At a little over three years old, Tracksuit is one of the fastest growing and exciting SAAS startups to have emerged from New Zealand. Conceived and incubated as a collaboration between Previously Unavailable and TRA Labs, we redesigned both the brand health tracking business model and product, capturing the imagination of brand marketers all over the world.
Historically, tracking brand metrics like awareness and consideration has been too expensive for smaller companies ($100K+ per year).
We set out to provide brand tracking at a fraction of the cost, so that any company could have a dashboard of long-term brand metrics alongside their existing dashboards of short-term performance metrics.
We also set out to become champions of brand building – helping brand marketers demonstrate the results of their work to their exec and board to reinforce the value of what they do.
The first step was to redesign the operational and business model. The conventional model saw single brands engage research firms in large programmes of bespoke work which cost in the vicinity of $100K per year. We reasoned that if we could ‘syndicate’ brand tracking across many brands at once, we could reduce the costs considerably. By selling Tracksuit on a ‘cohort’ basis we syndicated the costs over groups of 20 brands, enabling us to provide brand tracking at about 10% of the usual cost – opening us up to a massive addressable market of brands who’d never been able to afford this type of research.
The next step was to present brand tracking data in a completely new way – a beautifully designed and highly functional dashboard that gives marketers an ‘always-on’ view of their brand’s health. The dashboard has been designed to facilitate communication with exec and board teams, and our customers frequently talk about including Tracksuit’s dashboard exports in exec and board reports.
The last step was to design a brand around Tracksuit’s purpose of being ‘champions of brand building’. The name ‘Tracksuit’ was a key part of this design process and gave the company a memorable name that appeals to marketers’ fun side. Then brand design and messaging has helped Tracksuit communicate prolifically and consistently across all its channels with useful content that supports brand marketers to build the value of brand marketing in their organizations.
The company was conceived and incubated as a collaboration between Previously Unavailable and TRA Labs, before being incorporated under the leadership of Previously Unavailable partner Connor Archbold and his former colleague Matt Herbert.
As of February 2024, Tracksuit tracks more than 4,000 brands across New Zealand, Australia, US and UK.
Tracksuit reached $8M in annual recurring revenue in three years – putting its growth among the top 1% of startups from New Zealand. The company was valued at $45M in 2023 after an oversubscribed funding round led by Blackbird and involving Icehouse Ventures, global marketing intelligence platform WARC and esteemed marketing professor Mark Ritson.
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