Building a brand from scratch, eight weeks before launch.
Virgin Sport was a bet on a gap in the market nobody had named yet. Fitness events had been captured almost entirely by serious athletes like marathon runners and triathletes — people who'd been training for a year and still weren't sure they'd finish. The 80% of people who wanted to push themselves physically, experience something electric and communal, and come home feeling genuinely proud of what they'd done had been left out of the conversation. Virgin Sport was built for them.
I joined eight weeks before the brand's official launch with a mandate that was equal parts creative director and production studio: take the brand DNA developed by AKQA and make it real across every channel, with no team, and at a startup pace.
What followed was the most compressed and complete creative experience of my career. I conceived, wrote, designed, art directed, and produced the brand's creative output across digital and physical channels simultaneously, from the verbal identity documents that governed how the brand sounded, to the OOH campaign that covered London's tube network, to the environmental graphics that turned two city neighborhoods into Virgin Sport festivals.
Visual and Verbal Brand Development
Before launch, I wrote and designed the Virgin Sport Heartfelt Service Guide, the internal verbal identity document that established how the brand thought, spoke, and showed up across every touchpoint. Working from AKQA's visual identity guidelines, I translated the brand's ethos into practical creative standards for the team: tone of voice, language principles, dos and don'ts, and the editorial philosophy that would govern everything we made.
Brand Launch Campaign
Working with the executive team, I led creative for the brand's go-to-market: writing and designing emails, social posts, and web copy; developing talking points for press engagements; and ghostwriting for the CEO and CMO ahead of interviews and announcements. Every piece of creative had to do two jobs simultaneously: launch the brand and open registrations for the inaugural Hackney event, with the goal of selling out 15,000 spots.
We sold out in 12 weeks.
Hackney Festival of Fitness
For the Hackney launch, I art directed and wrote the social campaign targeting customer acquisition; developed web and product copy across the festival and all sub-events; and built out the full email program segmented by audience — prospective registrants, confirmed participants, prior race participants, and volunteer prospects.
Out-of-Home
For out-of-home, I worked with agency VCCP to oversee copy and visuals for posters and billboards across London's tube network and double-decker bus routes, writing the campaign lines and art directing the executions against the Hackney gradient identity (Virgin red to purple).
Hackney Festival - Experiential
For the event itself, I wrote and designed the full festival experience: press invites, the runner's race pack, an app built on the MyLaps interface, environmental graphics throughout the race and festival site, and all participant swag. The goal was a brand experience that felt like a festival, not a race — and that standard ran through every piece of paper and pixel at the event.
Virgin Sport Westminster
A month after Hackney, we launched the Virgin Sport Westminster, a rebrand of the legacy British 10K. Tighter Westminster regulations trimmed the programming: no cycling race, no group fitness stage, no live music. But we retained the festival identity and branding to lay groundwork for future events, and the creative suite had to work harder as a result. The experience lived in the design and the signage more than in programming. I wrote and designed for print and digital channels and art directed environmental graphics throughout the race, maintaining visual and verbal continuity with Hackney while giving Westminster its own distinct identity (Virgin red to yellow).
