In Part 1 of this series, we looked at Merrell's "It Starts Outside" platform through a strategic lens — the positioning choice, the competitive map, and the cultural tailwind that makes the timing feel right. The athlete-creator, and partnership side of their strategy is equally interesting, so we wanted to give it it's own space.
Alexi Pappas — Olympian, filmmaker, bestselling author — hiking alongside Lisa Thompson, a visually impaired marathon runner. Not racing. Hiking. Not in matching performance kits with split times on screen. Just two people on a trail, sharing the experience of being outside together.
That image is doing more work than it looks like on first glance. And when you pull the thread — following it from Pappas to the Virgil Abloh "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund to Pensole Lewis College to Merrell's new Futures Project — a larger story emerges. One that's less about a campaign and more about what it actually looks like when a brand operationalizes its own messaging.
We've had Pappas on our creator watchlist for a while. The reason is simple: she represents a model for the athlete-brand relationship that most of the industry is still catching up to.
Start with the résumé and you'll see why she doesn't fit the standard mold. She holds the Greek national record in the 10,000 meters. She competed at the 2016 Olympics. She co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in Tracktown, a feature film about a young runner — which she made the same year she ran at the Games. She co-wrote and starred in Olympic Dreams alongside Nick Kroll — the first fictional film ever shot inside an Olympic Village. Her memoir, Bravey, hit #1 in both the sports and film categories on Amazon when it came out in 2021, with a foreword from Maya Rudolph. She's currently adapting What Made Maddy Run — a book about a college athlete's mental health crisis — into a film.
She hosts a podcast called Mentor Buffet. She's a mental health advocate who has spoken openly about post-Olympic depression, including at McLean Hospital. Her fans call themselves "Braveys" — a word from one of her poems that became a community identity.
This is not an athlete who endorses products. This is a creator who happens to be an elite runner — and whose creative output, advocacy work, and athletic career all feed the same stream. When a brand partners with Pappas, they're not buying a face. They're buying into a worldview.
Here's the detail that makes the Merrell campaign feel different from the standard athlete-brand content play.
Pappas didn't meet Lisa Thompson through Merrell. She didn't meet her through an agency or a casting call. She reached out to Team with a Vision — a nonprofit that supports visually impaired athletes — and asked if they needed any support at the Boston Marathon. That was four Bostons ago.
Thompson, a visually impaired runner from Houston, Texas, has been running with Pappas as her guide ever since. Guide running is exactly what it sounds like — you run tethered to another person, navigating for them, matching their pace, being their eyes on the course. It requires trust that goes beyond anything you'd find in a brand partnership brief. At the 2025 Boston Marathon, Thompson won the T13 visually impaired category with Pappas guiding, finishing in 3:42:01.
Their relationship — built entirely outside of any brand context — is now the emotional centerpiece of Merrell's biggest campaign ever. And that ordering matters. Merrell didn't create the story. The story already existed. Merrell recognized it and built around it.
This is the structural difference between endorsement and co-creation. In the endorsement model, a brand writes a brief, casts an athlete, and produces content around the brand's narrative. In the co-creation model, the athlete brings an existing story — one they own, one that predates the brand relationship — and the brand amplifies it. The authenticity isn't manufactured. It's borrowed, with permission, from someone who was already living it.
We wrote in our AI Dilemma piece about the "authenticity premium" — the measurable trust penalty consumers assign to content they perceive as artificial. Pappas and Thompson on a trail together is the inverse of that. It's the authenticity dividend. You can't generate this. You can't prompt it. You can only find it and get out of the way.
We talk a lot in this industry about athlete-creators — the idea that the old endorsement model is giving way to something more collaborative. But most of what we see is still pretty surface-level. An athlete gets a contract, shoots some content, posts on Instagram, maybe appears in a campaign film. The "creator" part is often just the athlete creating brand content instead of the brand creating content about the athlete. Same transaction, different production model.
Pappas represents something structurally different, and it's worth being specific about why.
Her value to Merrell isn't her running credentials — though those are real. It's the fact that she has an independent creative practice that exists completely outside of any brand relationship. She directs films. She writes books. She advocates for mental health. She guide-runs for a visually impaired athlete. Each of these things generates its own audience, its own credibility, and its own cultural footprint. When she shows up in a Merrell campaign, she brings all of that with her.
This is what we mean when we say the athlete-creator model is evolving. The old model was about reach — how many followers, how many impressions. The new model is about depth — how many dimensions does this person bring to our brand? How many conversations are they already part of that we couldn't enter on our own?
Kilian Jornet took it one step further by founding his own brand, Nnormal. Kate Courtney went independent and built partnerships with Allied Cycle Works, Rapha, SRAM, Red Bull, and Rivian — each choice a signal about who she is and what she stands for. Pappas hasn't launched a brand, but she's built something arguably harder to replicate: a creative body of work that gives her leverage and independence in every brand conversation she enters.
For our audience — the brand managers and founders figuring out their own creator strategies — Pappas is a case study in what you should be looking for. Not the biggest following. Not the fastest times. The richest story.
Now let's follow the second thread in the Merrell platform — one that's gotten almost no attention in the marketing coverage of "It Starts Outside," but that tells us the most about the brand's commitment to their new platform.
Alongside the campaign, Merrell launched the "Outside: Futures Project" — a design program developed with the Virgil Abloh "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund and Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design. The program selects more than 30 students for a nature-driven creative curriculum and impact apprenticeships inside Merrell's own design studio.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand what the Abloh Fund actually is — because it's not a typical brand philanthropy play.
Virgil Abloh established the "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund in 2020 with a coalition of partners including Nike, Louis Vuitton, evian, Farfetch, and New Guards Group. The initial commitment was $1 million to support Black students pursuing careers in fashion and design. Abloh named it "Post-Modern" because the vision was holistic — not just tuition money but ongoing career support, mentoring, and professional development, administered through the Fashion Scholarship Fund.
After Abloh's death in November 2021, the fund's scale expanded dramatically. Louis Vuitton facilitated a Sotheby's auction of 200 pairs of Abloh's Louis Vuitton x Nike Air Force 1 sneakers that raised approximately $20 million — making it one of the most well-capitalized design scholarship funds in the industry. The fund's philosophy reflects Abloh's cross-disciplinary ethos: architecture, design, engineering, art, and music, all connected. The point wasn't to train people for a single industry. It was to build infrastructure that opens doors across creative fields.
That word — doors — keeps showing up when you dig into these connections. Nice symbolism if nothing else.
The third thread is Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design, and this one is deeply relevant to anyone in our industry who cares about who designs the products we sell.
D'Wayne Edwards founded PENSOLE in 2010 as the first academy in the U.S. dedicated to footwear design. His own story gives the project its urgency — he left school at 17 and went on to become one of Nike's youngest lead designers. He knew firsthand that the pipeline into design careers was narrow, and he set out to widen it.
The results speak for themselves. PENSOLE and its successor have placed more than 700 graduates at Nike, Adidas, Jordan, New Balance, Vans, Puma, Timberland, The North Face, and other major brands. In 2021, Edwards partnered to reopen the Lewis College of Business — Michigan's only HBCU, which had closed in 2015 — as Pensole Lewis College. It became the first HBCU in the U.S. to reopen. It remains the only HBCU in America focused on design.
When Merrell says it's building a design pipeline through the Futures Project — 30+ students, nature-driven curriculum, apprenticeships inside the design studio — this is who they're partnering with. Not a PR firm. Not a consulting agency. An institution that was specifically built to diversify who gets to design the products our industry sells.
Here's what ties all three threads together, and what makes this a story about brand strategy rather than just a list of good initiatives.
Merrell's campaign says the outdoors should be accessible to everyone. That's the platform message.
Pappas's presence in the campaign says athletic storytelling should be accessible to everyone — not just the fastest runners or the most photogenic athletes, but an Olympian hiking with a visually impaired marathoner, sharing a trail as companions rather than competitors.
The Abloh Fund says design careers should be accessible to everyone — specifically Black students who've been historically underrepresented in the fashion and footwear pipeline.
Pensole Lewis College says the education that leads to those careers should be accessible to everyone — and that reopening a closed HBCU and focusing it on design is how you build that access into the system.
And the Futures Project is where all three converge inside Merrell's walls. Students from an HBCU design program, supported by the Abloh Fund's scholarship infrastructure, doing apprenticeships in the design studio of a brand whose entire platform is built on the idea that the first step — the door — is the one that matters most.
The theme running through all of it is access. And it's not being used as a marketing concept. It's being operationalized across talent (Pappas as co-creator, not endorser), pipeline (Futures Project bringing design students into the studio), and institutional partnership (Abloh Fund and Pensole Lewis College).
That coherence is what separates a brand platform from a brand campaign. Campaigns live in media. Platforms live in decisions and culture. And the decisions Merrell is making — who they partner with, who they hire, who they invite into the studio, whose stories they tell — all point in the same direction as the tagline.
This concludes our two-part series on Merrell's "It Starts Outside." For the strategic and competitive analysis, read Part 1: Everyone's Racing Upmarket. Merrell Just Went the Other Way.
