Rhone, the athleisure brand founded in 2014, launched "A Love Letter to NYC," a campaign tying the energy of New York to the brand's own ambition. Rhone has a flagship in the Flatiron District and is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut. The campaign marks a deliberate shift from performance marketing toward brand building.
The timing matters. Rhone sits at an inflection point between its DTC origins and growing retail and wholesale businesses, while performance apparel itself evolves. "We started in the athletic space, and as we've grown, we've realized performance isn't just about athletic achievement: It's about how people navigate their everyday life," said CMO Bethany Evans, who joined in November 2024 after more than five years at The North Face. "This campaign was meant to reflect how our customers actually live, making it more of a natural evolution of the brand, not a departure from it."
The 30-second hero video draws on 1990s New York-set romantic comedies. A man and a woman separately prepare for and move through a day in Manhattan, near-missing each other on the street before a dog-assisted meet-cute in the park. Rhone splits its line into move, play and live, and all three appear — while scenes of fitness or gym life are intentionally absent. For authenticity, the two actors are a real couple, and the dog is theirs.
The campaign was created in-house; media is handled by Kepler Group, named the brand's first media agency of record in 2025.
The campaign spans linear, connected TV, social, direct mail, print, out-of-home and retail and digital experiences. It includes Citi Bike dock takeovers near Rhone's three New York locations, an integration with The New York Times' Connections game, and partnerships with NYC photographer Ethan Barber and the Instagram account @MeetCutesNYC. A custom photo booth runs at the Flatiron store September 19–20.
Evans is direct about the reasoning: "We were really focused on performance media for a long time, and I get it: It's easy to measure, it's really focused on e-comm. But our wholesale business is growing and our retail business is also growing, so we had to start taking a more omni-channel approach."
Rhone operates more than 20 U.S. stores and has expanded wholesale, including a Bloomingdale's partnership widened earlier this year. It also partners with the LPGA and the NBA. The NBA deal began in October 2024, before Evans arrived; it looked like an odd fit to her until she learned that Dave Checketts — father of co-founders Nate and Ben Checketts — held executive roles with the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden.
What matters is the use. "We've partnered with athletes who are really outspoken about the pressures of being a professional athlete — 'Here's what I do to keep myself in a healthy mindset' — and so that's the angle we've taken on it, which feels right for us, versus some kind of logo slap play that doesn't have a deeper meaning," Evans said.
Rhone runs a monthly challenge framework called 12 Pursuits, a truncated version of Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues that began as a Checketts family project. Part of Evans' remit has been extending it to customers, and over the next year the plan is to make it more experiential — retreats or pop-ups rather than an email or a social post. It stays commercially separate on purpose: "We're inviting our community to join us in this, but it can't be a way to sell clothes, so we've intentionally kept it very separate."
The trigger for moving up-funnel is concrete: the distribution mix changed. When everything sells through e-commerce, measurable spend is the optimum. Once wholesale and physical retail grow, how many people already know the brand before they reach the shelf starts to determine results. Brand campaigns are a function of distribution, not taste.
For building brand equity on a small budget, see Cava Beats Chipotle on About 1% of Revenue; for a brand rewriting its own category, Jif Reworks Its Logo to Escape the PB&J Box.
Rhone's brand campaign built around a 30-second hero film inspired by 1990s New York rom-coms. Fitness and gym scenes are deliberately excluded, and the two leads are a real-life couple.
CMO Bethany Evans said growing wholesale and retail businesses required an omni-channel approach, since e-commerce-focused performance media alone no longer matched how the brand sells.
A monthly challenge framework adapted from Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues, started as a Checketts family project. Rhone plans to make it more experiential through retreats or pop-ups while keeping it separate from sales efforts.
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