Brands like Chipotle, Duer & Hoka are partnering with Strava to make branded workouts
Companies are using the fitness tracking and activity-sharing app Strava for branded workout challenges, often rewarding potential customers with product discounts.
Last year, CamelBak hosted the Redefine Limits running challenge with 149,000 participants, the Chase 20 bike challenge with almost 222,000 people and an All-Terrain Running Challenge with 223,000 participants, each offering discounts on its products like water bottles and tumblers in exchange for running or biking a certain time or duration. Hoka has hosted many challenges on Strava, including a running challenge in July with a chance to win shoes that attracted more than 175,000 participants.
In an email to Modern Retail, Strava for Business director Evelina Jarbin said brands’ interest in hosting branded challenges has grown over the past couple of years alongside their attempt to better engage with active people, also noticing an increased focus among people to invest in their physical and mental health. The app’s internal research also showed a higher share of Gen Z people uploaded runs on its platform in 2023 than Gen X, according to Jarbin, so Strava may give brands a way to reach that young, fit audience.
“By working with brands and organizations that share our values, Strava offers a genuine and impactful connection to an active and engaged community, which can increase brand awareness and attract new customers and sales for the brand,” Jarbin said.
Strava offers both sponsored challenges and sponsored segments. Sponsored challenges allow brands to choose between duration, distance, altitude, streak, collective or days-active challenges based on their target audience. Sponsored segments add an element of gamification for runners on their runs, from daily runs to marathons, on pre-defined portions of roads and trails. In January, Chipotle created sponsored segments in six cities, each about 300 meters, rewarding the winners who ran each segment the most with free burritos or bowls for a year.
Branded challenges are promoted within the Strava app, which has more than 125 million users. People who complete a challenge are redirected to the partner’s site to redeem their reward.
The fees associated with each challenge are campaign-based and dependent on targeting (geography and sport types), duration and amplification such as emails or in-feed promotion, according to Jarbin. Strava doesn’t make engagement guarantees but provides estimates of impressions, participation and finishers for sponsored challenges and segments. Challenges start at $20,000 for brands, with discounts for charities and nonprofits, according to Strava’s guide for potential partners on its website.
Apparel brand Duer in May hosted the Bike to Work Challenge that prompted about 59,000 people to commute by bike. The challenge was inspired by the brand’s story. Duer started about 10 years ago when its founder Gary Lenett ditched his car for a bike to get to meetings and needed a pair of jeans that was comfortable and stretchy, but still stylish.
The brand markets the jeans as performance apparel, especially catering to hikers and bikers. Strava allowed Duer to engage new and existing customers in that active world, Nadia Gillies, director of brand and creative services for Duer, told Modern Retail.
“When we’re looking for brand partnerships or programs or organizations to create partnerships with, we’re always looking at which partners make the most sense for our brand ethos and who do we likely share a customer with,” Gillies said. “That’s why Strava came to mind for us.”
Duer’s challenge, its first on the app, encouraged participants to cycle to work twice a week for two weeks. The company set a sign-up goal of 50,000 and beat that by 6,000 people. The number of completions was a surprise: 42,000 people completed the challenge — surpassing Duer’s goal of 27,000 by 58%.
The brand offered 30% discounts for completing the challenges — much more than its new-customer discount of 15%. “We knew that we wanted to give a deeper discount there, just as an incentive,” Gillies said. “It’s pretty effective.”
Now, Duer executives are using data from the challenge to inform decisions on potential new store locations. Gillies said the brand is considering Portland and Seattle as well as additional Canadian locations, influenced by data from Strava and also where its wholesale retailers are already.
Duer doesn’t have another Strava challenge on the books yet, but Gillies and her team hope to do one before the end of this year. Outside of Strava, the brand is also sponsoring the RBC GranFondo Whistler race from Vancouver to Whistler, British Columbia, in Canada in September.
“Our community lives on Strava, and so, because we are a brand that focuses so greatly on engaging with our community, it was it was an easy decision to trial it, and it was a really successful partnership,” Gillies said. “It’s interesting when a partner like Strava can both enable us to get engaged with community but also give us such critical data for future expansion for a business like ours that’s growing really fast.”