Crowdsourced sportswear is doing away with ads and stores

To make its range of sportswear more affordable than high street brands, Tribesports is fostering a community of loyal customers through crowdsourcing and fitness tracking.

Major sports brands like adidas and Nike have built up their brands over the last several decades and taken advantage of multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to get their name known worldwide, but how can a young startup such as London’s Tribesports compete? In order to make its range of sportswear more affordable than high street brands, it is fostering a community of loyal customers through crowdsourcing and fitness tracking.

Although it uses the same technical fabrics, experienced sportswear designers and manufacturers as leading brands, Tribesports is eschewing the traditional route for marketing its products. It first built a community of avid athletes by offering articles, forums for discussion, tools for tracking performance, and challenges for members. It then invited its userbase to help design a line of sportswear by submitting their ideas for what they wanted from the range. After working with a designer to create prototypes, the startup launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in August, which reached four times its target. By creating a community of engaged users, Tribesports was able to forgo an expensive marketing campaign and then took advantage of digital sales to cut its costs by around 40 percent when compared to high street brands. The video below explains more about the company:

Tribesports successfully combines a number of aspects of business that have been enabled by the web. Is this method of successfully scaling a business something that could work for your company?