Rhone CMO on marketing at an inflection point for the apparel brand

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“A Love Letter to NYC” arrives amid the growth of the brand’s retail and wholesale ambitions, alongside an evolution of performance apparel.

Rhone on Tuesday launched a new campaign, “A Love Letter to NYC,” that looks to connect the energy of New York with the apparel brand’s ambition and progress, per details shared with Marketing Dive. Founded in 2014, Rhone has a flagship store in the Flatiron District and is headquartered in nearby suburb Stamford, Connecticut.

“A Love Letter to NYC” marks a shift from performance marketing to brand building for Rhone. The campaign also arrives as Rhone reaches an inflection point between its DTC beginnings and the growth of its retail and wholesale ambitions, alongside an evolution in performance apparel.

“We started in the athletic space, and as we’ve grown, we’ve realized performance isn’t just about athletic achievement: It’s about how people navigate their everyday life. This campaign was meant to reflect how our customers actually live, making it more of a natural evolution of the brand, not a departure from it,” said CMO Bethany Evans, who joined the brand in November 2024 after more than five years at North Face.

The campaign includes a 30-second hero video that draws inspiration from New York-set rom-coms from the 1990s. The story follows a man and woman as they separately prepare for and engage in a day in Manhattan, where they have a series of near-misses on city streets before a dog-assisted meet-cute in the park.

Rhone breaks its product line into three areas — move, play and live — all of which are highlighted in the campaign, which intentionally does not include scenes of fitness or gym life. In a bid for authenticity, the actors in the spot are a real-life couple (the dog is theirs, too). While the campaign was created in-house, media is being handled by Kepler Group, which the brand named as its first media agency of record in 2025. “A Love Letter to NYC” is also an experiment for the marketer in more upper-funnel work.

“We were really focused on performance media for a long time, and I get it: It’s easy to measure, it’s really focused on e-comm. But our wholesale business is growing and our retail business is also growing, so we had to start taking a more omni-channel approach,” Evans said.

“A Love Letter to NYC” spans linear, connected TV, social, direct mail, print, out-of-home and retail and digital experiences. It also includes Citi Bike dock takeovers near the brand’s three New York locations, an integration with The New York Times’ Connections game and partnerships with NYC-based photographer Ethan Barber and Instagram account @MeetCutesNYC. In-store activations include a custom photo booth experience at Rhone’s Flatiron location from Sept. 19-20.

Rhone has more than 20 retail stores across the U.S. and has grown its wholesale business, including through a partnership with Bloomingdale’s that was expanded earlier this year. The brand has also partnered with sports leagues the LPGA and the NBA.

The latter partnership kicked off in October 2024 , before Evans became CMO. It seemed to her like a strange partnership until she learned that the father of Rhone co-founders Nate and Ben Checketts, Dave Checketts, held executive positions with the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden. Along with the family connection, Rhone has used its sports marketing to connect with its purpose-driven work around mental and physical fitness.

“We’ve partnered with athletes who are really outspoken about the pressures of being a professional athlete – ‘Here's what I do to keep myself in a healthy mindset’ — and so that’s the angle we've taken on it, which feels right for us, versus some kind of logo slap play that doesn’t have a deeper meaning,” Evans explained.

Rhone has also sought to encourage better physical and mental health, both internally and externally. The brand’s 12 Pursuits framework — a truncated version of Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues — is a monthly challenge that began as a Checketts family project before being launched at Rhone.

Part of Evans’ purview has been extending 12 Pursuits to the brand’s consumers. In the next year, Rhone will seek to build on its foundation and make 12 Pursuits more experiential, whether that means retreats or pop-ups — something more than an email or social post. But it won’t be a sales-driven effort.

“We’re inviting our community to join us in this, but it can’t be a way to sell clothes, so we’ve intentionally kept it very separate,” Evans said.

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