Say what you mean, do what you love and fucking send it
RUNNING JUST GOT DARK. ABOUT FUCKIN’ TIME.
The running market is loud. Neon, slogans, the kind of relentless optimism that wants you buzzing (read: exhausted) before you’ve even left the house. R.A.D® weren’t interested in any of that. So for the all-black colourway drop of their new running shoe the UFO, we went the other way. Goth Happens, a deadpan nod to ‘shit happens’, became the brief. Sport doesn’t always have to feel like a pep talk, so we built the campaign around darkness: liberty spike subculture, glitch-distorted film and a big ol’ ‘fuck you’ attitude. Teaser film, social carousels, website banners, a full lookbook. Turns out not everyone runs toward the light.
Industry Sports performance footwear
The campaign direction ironically leans into tension rather than performance, pulling from emo and goth references over the action poses you’d expect from a running campaign. Working with photographer Jack Chipper, VHS footage, contact sheet photography and lo-fi stop-motion GIFs gave the whole thing a Tumblr-era zine quality that felt specific rather than borrowed.
NOT EVERYONE RUNS TOWARDS THE LIGHT
The Goth Happens ident became the graphic anchor: a liquified chrome bubble type bridging 90s retro sport and metalcore in a single mark. It ran as two treatments across the rollout, monochrome and violet glitch, giving the campaign deliberate flex without ever breaking the world it had built.
