Rhone launched a campaign called A Love Letter to NYC on Tuesday, and the interesting thing about it is what it deliberately leaves out. There is no gym in it, and nobody works out.
The thirty-second film borrows its shape from nineties New York romantic comedies. A man and a woman get ready separately, move through Manhattan, keep just missing each other on the street, and eventually meet in the park by way of a dog. The couple on screen are a couple off it, and the dog is theirs.
Founded in 2014, with a flagship in the Flatiron District and a head office up in Stamford, Connecticut, Rhone splits its range into move, play and live. All three appear in the campaign. None of them appears in a workout.
That absence is the argument. Bethany Evans, who became chief marketing officer in November 2024, arriving from North Face where she had spent over five years, describes it as widening what performance means: the brand started in athletics and concluded that performance is really about how people get through an ordinary day, not what they achieve in a session. She frames the work as showing how customers actually live, and as an evolution of the brand rather than a break from it.
Underneath the creative sits a media shift that is easier to describe than to justify to a finance team. Rhone spent years on performance marketing, and Evans is candid about why: it is measurable, and it points straight at e-commerce. But the retail and wholesale sides of the business are both growing now, and neither responds to a channel built for direct online sales. Hence an omni-channel approach, and a campaign aimed at the top of the funnel instead of the bottom.
The spend reflects that. It runs across linear and connected TV, social, print, direct mail, out-of-home, and both retail and digital experiences. Locally it gets more specific: Citi Bike dock takeovers beside its three New York locations; a tie-in with Connections, the New York Times puzzle; and partnerships with the photographer Ethan Barber and the Instagram account @MeetCutesNYC. A custom photo booth runs at the Flatiron store on 19 and 20 September. The work was made in-house, while Kepler Group — appointed as Rhone's first media agency of record in 2025 — handles the buying.
The timing is a real inflection point rather than a phrase in a press release. Rhone now has more than twenty stores across the US and a growing wholesale business, including a Bloomingdale's partnership that was widened earlier this year.
Its sports work follows a similar logic. Rhone has deals with the LPGA and the NBA, the latter starting in October 2024, before Evans arrived. She admits the basketball tie-up looked like an odd fit until she learned that Dave Checketts — father of the co-founders Nate and Ben — had run Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks. Rather than putting a logo on something, the brand has aimed the partnership at athletes willing to talk publicly about the pressure of the job and what keeps them steady, which Evans contrasts with a placement carrying no meaning behind it.
The same instinct drives 12 Pursuits, a monthly challenge adapted from Benjamin Franklin's thirteen virtues that began as a Checketts family habit before the company adopted it. Evans wants to take it to customers more substantially over the coming year — retreats, pop-ups, something with a physical form rather than another email or social post. The condition she puts on it is the notable part: it cannot become a way to sell clothes, and is kept deliberately separate from anything that does.
