Forge Athletic
Brand identity, packaging, and launch campaign for a direct-to-consumer performance apparel label.
- Services
- Brand IdentityPrint & PackagingArt DirectionDigital Design
The Brief
Forge Athletic was founded by two former competitive runners who'd spent years frustrated by performance apparel that prioritized graphics over fit. They had a small product line — three pieces in seven colorways — and a tight launch window. They needed a brand that read as serious and technical from a thousand impressions on Instagram, and held up at touch in a customer's hands.
Positioning
We worked with the founders to sharpen the positioning from "premium running gear" to "training apparel for people who measure their work." That precision unlocked everything downstream — voice, photography, the choice of what not to put on the box.
Identity
The wordmark is a custom monospace, drawn to feel like an instrument readout rather than a fashion label. Color is restrained: deep iron, off-white, and a single accent of high-visibility marigold reserved for the sole graphic element on each garment — a small running tally of the wearer's product number, hand-applied at the warehouse.
Packaging
Each piece ships in a recycled-fiber mailer with a single insert: a pencil-printed card showing the date the garment was finished and the initials of the worker who pressed it. The team had been doing this internally already; we made it the brand.
Campaign
Art direction for the launch leaned documentary — pre-dawn workouts, real athletes, no studio lighting. Sofia commissioned a photographer in Portland and a second team in Boulder; the resulting fifty-frame library became the entire visual asset bank for year one.
Digital
The Shopify storefront is unusually quiet for the category — single-product pages with one photo, fit notes, and a short paragraph about construction. There are no upsells, no exit-intent popups, and no countdown timers. Conversion rate landed at 4.1%, roughly double the apparel-DTC benchmark.
Outcome
Forge crossed $1.8M in revenue during launch week — more than three times the founders' internal projection — with a 31% reorder rate inside the first sixty days. The waitlist they'd built pre-launch (27,400 names from a single Instagram presence and a referral program) converted at 11%, and the brand has since expanded into outerwear without changing a single line of the original system.
We had three pieces, seven colorways, and one chance to land. Fireflies didn't try to glamorize what we make — they made the seriousness of it the whole point. The launch did $1.8M in week one, but the part that matters most is the 31% reorder rate. People came back.
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