How the New York Knicks, Bandit Running & Ultra Pouches Built Cult Followings

At a recent Willpower panel, leaders from top brands revealed their best strategies for organic marketing, building brand loyalty and leveraging strategic partnerships

What does it take to build a brand with a cult following?

Sometimes it’s just luck, but more often than not it’s intentional marketing and consumer engagement. Leading the charge as legacy and newer brands still emerging, executives from the New York Knicks, Bandit Running and Ultra Pouches sat down for a Willpower panel NYC’ on August 19.

Bandit is one of those cult brands that has become a pillar of the New York City running community and beyond. It first emerged out of the pandemic when co-founder and CEO Nick West and his brother noticed a key running subculture worth tapping into, selling performance socks in Brooklyn — and they had big goals from the beginning.

“If this thing doesn’t gain momentum without us having to hawk product on people, it’s just not going to go any further than that,” West said at the panel, noting that Bandit didn’t spend much on paid marketing in its early days. “We wanted as organic of a start and as firm a foundation as these brands that we admired growing up.”

“Our goal is to be the biggest, most positive force in the sport of running,” he added.

Those early days are crucial for capturing people’s attention, which is exactly the place that Ultra Pouches — the caffeine-free, nicotine-free brand — finds itself a year after launching, during which it landed $11 million in funding and sold one million units in just six months.

“Early on you have to make the case almost to the customer about why this is amazing and life-changing,” Ultra Pouches chief marketing officer Ankur Goyal said.

Leveraging Partnerships & Social Media

Goyal estimates that Ultra pours somewhere in the low-six figures per month into content investment, production and partnerships. What they’re looking for are interesting and unique content partnerships across platforms that create different angles for wide audiences, he said.

“You have all of these streams of raw (content) coming in, and then you have a very sophisticated post-production engine, pre and post, that has the boxes they need to check and everything they need to do to pump out six to 700 pieces of content a month,” he said. “We’re going to double that in two months.”

Goyal also noted the brand has been very intentional in its hiring, looking for people who are good in front of the camera and good at producing content themselves.

Social media partnerships are not just crucial for building up a startup like Ultra, but also for keeping the momentum going behind major legacy names like the New York Knicks.

The Knicks have already had a cult following that stood long before they broke their 53-year drought with a championship win this season. As they grow and evolve their brand, those key partnerships have to consider that loyal fan base, explained Madison Square Garden director of global partnerships sales Tobias Gimand.

“What we always kind of look at from a partnership lens is: is this brand partnership additive to the fan experience?” Gimand said. 

“Our best partners are the ones that are active: the ones that are leveraging our IP in their own marketing materials, whether it’s at retail, digitally, with their own content that they’re posting, with things they’re collabing on with us,” he explained.

Gimand noted that this past season, the Knicks took even more steps to up their marketing game. For instance, the brand had its first-ever beauty partnership with company Saie and doubled down on influencer partnerships.

“They would have a couple suites for Knicks games, kind of have their own branded experience before and then come into MSG and have access that our non-partners won’t have,” Gimand said. “We’re getting more collaborative than when I started in this.”

How a Cult Following Creates Organic Marketing

It’s nearly impossible not to see dozens of runners throughout NYC brandishing the iconic Bandit logo, creating widespread marketing that doesn’t rely on advertising spend — one of the key strategies Bandit relies on.

The brand has been increasingly leaning into its flagship Bandit Grand Prix event, which came back for a second time this year. The competitive Formula 1-style race hosted at the Brooklyn Storehouse drew about 3,000 runners and 2,000 spectators this year — occurring at the same time as the massive Hyrox NYC competition — while operating off of a $1 million budget, West said.

“We’re trying to create an event that emotionally engages our core customer in a way where the experience is so good that we’re imprinting and creating the affinity between what they’re experiencing, running nine laps on a closed course, our logo and brand name,” he said.

To put the event together, West revealed they studied music-festival economics, where the people going and talking about it ultimately create the marketing for the event year after year.

“It’s going to be bigger and better next year, and ultimately we want to take it around the world,” he said.

As Bandit grows, West noted the brand is very intentional about sticking to its core, loyal, cult customer base instead of trying to create mass appeal through marketing, especially because that approach is what has got the brand this far.

“We always talk about how we really never want a customer to find us for the first time on a performance marketing ad,” West explained. “We want you to find us on YouTube, telling a long story about an unsponsored athlete going to the Olympics or at a major marathon IRL experience.”

Willpower, a growth platform founded by Bill Murphy that connects consumer brands, service providers and investors across the wellness, performance and lifestyle sectors, hosts events including the upcoming World of Sports in Austin, Texas, on October 22.