Rhone Turns Its Attention to Revamping Its Activewear Offer
Rhone is going back to its roots.
After several years spent focusing on its lifestyle offerings, the Connecticut-based menswear brand is turning its attention back to activewear where it got its start a decade ago.
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“We started with activewear only because we felt there was a big void in the quality of what was being offered,” said Nate Checketts, Rhone’s cofounder and chief executive officer, of the brand’s beginnings. “Everything either had a funky fit or wasn’t high quality.”
So Rhone created a line of premium apparel that was comfortable, made for motion and durable. Over the past few years, it extended that same aesthetic beyond workout gear into successful commuter and lifestyle collections, but now it is revamping and refreshing its initial product offering.
“We realized we haven’t spent much time on our activewear innovation,” Checketts said. So the team sat down with chief product officer Kelly Cooper to “reinvent the product line.”
They started with the Pursuit Short, which will launch on Thursday. The company spent months testing different iterations of the short, which Ben Checketts, Nate’s brother and Rhone’s creative director, described as “an evolution of our bestselling Mako short — our sweaty, generalist short. It’s still great but we realized the style was getting old and set out to find a way to make it lighter, stretchier and super durable.” He said this “all-purpose short” will work for everything from mountain biking and weight lifting to pickleball.
The Pursuit will be offered in a standard fit in five-, seven- or nine-inch inseams, either lined or unlined. Updates have been made to the drawcord, there is a faux stitched fly, two hand pockets with one zippered security pocket and a new reflective knockout captain’s stitch logo. The product also uses Goldfusion anti-odor technology.
“The liner is a big issue with guys,” Ben Checketts said. “You either love it or hate it.” So while Rhone still offers shorts with compression liners, they wanted to include something more comfortable in the Pursuit that guys could wear all day. “We call it the FIT liner — forget it’s there,” he said.
The price of the Pursuit will be similar to the Mako, and will sell for $74 to $84.
In addition to the Pursuit, Rhone will also revamp its other activewear products over the course of the next several months. In February, Base Training short-sleeve shirts and shorts will be launched that are intended for gym workouts and general training sessions. In April, a collection specifically for pickleball and other court sports will be introduced, followed by a running-specific line in May and a premium activewear collection designed for more-intense workouts in June.
Ben Checketts said during the pandemic that customers shopped “super niche,” seeking products specific to particular sports or activities, so Rhone aims to answer that call with these different products.
Rhone’s focus on activewear runs counter to many of its competitors, which are expanding beyond strict workout clothes into more lifestyle offerings. “We zig when other people are zagging,” Nate Checketts said. “We see the world going back to their pre-pandemic ways and some of the habits they developed during the pandemic have stuck. So we believe people are ready to invest in activewear again.”
That’s not to say that Rhone will abandon its more-lifestyle offerings. “Our commuter collection has had three times the growth of anything else and we continue to believe in that,” Nate Checketts said. Sales of the commuter line are 61 percent over last year with sales of the slim model up 55 percent and the skinny silhouette up 33 percent year to date. Even so, “our big launch for 2024 is activewear.”
The company is also planning to launch womenswear in May, and Nate Checketts hinted that there are also some “interesting collaborations” in the offing for this year as well.
But one thing Rhone is not planning to do is significantly expand its retail footprint. The company operates 15 stores and Ben Checketts said the plan is to “strengthen” the current fleet and “fill them with personality.”
Rhone, which was founded in 2014, received an investment in 2017 from L Catterton, a partnership between Catterton Partners, LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Groupe Arnault. But last summer, L Catterton cashed out and the brand closed a series D round of financing through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) fund, with management and a select group of investors — including former NFL players Tim Tebow and Steve Young — buying back L Catterton’s minority stake. Half of the funds came from seven owners of professional sports teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS and EPL, the company said. In addition to Tebow and Young, other investors included Blackstone executive David Blitzer, former hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin and Larry Miller Group. Prior investors have included Justin Tuck and Troy Aikman.
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