How Satisfy Got the Cool Kids Into Running
Brice Partouche, the founder of running brand Satisfy, is talking to me over Zoom about how he’s spent the beginning of this week onboarding six new starters to the company. Their office, which was already slightly too small, has shrunk even further.
“I think if it’s worth doing something, it’s worth overdoing it,” says Partouche. “I guess this is how I could describe the way I do things.”
Compared to those already in the running business, Partouche was quite new to the sport when he launched Satisfy. He didn’t put on a pair of long-distance trainers until he was in his thirties, having spent his childhood either skateboarding or snowboarding around the French Alps.
Unsurprisingly, Partouche became hooked on the pastime after experiencing "runner’s high", the endorphins-induced feeling of euphoria that many newbies experience. After a successful stint with his jeans brand, April77 – inspired by the dress codes of his favourite bands – Partouche looked to his new obsession as the source of his next pay check.
“Every time I become passionate about something, I have this need to transform it into something physical and something business and product driven," he tells me.
Satisfy arrived in 2015. It was a running brand with a difference, influenced just as much by Partouche’s love of music and fashion as it was performance and ability. Ten years later, it's stocked at multi-brand juggernauts like Mr Porter, Ssense and Selfridges, as well as END and The Outsider Store on the gorp-ier end of the spectrum.
It’s collaborated with the likes of Oakley, Our Legacy, Crocs and Hoka. The latter paired with the French running brand to create the Mafate Speed 4 Lite STSFY. An employee told me that the drop sold out in three minutes.
When Satisfy launched, its uniqueness was something that made it stand out amidst the athletic corps that had dominated the running sphere. Nike was the largest supplier and manufacturer of athletic shoes and apparel at the time with a 22.9% market share.
While many traditional sports brands marketed running as an act of self-discipline and competitiveness (against yourself as well as others), Satisfy challenged that. Pieces were crafted to aid the running process, but the goal wasn’t to enhance your PB. In fact, the team would likely be more interested in the music playlist that helped you achieve it.
“It was obvious that [the problem] wasn’t that there was no running culture, but the running culture had to be rebranded,” says Partouche of the time. “If you want to inspire people to run, you need to connect with them through content, through products, through storytelling. No one was doing that.”
This attitude hasn’t changed. The inaugural print issue of their magazine, Possessed, launched this summer, and Satisfy already hosted articles on their online platform about the supposed athletic benefits of smoking cannabis, as well as its link with astrology.
Naturally, they connect with customers via their LSD (long slow distance) runs, which happen in Paris, London, Milan, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Bali.
The rest of the running world has also quickened its pace. Brands like District Vision and Soar both offer kit that’s equally imbued with a cool backstory, shared across visual-pleasing Instagram profiles.
Culturally, running has become the hobby du jour for those who are bored of dating apps (TikTok showcases how running clubs are the new place to meet singles), or health-conscious people who simply want a guilt-free pint (pub visits are a common run endpoint), as well as those who want to show that they’re part of a like-minded ‘community’ (via run-club merch worn proudly, on a run or not).
All of this has made running prime social media fodder. Where once people may have cowered at a camera being raised for a selfie mid-race, now they’re to be shared on Strava. If you’ve done a particularly good time, that’ll be posted on IG stories. And if you search ‘running’ on TikTok, you can find videos on everything from what to wear to improving your form.
“It's like how people want to go to a Balenciaga party, just to show that [they did it],” explains Partouche. “Some people do things thinking about the content they will get from the event, and there is a layer of that now happening in running as well.”
So much airtime in the digi-sphere requires a look to be snapped in. Partouche’s fashion background is evident in the garms produced at Satisfy, where boxy fits, graphic tees and refined colour palettes dominate.
While logomania has been prominent in the ready to wear industry for years now, Satisfy turns it on its head. Instead of brash monograms, the white tag stuck onto the piece’s exterior denotes its fabric as well as washing instructions. Wearers have the choice of leaving as is or ripping the majority off. Either look is easily identifiable by those in the sphere.
Partouche says some of the customer base can tap into the brand’s ideology without even wearing the product. Handy, really, when trail shorts retail at £210 and rain jackets at £470 (pricing being a frequent topic on Reddit, Substack forums and podcast interviews).
“They achieve the Satisfy aesthetic, the Satisfy look, with vintage stuff. It's a bit like the Rick Owens’ effect, how when you see this person, you know she's or he's a Rick Owens guy or girl [by the way they wear clothes],” says Partouche.
“We invented the Satisfy silhouette, and it's so satisfying (no pun intended) to see people wearing it. It’s like a cult, and I'm used to seeing it now, but I'm still shocked by how people really embrace what we've been creating.”
The fact many of their items can pass as non-athletic pieces is part of their appeal. The MothTech t-shirts have become a bit of a brand staple, inspired by vintage tees that look like they’ve had a few of the fabric-nibbling insects at them. But while Acne and Balenciaga have been known to adorn their lines with this look, for Satisfy, it’s also functional. Through body mapping, the holes have been strategically punctured in the cotton top to allow for optimum ventilation while out and about.
I ask Partouche whether the brand’s customers are mainly advanced runners who are as punky as the brand, or if they’ve got into the sport because they were enticed by Satisfy’s cultural roots.
“I personally receive so many messages on Instagram like, ‘I wasn’t a runner but the brand inspired me to start’,” says Partouche. “They could be newbies or good runners who get on board with us, but they do because we’re different from other brands and the product is very performance-oriented. It's the goal: to inspire people to run and to inspire runners to run even more.”
So, what’s next?
“What is public is that we’ve hired a VP of footwear, which means it’s a topic at Satisfy, but that’s only what I can share for now,” says Partouche. “Now I sound very corporate!”
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