How Athletic Brand Set Active Made $1 Million In One Hour

Forbes

9 hours ago

Set Active focuses on creating athletic and athleisure matching sets, priced between $50 and $100 ... More per top and bottom.
Perfecting a social media launch campaign is always a moving target, but one brand has honed a formula that has helped define its overall sales strategy.
Set Active, a self-funded seven-year-old athletic brand, has developed a drop strategy that recently netted the brand $1 million in sales in just one hour for its first-ever resort collection, which launched in early May. Set Active earns approximately $20 million in annual revenue, according to an Instagram post from Female Founder World. The brand focuses on creating athletic and athleisure matching sets, priced between $50 and $100 per top and bottom.
It's partly because of the bootstrapped nature of the brand that the team has to be more clever with the tools and opportunities in front of them, and more focused on cultivating a grassroots digital community compared to higher-end brands that sell affluence, which requires the allure of distance. Today, Set Active has approximately 40,000 rewards members, 475,000 Instagram followers and 8,000 followers between its Instagram broadcast channel and its founder's. Its core customers are women between 25 and 34-years-old, followed by women 18 to 24-years-old.
Nearly 50% of the recent $1 million sales figure was earned within a 15-minute early access period for reward members and Instagram broadcast channel followers. Furthermore, 72% of customers had previously purchased from the brand in the last 12 months. According to Kira Jackson, chief brand officer of Set Active, the brand has earned $1 million from its drop model before, but the fast pace of sales for the resort collection was unprecedented.
'That [sales figure] is a huge testament to the community that's been built around the brand,' she said.
As of 2023, the value of the global sportswear industry is close to $395 billion at retail value selling price, with local and niche brands gaining market share, according to a 2024 S&P Global report. Notably, e-commerce penetration accounted for about 30% of the sportswear market.
The first-ever resort collection and photoshoot sought to evoke the feeling of a vacation.
Like almost every brand, Set Active teases its upcoming product launches on social media and in marketing emails. The team uses special links on its social media that remind customers of upcoming launches, and the team can see how many opt in for reminders. Typically, the brand receives a few hundred sign-ups, which is viewed internally as strong interest, but the resort collection saw thousands of sign-ups, said Lindsey Carter, founder and CEO of Set Active.
The limited-edition collection featured trendy pieces like butter yellow sweat pants and crew necks, contrast color tops and bottoms in pinks, blues and olive tones.
For the brand's various social channels like Instagram, Instagram Broadcast, Pinterest and TikTok, the primary goal is to create different content opportunities within each channel that a consumer might otherwise not get from any other Set Active social channel. To achieve this, the team has to produce or commission hundreds of pieces of content for any given rollout, said Jackson. The in-house creative team consists of two graphic designers, a creative manager and a creative coordinator who manages photoshoots and other responsibilities. Carter's own Instagram broadcast channel sees more intimate behind-the-scenes content related to product development meetings, photoshoots and other daily founder and CEO life moments.
'​​That's the No. 1 most important tactic from a community and brand-building perspective; making sure that the creative [assets] match the platform that they're being produced for, instead of just being cross-leveraged on [social],' said Jackson.
From an influencer perspective, Set Active has an in-house manager to oversee more manual and one-on-one relationships and opportunities, and uses the ShopMy platform for influencer gifting. But the team goes beyond influencers to gift products to rabid Set Active fans and followers who might not fall under the traditional influencer label. Because Set Active often features user-generated content on its social channels, marketing emails and occasional product detail pages for its e-commerce site, the team sees gifting to fans as a way to build a more dedicated online community. Gifting to community members and influencers alike happens before a product launch, in order to help build interest and momentum.
Because this type of gifting is outside the bounds of traditional influencers, the key performance indicators 'go out the window,' said Jackson. Instead, the Set Active team focuses on the most engaged followers. These can be the names they recognize because they comment so much on Set Active social posts or create unpaid social posts on TikTok, for example. As long as it remains profitable for the business, the program will continue, she said.
'Consumers are bombarded with choices when shopping for active wear. So from day one, our approach has been to create genuine relationships rather than just a transaction,' said Carter. 'Consumers want to feel connected to something, and the more you can give that to your consumer, the more they're going to be brought into your brand.'
It was that well-honed execution on all business and product fronts that led to the outsized success of the resort collection launch. Following every launch the team has a post-mortem to discuss which styles sold the best, what worked or didn't from a social and marketing perspective and anything else that can be learned from the experience. Carter said one major discussion point was that some resort styles, such as a butter yellow set, sold out during the early access period, meaning other customers were unable to purchase them and how to resolve that for the future.
'It's a balance of knowing how to speak to a customer now through a modern marketing lens, and understanding where the consumer is headed,' said Jackson.