UNNA x HOKA Speedgoat 2 just dropped a collab of the Speedgoat 2 and it’s as meaningful as it is beautiful.
A lot of brands build community as a tactic for growth. If a brand can generate a movement where runners coalesce around its values, sales follow every time. No shade. In fact, just the opposite. When a brand does this, it aims to satisfy a felt need, creates friendships, and gives meaning to people looking for it.
[Borderlands Podcast with UNNA Founder, John-Ruben Holtback – Spotify | Apple]
But it is still a business tactic to build brand and business owner would not allocate budget for it purely for altruism. The difference maker is when it feels like a tactic versus a unique expression of the founder (even when a founder exits, the founders’ DNA never leaves a company—for better or worse).
UNNA’s brand so naturally builds community that it’s easy to overlook its products. Not because the products are deficient (quite the opposite). It’s that the messaging is of the soul that one easily gets lost in it. Community-building is an effortless outcome when the mantra of UNNA is that runners ‘Finish in a Good Place’.
Yes, I like to run hard but to reframe my hard runs through this lens makes me ask ‘Am I in a good place?’ And while being overly self-reflective and ruminating is the source of many of our problems, defining ‘good place’ for ourselves can be cathartic and even healing.
It’s energy we all want to be around and to find someone else who resonates is to find someone with whom you’d enjoy a morning coffee.
Stockholm is the perfect backdrop to build a brand like UNNA where the winters are dark literally and metaphorically. Sunlight is scarce, the days are short, and without the biological and psychological benefits of sunlight, anyone would go into a mental abyss.
Enter the UNNA x HOKA Speedgoat 2 collab: a shoe that doesn’t just grip the trail but grounds you in a Good Place, turning endless dark days into something better.
I know, a shoe is unlikely to do this on its own.
But community, meaning, people, and all the good chemicals that fire on a good run can. Sure, you can buy UNNA simply for how it looks and you won’t be disappointed. But anyone willing to open their wallet and buy something from UNNA likely resonates with the brand and the aesthetic.
It’s not about outrunning the dark, it’s about carrying light in your stride, reminding us that even in the abyss, we can find a Good Place.
