Mark Wahlberg’s apparel brand Municipal aims to create ‘a Muniverse’ of stores, cafes and gyms

It’s all part of a larger growth strategy for Municipal, which launched in 2020 and labels itself as a “sport utility gear” company. Municipal, which attributes 70% of its business to its website and two stores in California, has doubled its business each year. Although Municipal makes most of its revenue from products like $180 sneakers and $64 polos, it hopes to become a larger mission-focused company around health, wellness and entrepreneurship. The brand is now betting on interactive stores and unique programming like hiking clubs and workshops for high schoolers to set itself apart.

“I never want anybody to leave one of our stores and [only] say, ‘That was a nice store,'” Arnett said. “I want people to have a real connection to what the brand is about and really feel like they’re in a community. Community is at the epicenter of all we do, … and if you’re a fan of our gear, we hope you’ll be a massive fan of our experiential offerings, too. That’s the breadth of what the brand is going to be focusing on.”

Key to this goal is Municipal’s flagship store model, which involves not only selling products, but also offering services. Municipal’s first flagship store opened in November 2024 in Oceanside, California, and the location features an Urth Caffé coffee shop and a barber shop to encourage folks to stick around. Municipal is now planning three such flagship stores in the next 24 months. People who join Municipal’s membership club can also access the stores’ private events and ambassador meet-and-greets.

The brand aspires to make each flagship store unique. Its Oceanside store, for instance, has a barber shop “because we’re connected to [the military base] Camp Pendleton, which has an incredibly strong barber culture,” Arnett said. He added, “One of the things that has always bothered us about some broad-scale brands is that you go into one retail store in Scottsdale and another in Atlanta, and they’re identical. Our plan is for each of these [flagships] to be more like a luxury model, like how the Hermès store in New York is different from the one in Los Angeles.”

Municipal’s gyms — the first of which will open in early 2026 in Summerlin, Nevada — will be separate from the store flagships but share a similar goal around community. They will be tailored to local athletes, with offerings like run clubs and hiking clubs, and include locker rooms, fitness equipment, gear for sale and a coffee shop. The gyms will be in partnership with EōS Fitness, and they will be brand-new gyms, as opposed to existing ones given a “Municipal” label. “We think this concept could grow into 50 gyms in the next five to 10 years,” Arnett said.

It may not be an easy climb. Municipal is trying to expand in a crowded activewear market, where everyone from Under Armour to Lululemon is vying for customers’ dollars and time. Still, Jessica Ramírez, co-founder of the advisory firm The Consumer Collective, told Modern Retail, “We’ve seen a lot of brands find their niche and be able to succeed through that.”

Ramírez said Municipal’s “Muniverse” concept fits in with a strategy more retailers are taking: offering service and experience tie-ins. Uniqlo, for instance, just opened its first coffee shop in North America, while Hoka is using its New York City store as a meeting point for the Hoka Run Club. But expansions like this also take capital — and that may be easier to come by for large-scale brands or celebrity-founded ones, versus startups.

Ramírez believes that a coffee shop may be more of a draw for customers than, say, a barber shop. “If you’re in the store, you may get a little peckish, and if the coffee is good, people will return,” she said. On the other hand, she said, “A barber shop may be slower to pick up, because people tend to have their go-to person [for something like a haircut].”

However, she added, “It’s very smart for a brand to tap into the consumer’s lifestyle and the community so their store ends up being a place the consumer can go back to for a reason, and not necessarily always to shop. That also ties strongly into loyalty.”

Five years in, Municipal has amassed thousands of customers, and it’s “seeing the impact of this foundation that we’re building,” Arnett said. But the business is also open to experimentation, he emphasized. It’s working with influencers in a formal program for the first time, and it’s developing more of its women’s line to eventually bring the business up from 85% men, 15% women to 70% men, 30% women. It also hopes to collect feedback from people in its new member program about what they’d like to see from the brand next.

“We never want to be perceived as a giant, disconnected brand,” Arnett said. “We want to build this thing fairly methodically and for the long haul.”