Jeremy Bresnen founded Ciele Athletics Inc./Ciele Athlétique Inc. with Mike Giles in 2014 in the now-great running city of Montreal. I started running around 2012 and clearly remember seeing Ciele on the shelf at Salt Lake Running Company circa 2015.
I bought a hat almost instinctively and no doubt irresistibly.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to even run in it yet becuase I loved it so much and didn’t want to ruin it from the 100 degree July days. Eventually I bought a second Ciele hat – one for running and one for around town.
It was the first brand I wore while not running to signal to everyone that I was a runner. Ciele transcended any single type of running and permeated anywhere runners cared about performance and style – road, trail, and track from 5k to ultra distances.
They emerged with a cohort of brands still going today like Tracksmith, Oiselle, Janji, and SATISFY. This co-hort of early 2010s brands were all seeing something similar – people were not simply running – they were runners.
Jeremy Bresnen tells the story of Ciele while on a long walk with me from founding to today with thoughts on the future. From the days of hats-only to today where they create all sorts of running apparel and different styles of hats all built around performance first then style.
