The stories of fitness influencers who have risen to fame always capture people's interest. Figures like Pamela Reif and Kim Kardashian demonstrate the significant impact fitness influencers can wield.
Their journeys extend beyond personal branding. The next chapter in their success stories involves fitness apparel, a burgeoning industry in both Europe and America.
For instance, Gymshark, a fitness apparel brand started in 2012 by 19-year-old fitness enthusiast Ben Francis, was valued at $1.3 billion at one point. Similarly, the North American yoga clothing brand Alo Yoga, backed by influencers and their followers, has built a sportswear business with annual sales reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. Numerous fitness influencers in Europe and America, boasting millions of fans, have successfully launched and managed their own sportswear brands.
A notable example is Christian Guzman, a young fitness influencer from Texas. Eight years ago, he emulated the success of Gymshark and Alo by creating his sportswear brand - Alphalete. Over eight years of his fitness apparel venture, he has now surpassed $100 million in revenue.
Fitness influencers excel not only in content creation but also in the fitness clothing sector, particularly in European and American markets.
Alphalete’s apparel is designed to fit the physiques of trainers, using fabrics suited for strength training. Their marketing strategy involves collaborations with fitness influencers, which has helped Alphalete carve out its own space in a crowded sportswear market.
After successfully establishing Alphalete in the market, Christian Guzman announced in a YouTube video in March that he plans to upgrade his gym, Alphaland, and launch a new clothing brand.
Fitness influencers naturally have strong ties to fitness apparel, gyms, and healthy food. Alphalete’s impressive revenue growth of over $100 million in eight years is a testament to this connection.
Like other influencer-driven brands such as Gymshark and Alo, Alphalete started by targeting niche fitness audiences, fostering a passionate community culture, and maintaining high growth rates in its early stages. They all began as ordinary, young entrepreneurs.
For fitness enthusiasts, Alphalete is likely a familiar name. From its iconic wolf head logo at its inception to the popular women’s sportswear Amplify series in recent years, Alphalete has distinguished itself in a market filled with similar training apparel.
Since its founding in 2015, Alphalete’s growth trajectory has been impressive. According to Christian Guzman, the brand’s revenue has now exceeded $100 million, with over 27 million visits to its official website last year, and a social media following surpassing 3 million.
This narrative mirrors that of Gymshark’s founder, reflecting a common growth pattern among new fitness influencer brands.
When Christian Guzman founded Alphalete, he was just 22 years old, but it wasn’t his first entrepreneurial venture.
Three years prior, he earned his first significant income through his YouTube channel, where he shared training tips and daily life. He then began offering online training and diet guidance, even renting a small factory in Texas and opening a gym.
By the time Christian’s YouTube channel had surpassed a million subscribers, he decided to embark on a venture beyond his personal brand. This led to the creation of CGFitness, the precursor to Alphalete. Around the same time, he became a model for the rapidly growing British fitness brand Gymshark.
Inspired by Gymshark and wanting to move beyond the personal branding of CGFitness, Christian rebranded his clothing line to Alphalete Athletics.
“Sportswear is not a service, but a product, and consumers can also create their own brands,” Christian mentioned in a podcast. “Alphalete, a blend of ‘alpha’ and ‘athlete,’ aims to inspire people to explore their potential, offering high-performance sportswear and stylish everyday attire.”
The entrepreneurial stories of sportswear brands are unique but share a common logic: creating better apparel for niche communities.
Like Gymshark, Alphalete targeted young fitness enthusiasts as their primary audience. By leveraging its core user base, Alphalete recorded $150,000 in sales within three hours of its launch, managed at the time by just Christian and his parents. This marked the beginning of Alphalete’s rapid growth trajectory.
Embrace Fitness Clothing with Influencer Marketing
Much like the rise of Gymshark and other DTC brands, Alphalete heavily relies on online channels, primarily utilizing e-commerce and social media to directly engage with customers, thereby minimizing intermediate steps. The brand emphasizes consumer interaction, design, and functionality, ensuring that every step from product creation to market feedback directly addresses the customers.
Alphalete's fitness apparel is specifically tailored and designed for fitness enthusiasts, featuring striking designs that integrate well with athletic physiques and vibrant colors. The result is an eye-catching fusion of fitness attire and fit bodies.
Beyond product quality, both Alphalete and its founder, Christian Guzman, continually generate a wealth of text and video content to broaden their audience. This includes workout videos featuring Christian in Alphalete gear, detailed size guides, product reviews, interviews with Alphalete-sponsored athletes, and special "A Day in the Life" segments.
While exceptional product quality and online content form the foundation of Alphalete's success, collaborations with professional athletes and fitness KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) truly elevate the brand's prominence.
Upon its launch, Christian collaborated with fitness influencers and KOLs to create social media content that promoted the brand across platforms like YouTube and Instagram. In November 2017, he began to formally establish Alphalete's "influencer team."
Simultaneously, Alphalete expanded its focus to include women's apparel. "We noticed that athleisure is becoming a fashion trend, and women are more willing to invest in it," Christian mentioned in an interview. "Today, women's sportswear is a crucial product line for Alphalete, with female users increasing from 5% initially to 50% now. Additionally, women's clothing sales now account for nearly 40% of our total product sales."
In 2018, Alphalete signed its first female fitness influencer, Gabby Schey, followed by other notable female athletes and fitness bloggers such as Bela Fernanda and Jazzy Pineda. Alongside these efforts, the brand continuously upgraded its product designs and heavily invested in the R&D of women's apparel. Following the successful launch of the popular women's sports leggings, the Revival series, Alphalete introduced other sought-after lines like Amplify and Aura.
As Alphalete expanded its "influencer team," it also prioritized maintaining a strong brand community. For emerging sports brands, establishing a solid brand community is essential to gaining a foothold in the competitive sportswear market—a consensus among new brands.
To bridge the gap between online stores and offline communities and offer consumers a face-to-face experience, Alphalete's influencer team embarked on a world tour across seven cities in Europe and North America in 2017. Although these annual tours serve as sales events to some extent, both the brand and its users focus more on community building, generating social media buzz, and nurturing brand loyalty.
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Post time: Jan-06-2025
