When Max Vallot and Tom Daly first got into running, it was primarily as a hangover cure. They’d link up to do laps around Regent’s Park in London together to cleanse themselves of indie nights out when they were studying at business school. But a few years down the line in 2013, they found themselves deep in New York’s sleepless fashion scene, with Vallot working for Saint Laurent and Daly working for Acne Studios. Disillusioned with the pace and nightlife-heavy culture, Daly took his running to the next level and began training for marathons, while Vallot took up meditation as a way to deal with stress.

“That was the beginning of our ongoing exploration,” Vallot says, explaining how he began teaching a series of DIY meditation workshops to Daly’s running crew, who’d grown interested in how mindfulness could help their performance. “We had no idea what we were doing, but it sparked something — an idea for a new kind of sportswear brand that was both connected to our fashion backgrounds, but also mindfulness and a slower and more intentional, technical approach to product.”

This idea became District Vision: a brand they founded as a side project in 2015, which built “tools for mindful athletes” and connected mental wellbeing with sports performance — long before the mind-body connection became a mainstream wellness trend. The duo began with a line of precision-engineered technical eyewear, before expanding into technical apparel in 2018, soon becoming an ‘if you know, you know’ status symbol among the fashion-conscious running crowd, a market that’s grown in tandem with the brand.

District Vision’s growth has accelerated to 50% year-on-year since 2024, as running continues to take over mainstream culture. Just last week, a record 1.3 million people signed up to run the 2027 London Marathon through the public ballot, breaking last year’s record by around 200,000. The global running gear market is projected to reach almost $70 billion by 2032, up from $45 billion in 2024. Running’s popularity as a means for offline connection is surging among the broader population, too — the number of new running clubs nearly quadrupled in 2025 to one million, according to exercise tracking platform Strava.

This broad appeal means running is no longer just a sport, but more of a cultural identity system that has consumers searching for brands that signal taste, values and belonging, as well as function, creating space for more niche brands like District Vision, Satisfy, and Bandit Running to position themselves as lifestyle and community brands with more of a cult following than more mainstream players. For District Vision, this market growth has opened up new opportunities to scale.

“The market’s really matured in terms of distribution, but also the role that running brands play. But in terms of being part of starting this new sector, there’s a certain heritage and legacy for the brand after 10 years, which is really cool to see and is benefiting our growth,” Vallot says. “Now, we can scale more, open stores, hire more people, and do more interesting projects. District Vision was never supposed to be a scrappy part-time project, we just always knew we needed to take our time to get it right.”

District Vision remains wholly independent — Daly and Vallot have never taken external funding, and have hovered around the breakeven mark with consistent profitability since day one, growing the business at around 40% year-on-year, and reinvesting profits into expansion. In 2020, they reached revenues that allowed them to go full-time with the brand, moving it from New York to LA during the pandemic.

Last week, 10 years into District Vision, they opened their first flagship store on Santa Fe Avenue in LA’s Arts District. Conceived as a “hybrid retail and research environment”, the District Vision store sells eyewear, apparel and footwear by day, and acts as a space for cultural programming by night, where the brand’s founders plan to host meditation, movement, and learning sessions. This all feeds into District Vision’s ethos of exploring what it calls “human technology” — which its co-founders decode as an ongoing exploration into how mindful practices like meditation are just as important as tools as running glasses, apparel, and shoes for improving performance and endurance.

“District Vision is a research project into what the human body and mind is capable of. We see our role as finding, exploring, and sharing tools that get more out of the human body and the mind,” Daly says. “This goes beyond wellness — we’re interested in exploring what’s humanly possible. What state of mind can we reach when we run a hundred miles? What happens to our attention when we go through 45 minutes of breath work? How does it work? How does it go together? That, for us, is a space of human technology.”

District Vision’s LA store is also functioning as a litmus test for the brand’s further retail expansion. Daly and Vallot say they plan to open a store in New York in 2027, and then explore opening in Asia, the brand’s second largest market after North America. As District Vision moves into its next stage of growth, its co-founders are hoping an increased physical presence will equip them with more knowledge of this mind-body connection, to create even more technical running products that help more people run, whatever their age.

“We’re using the space as more of a question mark, as an exploration of what retail can be,” says Daly.

The rise of the luxury running cult

Back in 2015 when they founded District Vision, Vallot and Daly felt there was a gap in the market for performance products that were both technically rigorous and matched up to the rest of the luxury fashion consumer’s closet. They were simultaneously running a creative agency for luxury fashion brands, District Projects, at the time, which helped them place District Vision as a premium offering to rival mainstream performancewear brands. District Vision’s products were first launched in high fashion outlets like Dover Street Market in London and Colette in Paris, defying the typical sports launch.

The brand’s running glasses and apparel were among the earliest examples of sportswear designed with a more refined aesthetic than the garish colors and futuristic shapes that have long defined the category; their understated colors and vintage-inspired designs make them wearable beyond sport.

“The market was so different at the time — it felt like everything was kind of disconnected,” Daly says. “Let’s say if you were someone buying Acne or Our Legacy for your main closet, when you wanted to work out, you had to go to a totally different store with a totally different experience — it was two different worlds that hadn’t met yet.” At the time, legacy players like Nike and Adidas had just begun experimenting with luxury sportswear lines via collaborations with high fashion designers — namely Adidas’s Y-3 collaboration with Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, and Nike’s Gyakusou running gear tie-up with Undercover founder Jun Takahashi.

“When those worlds started to meet, there was this idea that, oh, people want to have the same quality products when they run as what they’re wearing during the day,” says Daly. “So we had a prediction that the quality of sportswear is going to increase and that there’s going to be a premiumization of running gear.” The duo had observed a similar premiumization across both denim and fragrance in the early 2000s, at brands like Acne and Byredo, he adds.

“There was suddenly this concept of people in the fashion world bringing integrity into markets where maybe the consumer feels it’s lacking,” Daly says. “When we started to work on sport, it was like, how can we bring this level of intent, quality, and attention to detail from fashion into sport.” At the same time, they were noticing runners wearing Garmin watches in New York coffee shops, as running gradually became an identity that consumers wanted to express via products.

“Not because they’re running to the coffee counter, but because they wanted to tell you they’re a runner,” Daly says. “That signaling became really important in running around that time. Now, we’re seeing the product of that trend hit the wider market, 10 years on.”

Japanese engineering

District Vision’s deliberately slow approach to growth is mirrored in the brand’s meticulous approach to product development — something Vallot and Daly say has only been possible thanks to their stand against external funding. Their debut product — a pair of hand-finished, $295 precision-engineered Keiichi sunglasses with titanium cores and D+lens technology — was two years in the making in Japan, where the brand designs and engineers most of its products. This is also where District Vision developed its RX-integrated shield lens technology, a first for the industry, which allows prescription lenses to be integrated directly into the shield, rather than using separate clip-ins or glued-on attachments.

“We come from an industry of tinkering, so you’re supposed to have the time to prototype and test, but the lead times often don’t allow that —  you often see an erosion of the value proposition on the product level in sportswear, because there isn’t that level of care,” says Daly. “That’s why technology is a good analogy for what we do, because there’s an understanding of supply chain and that to make an innovative product, you have to invest in it. And for us, that means Japan — it’s the last country in the world that allows you to tinker, if I can be honest.”

The body of District Vision’s higher end glasses are made from Japanese titanium, which Daly says is chosen for longevity — he says the frames are designed to last 20-plus years, and should be considered more like investing in cameras or cars. This informs their price point: the brand’s glasses range from around $230 to around $700.

“I feel like fashion businesses have become financial engineering businesses — we’re trained today to see a brand come out of the gate with outside capital and have a billboard and think that’s normal,” Vallot says. “But District Vision is an entity that can move slower, because it doesn’t have investment vehicles behind it that maybe want it to get to certain points. Of course, we want to get to certain points, but there’s a concept of honesty in selling a product today that’s required. We can take a slower approach, which is really coming from a place of material innovation, iteration, and product longevity.”

Running for longevity

Sports brands are increasingly positioning themselves as technology brands, as they race to develop the lightest running “supershoes” and clothing materials to aid athlete recovery. This makes Vallot and Daly wary of using the term ‘technology’, which they say means something slightly different to the District Vision brand.

“If you look at the development in other technologies, like watches, over the last 20 years, there’s been so much advancement. But if you look at the progress of apparel and accessories, it’s a little depressing to compare,” Daly says. “So we challenge ourselves to do a better job in terms of the value proposition. The customer is so smart today that there must be a concept of honesty. There’s a lot of techwashing out there right now. The consumer in sport has been marketed to very heavily. And today, they’re mixing brands, so it’s a question of which brand is behaving in a way that the consumer can trust.”

District Vision combines its highly technical approach to product development with a holistic view of the customer’s health, and has always referred to the running products it makes as “tools” for mindful runners.

Daly says the brand’s collaborations with New Balance and 66°North have served to both increase brand awareness and inform the technology behind District Vision’s products through the years — in 2027, he says the brand will release a “new approach to a running shoe” with New Balance that’s rooted in preventative health. Vallot and Daly are also interested in the potential for wearable tech integrations in runningwear, if the technology moves beyond the kinds of sensors we currently see within smartwatches and rings.

“When you think of sport for the common man, it’s really preventative healthcare,” says Vallot. “So when we talk about how we make tools for both the body and mind, it’s about how we can apply tools that help people to run healthier and for longer.”

“The biggest issue we want to solve is the compartmentalization of technology in sport,” Vallot adds. “So, rather than making the fastest person faster, our goal is different. It’s about, how can we get you, your mum, and your grandad running together in a way that makes you active for longer.”