sessions when Marcus put the question to him. “I want you to do it if this is something you want to do,” Marcus remembers saying. “You have your path carved out for you … and I don’t really want to step in and get in the way of any of that.” But for Shawn, watching the business grow was motivation enough. “Marcus was doing all of it solo,” he says. “It was a no-brainer for me to jump in and help him.” With no background in clothing, he gravitated to operations, and today he manages supply chain, inventory and e-commerce while developing product alongside Clay. 

Clay was an online discovery. Marcus had found his TikTok design process videos and assumed he was an established creative working in NYC, so he asked whether he wanted to meet up. Clay was keen, for sure. The only catch, he revealed, was that he was a sophomore in college in Detroit. It was winter, so Marcus offered a remote internship over the break. Clay stayed on part-time until he graduated, making prototypes by hand at school for Marcus to scale up in New York, then moved to the city full-time. The brothers didn’t really know him in person until they flew him in for their first pop-up, in SoHo. 

The fourth member of the team is the Miliones’ sister, Kelly, who handles customer service part-time while balancing a full-time job of her own. Marcus and Shawn can’t thank her enough. “It is a very thankless job,” he says. “But she reads and responds to 99% of the emails that go to the support inbox. Any time you email support, it’s Kelly responding.”

SCRAPPY BY DESIGN

Shawn looks back on the basement era fondly, as “some of the best memories we have as a family, teaming up to help achieve this dream”. Then the operation moved to New York and eventually into a warehouse, which he calls “the most difficult time for me personally”. Running the business while also acting as their own fulfilment centre, as a team of three, “stretched us really thin”. 

The brothers did it that way out of necessity. “We’re bootstrapped. We have no investor money,” Marcus says. “Everything happens a little bit slower because you don’t have money to burn. But honestly, it’s taught us a lot and I wouldn’t change how we’ve done things.” 

When Tempo suggests that none of this looks scrappy from the outside, Marcus has a ready answer. “Well, I guess that’s a good thing, right? We’re very serious about product, and we’re very serious about presentation.”

Handing fulfilment to a logistics partner ended what Marcus calls “two straight weeks of hammering through orders” at every release. With an office and Clay full-time, the team can now concentrate on more comprehensive collections that are released on a proper schedule.

BUILT IN DETROIT

With a background in accessory design, Clay approached running apparel with a willingness to experiment and learn. The first collection laid the groundwork for what would follow, establishing a foundation that the team continues to build upon. With each release, they refine their approach, drawing on past experiences and customer feedback to improve the products that come next.

What Clay brought was a commitment to experimentation and refinement. “In school they really emphasised the importance of building strong concepts behind your work and making sure what you create has a sense of purpose or meaning,” he says. In Detroit he had been researching  car manufacturing. At Minted NY, he found inspiration in “objects that have been engineered to be insanely fast,” drawing a natural connection to running and the pursuit of speed. The result was the Mach print, which has since become a defining element of Minted NY’s performance line. 

He still makes the design process videos that first caught Marcus’s eye, and loves talking through each collection. “Clay’s a humble guy,” Shawn says, “but Marcus and I see the amount of research and time he puts into his work. He deserves a ton of recognition.” 

POISON

The Fall Performance Running ’26 collection represents the culmination of the team’s efforts to develop new products from scratch. “With this fall collection, we’re able to build upon a foundation we’ve worked hard to establish,” Marcus says. “We can take the patterns we’ve developed, learn from what our customers have responded to, and continue refining and improving each piece.” 

The starting point was last winter’s release, when Minted NY had been, as Clay puts it, “messing around with a lot of nostalgic sportswear”. Two pieces, the Flame ThermoKnit and the Fang Track Pant represented the direction the team wanted to go in. “We took a lot of those themes from the ’90s and nostalgic extreme sports,” he says, “and we wanted to blow that up in this collection.” 

We could give a hat-tip here to PACE Community, who recently noted that “since launching in July 2021, Minted New York has steadily transformed from a menswear label with a modest running offering into one of the more distinctive and visually progressive brands in the space … The early running collections borrowed heavily from classic track-and-field aesthetics, while today's releases lean into technical fabrics, conceptual graphics and a distinctly futuristic design language.”

That’s certainly true of the new fall collection, and its main colourway, carried across much of the range, is called Poison: purple, teal and citron green. “We feel like that’s very nostalgic to us,” Clay says. “We remember seeing Grave Digger and a lot of those crazy coloured monster trucks.” A green flame motif nods to brass foundries and other industrial references, while the graphics carry the story, building on Minted NY’s mad scientist character, Doctor Deminted, and his laboratory – packing in fan-favourite Easter eggs from an earlier Saucony release. “This is the first collection we have apparel for every single type of run,” Clay says. 

More is on the way. A merino wool engineered knit, with perforations knitted into the garment and mapped to where your core temperature rises as you run, was meant for this collection but has been pushed back to early next year. “We just really wanted to get it right,” Clay says. Marcus admits it has “been kind of a headache” for the designer, “but I also know that he enjoys trying to solve those hard problems”. 

LOOKING OUTWARDS

Sam Snowden recently directed Ordinary Excellence, Minted New York’s first attempt at documentary production, now available on YouTube. It’s a 50-minute documentary on Grant Fisher, the two-time Olympic bronze medallist. The brothers’ coach, Mike Scannell, also coaches Fisher, and over three years the friendship has extended to the athlete himself. The film traces Fisher’s life through archival material into the lead-up to his half-marathon debut at the United Airlines NYC Half. It is not a product story. “It doesn’t always need to be about selling a product,” Shawn says. “We really respect the sport of running and want to do our best to appropriately tell the story of one of the best distance runners in the world.”

For Marcus, the hope is that Minted NY inspires people beyond the products themselves, whether that's “putting on a pair of running shoes for the first time, picking up a new hobby, or finding the confidence to chase a dream.”