Alo is introducing its second shoe and its first foray into true performance-based footwear: a running sneaker.
Dubbed the Runner, the sneaker launched for pre-order on Thursday in black and white colorways. Excluding shower slides, it marks the brand’s second major footwear product. It retails for $185.
Alo’s first shoe, the casual Recovery Mode Sneaker, also $185, launched in May 2023 and has become a runaway hit for the brand. It is consistently among the brand’s top five best-selling products, said Danny Harris, Alo’s founder and CEO. “It’s not like someone buys a pair of Recovery shoes, and then that’s it. They come back and they buy another, and then they buy every color, and then they buy it for their family. It’s everyone’s favorite shoe,” he said.
“The way the Runner is engineered is to keep you running on your toes, which is the proper way to run,” said Summer Nacewicz, Alo’s evp of marketing and creative. “When you put them on, it changes your posture and tilts you forward. And as you run, it makes it easy to keep proper form.” According to the brand, the style is made with 70% recyclable materials.
The Runner will be the brand’s only running shoe, Harris said. “Alo doesn’t get into a category unless we truly believe that our product is the best,” he said. “Apple comes out with a product, and they put everything behind it. It’s the same idea for us. … When we come out with another shoe, it will be a different kind of shoe, in a category that we’re addressing very seriously and are really excited about.” The only exception may be updates to the original model as technology advances. New colors of the Runner will be introduced in December.
To promote the Runner, the brand tapped five athletes. They include football player Joe Burrow (4.1 million Instagram followers), model and actor Mathew Noszka (2.2 million), activist and motorcyclist Jordan Rand (533,000), Alo trainer Louis Chandler (43,000) and Tae Kwon Do champion Rayna Vallandingham (2.4 million). All use running as part of their wellness and fitness practices and have already been part of the Alo “family,” Nacewicz said.
In figuring out how to bring this new sneaker to market, at a time when plenty of brands play at the intersection of sport and fashion, Alo chose to focus on wellness and, more specifically, mindfulness. “When it comes to running, we envision these three circles: You have performance, you have fashion and you have this mindfulness element, and Alo is the brand that’s sitting at the center of all three,” Nacewicz said. “The tagline of the campaign is: ‘Inhale, Exhale, Run,’ and running as a moving meditation is the guiding principle.”
The campaign will be shared on all partners’ social media channels, plus the brand is doing extensive product seeding. In addition, for the first time in its history, Alo is running a small OOH campaign, including wild postings in NYC’s SoHo and Los Angeles’s Beverly Grove. It will also project the sneaker onto its own HQ in Beverly Hills.
On September 7, Alo will host a global 5-kilometer run, with the event beginning simultaneously from local Alo stores around the world, in cities including Honolulu, Beverly Hills, New York City, Toronto and London. Participants will receive a pair of the brand’s iconic Throwback Crew Socks. Prior, on September 5, Alo Moves, the brand’s online subscription-based fitness platform, will debut a four-week running program led by Chandler. The aim is to lean into the sport of running across Alo’s content and events.
According to Harris, the introduction of the Runner is only the beginning of the brand’s footwear chapter. In the next couple of years, he said, he expects the category to comprise 20% of the brand’s overall revenue. Alo, which launched in 2007, sought a $10 billion valuation in October 2023.
