During the workday, Emily Halnon is a social media professional. She tweeted from Capitol Hill when she worked in Washington, D.C., and now does the same for a craft brewing company in Eugene, Oregon, her current hometown. After hours, she is all runner. Her specialty these days is ultras, but she also has run Boston and has a marathon PR of 3:08:01. And in her spare time she is an unfailing blogger, keeping followers posted about her running life at Sweat Once a Day.
What isn’t she? That would be an actress, and Halnon would be the first to admit it.
But in 2012, she found herself in what she now says is “the most embarrassing video in the history of online video submissions.” In the four-minute homemade clip, she and a friend play superheroes seeking to save American Olympic hopes after a band of rogue Kenyan athletes had stolen running shorts made by Oiselle, the real-life women’s sports apparel company. “It’s a dorky story,” Halnon, 29, confesses.
Did the superheroes succeed in their mission? You’ll have to go to YouTube to find out. But the friends did achieve their primary goal. They entered the video in a contest put on by Oiselle, which was offering a trip to the 2012 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials for two women who could demonstrate why they should be picked to root on American athletes at the meet. Halnon’s entry won.
“It is a very amateur video,” says Halnon. “[Oiselle was] not judging us on the quality of the production.”
Oscar-worthiness aside, Halnon’s efforts demonstrate the level of fandom Oiselle—which bills itself as offering fashionable apparel for the female runner who wants to run hard and race competitively—has come to garner among women since it launched in 2007. Other evidence: Last year Oiselle (pronounced “wa-zell”) had such demand from recreational runners to be added to the company’s 250-person non-professional running team that it had to turn aside hundreds of applicants. And even with sales of less than $10 million, Oiselle recently recruited running star Kara Goucher as a corporate spokesperson and to race for its elite running team; Goucher, a two-time Olympian, had been with industry leader Nike for 12 years.
“I was so inspired by how [Oiselle] wanted to be in track and field, how they treated their athletes, and how they wanted to change the sport for the better,” Goucher, 35, recently said of her decision to join the company. Goucher added that she was drawn to Oiselle by “how they wanted to support women. I fell in love with their ideas and their ideals.”
Supporters and Skeptics
With the zealots, though, come the critics. Online message boards, such as those at Letsrun.com and Get Off My Internets, include threads where posters with pseudonyms routinely gripe about the company’s promotional techniques. “Oiselle cleverly markets using bloggers who’ll shill anything and will snap up their shorts like crazy,” one poster wrote last fall on Get Off My Internets. “Lots of gullible readers are all over their stuff, just on recommendation from someone who got it for free/cheap.”
And while the company says part of its mission is to build a community of female runners, some who are not Oiselle ambassadors have a less cheery opinion of the company.
“I’m sure being on the team feels very good and they feel a lot of support and love,” says Caitlin Connell, a San Francisco runner who entered the Oiselle video contest won by Halnon. “But it also has the opposite effect on people not on the team who perceive them as a very exclusive group.”
Function and Fashion, the governing body for American track and field. In May Oiselle posted a photo on its Instagram account of American athletes who had competed at the world relay championships wearing Nike-logoed uniforms approved and sanctioned by USATF. (Nike and USATF have a sponsorship agreement—recently renewed through 2040—by which Nike supplies uniforms when American athletes are competing on national teams.) Oiselle doctored the photo, replacing the Nike logo on some of the athletes’ uniforms with the logo of competing apparel companies, including Oiselle’s. USATF lawyers sent Oiselle a cease-and-desist order; Oiselle took down the photo after receiving the letter.
But the incident is part of an ongoing campaign by Oiselle founder and CEO Sally Bergesen to highlight what she says is a “conflict of interest” between USATF and Nike—one, she says, that is hurting athletes who are not sponsored by Nike.
“Honestly, I have been appalled at what I have learned about the way the sport is currently designed, managed, funded, and governed,” says Bergesen, a competitive runner since graduating from of the University of Oregon, though she did not run for the collegiate powerhouse. “I think there are a lot of problems inherent with the sport right now.”
What isnt she? That would be an actress, and Halnon would be the first to admit it
When she set out to create an apparel line, Bergesen contends, she never intended to be divisive or take on the higher powers of the sport. A designer by profession and a hard-core recreational runner by desire, Bergesen, 45, says she learned what worked and didn’t work when it came to women’s running clothes during her training and at races. She was brand-consulting for such companies as Starbucks, Microsoft, and Nike when she rolled out her first running line in 2007. The brand name Oiselle is French for “bird,” playing on Bergesen’s personal ethos to promote running as a sport where women will feel empowered to “take flight” and “be free.”
“I knew the sport, and I knew the product [for women then available] was subpar and had been for a long time,” says Bergesen, who boasts a marathon PR of 2:59 and will run the Napa to Sonoma Wine Country Half Marathon on July 20. “So there was a huge market opportunity. As a runner and designer I saw it and moved toward solving it.”
Oiselle is hardly the first or only running apparel company focused primarily on the female runner. The brand Moving Comfort, launched in 1977, is often credited as being the originator of a full line of women’s running apparel. Today, women-centric apparel designers range from such giants as Lululemon, Athleta, and Title Nine to boutique players like Skirt Sports and IRUNLIKEAGIRL.
Oiselle's Cross Top Mesh
What distinguishes Oiselle from the pack? According to Bergesen, “I think good design in women’s athletic apparel is not common, but I know that’s subjective. To be honest, I don’t spend much time thinking about competitors. We stay focused on what we like, and what we do well, and keep executing. That way, we’re much more likely to have a distinct aesthetic that’s unique to us. Runners compete, and face the elements, and push to pain. And we don’t have to speak a different language to partake.”
When Oiselle launched, many female runners quickly took notice—and took to championing it.
Go online and you’ll find Oiselle supporters blogging enthusiastically about the company’s popular running shorts. (“Everyone loves the Roga and it also comes in a very cute diamond pattern,” writes Runner Leana; “The Rogas convinced me it was finally safe to wear running shorts in public,” blogs Musing Footfall.) Members of Volée, the Oiselle non-professional racing team—250 or so running ambassadors scattered around the country who range from recent college grads to stay-at-home moms—get 20- to 30-percent discounts on the brand’s premium-priced clothing (running T’s and shorts retail for as much as $50) but are expected to commit to a seven-point manifesto dubbed “Principles of Flight.” Among the tenets: “Spread the love....If you choose to be here, join because you’re nuts about the brand.”
And they are. Danielle Heffernan, a 28-year-old technical writer from Somerset, New Jersey, joined the Oiselle team in 2012 after first following company tweets and testing the product.
“It is a really cool community to be a part of, whether you are a super-serious runner or a weekend 5-K’er,” says Heffernan, who blogs at Foodosaurus Rex. “It is a team feeling in that you will always have people to congratulate you and give words of encouragement. It is nice to have that when you are an adult and you usually can no longer be part of a team.”
Oiselle wearers, like Heffernan and Halnon, regularly seek out Bergesen and other Oiselle teammates at events. Heffernan says she spent time with the CEO on three occasions in the past eight months, including at the Oiselles Cross Top Mesh and Boston marathons. And besides being with Oiselle employees during the Track Trials in 2012, Halnon met Bergesen in Houston during the Olympic Marathon trials earlier that year.
Such loyalty to a brand does not come without a cost. Before becoming a Oiselle wearer and eventually a member of Volée (“flyer” in French), Halnon says she had a collection of Lululemon apparel. “From a business perspective it was financially detrimental decision at first,” she says of making the switch to Oiselle, which left her Lululemon apparel all but obsolete. “But it wasn’t about [finances]. It was about wanting to support the brand and wear their clothes.”
That sort of fandom has helped to push Oiselle’s bottom line. Bergesen says the company, which operates above a bar in the Green Lake area of Seattle and has 12 full-time employees, recently became profitable and expects to break the $10 million revenue mark next year.
That total is just a blip in the women’s sports apparel market. Earlier this year NPD, a Long Island, New York-based research firm, reported U.S. sales of women’s activewear reached $11.5 billion in 2013. The market segment is led by likes of Nike, Adidas, Lululemon and Athleta. Lululemon, for instance, recently announced first quarter revenue of $36 million, dwarfing Oiselle’s figures. And as a small, private company, Oiselle has yet to gain the attention of Wall Street analysts who cover the apparel industry. When Camilo Lyon, a retail analyst at the investment bank Canaccord Genuity, was when asked to comment on Oiselle, he replied, “I’m not very familiar with that brand. Sorry I can’t help.”
If it is not top-of-mind in the canyons of Wall Street, Oiselle, in the past few months, has made its presence known, and not just among its typical end-users. For instance, last fall, Oiselle made its debut runway appearance during Oiselles Cross Top Mesh’s Fashion Week, usually a showcase for such designers as Ralph Lauren and Vera Wang. Oiselle presented its spring 2014 line modeled by members of its elite running team Haute Volée, including two-time national 5K champion and Runner's World When Oiselle launched, many female runners quickly took noticeand took to championing it, seen at the left. Tak, an online fashion magazine that usually covers high-couture clothing rather than sports bras and race singlets, wrote of the Oiselle collection: “Overall a really nice set of looks that owe their function and form in part to high-fashion styling, but still felt down-to-earth and as sporty as intended.”
That combination—functional and fashionable—is what retailers, especially those that cater primarily to runners, say their customers are increasingly seeking.
Nikki Benedict, the women’s apparel buyer at Playmakers in Okemos, Michigan, says her specialty running store has carried Oiselle for much of the past two years. “Being a run-specialty I want to have things here that you can’t find at other places,” says Benedict. “So, one, I find [Oiselle] to be a very unique line. Second, it can be hard to find women’s-only product; [Oiselle works] hard to fit the average woman. The other thing I like about Oiselle is their fabric; it’s very soft and very comfortable. You put it on and it already feels broken in.”
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To help bolster its name among runners, Oiselle began signing bigger-named professional runners to sponsorship contracts and to run for the Haute Volée, which now numbers 25 elite athletes. First, in January 2013, Bergesen signed Fleshman, who had run previously for Nike. Then, this past March, Goucher joined Oiselle.
While potentially good PR, such signings don’t necessarily translate into more sales, according to some retailers. Chris Schmidt, owner of the Run Inn in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, says he suspects few of his female customers know who Fleshman and Goucher are—and those who might likely wouldn’t purchase a $40 Oiselle T over a less expensive alternative simply because of the athletes’ connection to the brand. “I’m not sure if even Nike gets a boost from its connection to runners,” Schmidt says. “They get a boost from being associated with Michael Jordan and Tiger [Woods] and LeBron [James].”
Regardless of retail impact, Bergesen says the deals, which gave Fleshman and Goucher equity in the company, have already paid off in two other areas. Both athletes have sizeable social media followings, including more Twitter followers than Oiselle (59,000 and 31,000 for Goucher and Fleshman, respectively, compared to 21,000 for Oiselle). Bergesen expects the two to draw new followers to Oiselle. “Their brands are bigger than our brand,” she says. “So it has been a great win for us.”
Bergesen also says her association with Goucher, Fleshman, and another top American runner, middle-distance specialist Kate Grace, has introduced her to the issues facing professional track and road athletes, many of whom have increasingly expressed disfavor with regulations within the sport that limit how they can promote their sponsors during major events. In Bergesen’s view such rules limit the athletes’ potential earnings but also deny sponsors such as Oiselle from gaining maximum exposure when their athletes are taking part in the competitions.
Her frustration helped to prompt the Instagram incident in May. The original photo, taken after the women’s 4 x 1500-meter relay at the IAAF World Relays Championships, shows the Nike logo on the U.S. uniforms of three American athletes—Katie Mackey, Kate Grace, and Brenda Martinez—replaced by the logo of the athletes’ current sponsors (respectively, Brooks, Oiselle, and New Balance). Within hours of the doctored photo’s appearance, USATF sent its cease-and-desist order to Oiselle.
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“What we would like to do is find ways to push for change,” she says, “and to make more people aware of the way the sport is designed and governed so that change can happen.” She adds that one of her goals is to make recreational runners who “are not necessarily plugged in to the elite end aware of it and get behind it.”
Bergesen calls herself a provocateur, a role Fleshman is happy to see the boss of her sponsoring company take on. “Her passion is great,” Fleshman says of Bergesen. “Sally doesn’t have a traditional approach to life that she follows. Oiselle started with designing shorts, but it has become a way to impact women.”
Bergesen admits the athletes’ issues can become consuming and test her business bandwidth.
“I try not to get too wrapped up in it, [but] it is hard,” she says. “I go through the pendulum swings. I will get really into it and get fired up and I will want to change the world, but that can often devolve into a depression [about] the state of the sport and how unchangeable things feel. That is not a good space for me to be in creatively. My job is to innovate on behalf of Oiselle and move the business forward.”
Toward that end the company recently added a swimwear line; expects to have Bloomingdale’s carry its running line in the near future; and is not ruling out the possibility of introducing a shoe line. When asked if a Oiselle shoe would be available in 2014, Bergesen said, “No.” When asked if one could be available in 2015, she said, “No comment.”
And this month the company is rolling out a Oiselle membership program—dubbed The Flock—in part to accommodate runners who previously had not been accepted to its Volée team. For $100, members will receive a Oiselle singlet, a spike bag, free shipping on all orders, and fan cards featuring Oiselle elite runners. Bergesen says $25 from each membership will be used to fund its elite program.
Even before the program was formally announced, news of it had leaked onto message boards, with some posters criticizing it as a marketing gimmick. “This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,” said a post on Letsrun. “I imagine it went something like ‘We’re all sisters in sport, but only if you pay us.’”
Such a reaction does not faze Bergesen. “We spent a lot of time thinking about it, talking about it,” she says of the membership program. “But having said that there are going to be people who pooh-pooh it or don’t like it. You know what? They don’t need to join.”
A pretty heady statement for the CEO of a still-small player in a vast business sector. But her fans have her back. “Not everyone is going to be impressed by [Oiselle] and some will say things against it,” says Danielle Heffernan. “But the point of the company is to bring all women together. It is an inspiration.”
