The secret of Alphalete's fitness wear success
The stories of fitness bloggers who became famous are always interesting to people. Whether it's Pamela or Kardashian, they show how much influence fitness bloggers can have.
Their stories don't end there. The next chapter in their legendary tales is about fitness clothing, which has become a thriving business in Europe and America.
Gymshark, a fitness clothing brand founded in 2012 by 19-year-old fitness enthusiast Ben Francis, was once valued at $1.3 billion; North American yoga clothing brand Alo Yoga, with the support of bloggers and fans, has achieved a sportswear business with annual sales of hundreds of millions of dollars; there are even many fitness bloggers in Europe and America with millions of fans who are steadily running their own sportswear brands.
Eight years ago, the blogger effect of Alo and the history of Gymshark's rise to fame were replicated by a young fitness blogger from Texas, Christian Guzman, who launched his own sportswear brand - Alphalete. After eight years of fitness blogger clothing entrepreneurship, he has now achieved revenues of over 100 million dollars.
At least in the European and American markets, fitness bloggers are good at creating content and also good at making fitness clothing.
As a fitness clothing brand, Alphalete's tailoring fits the bodies of trainers, the fabric is more suitable for strength training scenarios, and the marketing method also uses cooperation with fitness bloggers. In the European and American market full of sportswear brands, it has opened up its own unique living space.
After successfully promoting the Alphalete brand to the market, founder Christian Guzman announced in a video on his personal YouTube channel in March this year that he will start an upgrade plan for the brand's gym Alphaland and launch a new clothing brand.
Fitness bloggers naturally have a strong connection with fitness clothing, gyms, and healthy food. Alphalete's sportswear revenue of over 100 million in eight years is undoubtedly growing rapidly and moving towards a broader field.
Like many blogger brands such as Gymshark and Alo, Alphalete also starts from the fitness niche crowd, has a crazy community culture, and maintains a high growth rate at the beginning of its establishment. Of course, they were also ordinary and young when they started.
Fitness blogger's clothing entrepreneurship brand Alphalete
For fitness enthusiasts, Alphalete may not be unfamiliar. From the iconic wolf head LOGO at the beginning of its establishment to the popular women's sportswear Amplify series in the past two years, Alphalete has successfully stood out from the increasingly similar mass training clothes.
Since its establishment in 2015, Alphalete's growth seems to be smooth sailing. According to founder Christian Guzman, Alphalete's revenue has now exceeded 100 million US dollars, with more than 27 million people visiting the brand's official website last year, and its social platform fan base has also exceeded 3 million.
This story is similar to the founder of Gymshark, and the growth path of new fitness blogger brands seems to always converge.
When Alphalete was established as a company, founder Christian Guzman was only 22 years old, but Alphalete was not his first venture in life.
Three years before the establishment of the company, he made his first pot of gold in life from operating his own YouTube channel. Subsequently, in addition to sharing his training and daily life, he began to provide online training and diet guidance for his audience. He even rented a small factory in Texas and opened a gym.
At this time, Christian's personal channel on YouTube has broken through a million subscribers. At this time, he began to try to do something more resounding than his own name.
So, the idea of establishing a personal fitness brand sprouted in Christian's mind. Soon after, the predecessor of Alphalete - CGFitness was born. At the same time, Christian also became a contracted model for the rapidly growing British fitness clothing brand Gymshark.
Perhaps inspired by Gymshark, or perhaps feeling that the personal color of CGFitness is too ostentatious, Christian decided to strategically reshape his clothing brand after a while, and Alphalete Athletics was born.
"Sportswear is not a service, but a product, and consumers can also make their own brands," Christian mentioned in a podcast program. "At the same time, as a combination of alpha and athlete, Alphalete hopes to inspire people to explore more possibilities, with the goal of creating an elite series, which can be both a highly functional sports single product and casual wear for daily wear."
It can be said that the entrepreneurial stories of sportswear brands are each wonderful, but the logic behind them is similar, all for a group of niche people to make more suitable clothing.
Like Gymshark, the equally young Alphalete also chose young fitness and fitness people as the entry point. Or rather, it is precisely because Gymshark has run through this path that Alphalete has followed a similar path and emerged.
With its own accumulated core user resources, Alphalete achieved a sales record of $150,000 in just three hours when it was released, and at that time, the entire team only had Christian and his parents. It was at this time that Alphalete's road to rapid growth officially began.
Do fitness clothing in the way of fitness bloggers
Similar to the rise of Gymshark and other DTC brands, Alphalete relies on online channels, mainly using e-commerce and social media to communicate directly with users by reducing intermediate channels. Pay attention to communicating with consumers, pay attention to design, pay attention to functionality, from product design to market to feedback, every channel is directly facing consumers.
As a fitness suit, Alphalet is tailored, cut, and designed for fitness people, and is eye-catching enough. Fitness figure, bright colors, fitness suits and fit figures seem to be integrated.
In addition to product quality, Alphalete and Christian himself continue to produce as much text and video content as possible to expand the brand's audience. These contents include: Christian's exercise videos wearing Alphalete, detailed size guides and product reviews, interviews with Alphalete contracted athletes, and "A Day in Life" special interviews, etc.
If excellent product quality and online content are the cornerstones of Alphalete's rise to fame, then cooperation with professional athletes and fitness KOLs truly makes the brand famous.
Once Alphalete was released, Christian cooperated with fitness bloggers and KOLs to create social content to promote brand marketing through social platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. In November 2017, he began to truly build the brand's "influencer team."
At the same time, Alphalete also began to layout women's business. "We realized that sports leisure is becoming a fashion trend, and women are more willing to spend on it," Christian mentioned in an interview. "Now, women's sportswear is a very important product of Alphalete, and the proportion of female users has increased from 5% at the beginning to 50% now, while women's clothing sales also account for nearly 40% of the product sales."
In 2018, Alphalete signed the first female fitness blogger Gabby Schey, and then signed a series of well-known female athletes and fitness bloggers such as Bela Fernanda and Jazzy Pineda. While making the most of it, it continuously upgraded product design and invested a lot of money in the research and development of women's product design. After launching the first popular women's sports pants Revival leggings, it also successfully launched Amplify, Aura and other popular series of products.
While expanding its own "influencer team," Alphalete also pays more attention to maintaining its own brand community.
For a new generation of sports brands, establishing a strong brand community is crucial to gain a foothold in the competitive sportswear track, which seems to have become a consensus among new brands.
In order to break the thick barrier between online stores and offline communities, and create a face-to-face experience for consumers, in 2017, Alphalete's influencer team began a world tour across seven different cities in Europe and North America. Although the annual tour is a sales event in a sense, both the brand and users pay more attention to: community building, social media heat, and the cultivation of brand loyalty.
