A New “Movement Class” Is Emerging

While big capital is buying performance, the most interesting consumer is the one walking away from it.

Last month, On’s co-founder David Allemann wrote something on LinkedIn that most people read as a product announcement. I read it as a thesis.

He described the rise of what he called a “Movement Class” — a group for whom longevity, energy and vitality now matter more than the old status signals. In this world, he wrote, sportswear is no longer utility. It has become identity. A second skin.

On x Erewhon collab anouncement

He is right. And he is not alone in seeing it.

Within weeks of that post, the news broke that L Catterton — the private equity firm backed by LVMH and the Arnault family — was in exclusive talks to take a large stake in Hyrox, the standardised fitness race that has gone from roughly 650 participants in 2017 to hundreds of thousands of athletes across more than thirty countries. Industry estimates put the valuation somewhere between €700 million and €1 billion.

Read that again. The house that built its empire on handbags is circling a business whose entire product is eight kilometres of running and a sled pushed across a conference-centre floor.

Then On itself launched a multi-year partnership with Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocer that turned a twenty-dollar smoothie into a cultural password. And no, it is NOT just a logo swap. A run collection, a co-branded recovery juice, and a Wellness Club — recurring running, training and recovery events across LA.

On x Erewhon collab announcement

And underneath all of it, Whoop — the screenless strap that sells discipline as a subscription — raised $575 million in March at a $10.1 billion valuation, with Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Abu Dhabi on the cap table.

image credit: Whoop

There is even a clean line straight back to the conglomerate: LVMH’s own Loewe has already collaborated with On — luxury and performancewear, fully intertwined, before a single euro changed hands over a fitness race.

What is actually happening is more specific, and more useful to anyone building a brand right now.

Status used to be a possession. You bought it, wore it, parked it in the driveway, wore it on the wrist. What luxury capital has understood — earlier than most brand teams — is that status has migrated from the thing you own to the thing you do. A Hyrox experience cannot be bought. The entry fee is months of training, and training is time, the one resource no amount of money can buy. It is also, more importantly, a community and a shared identity.

This is why the finish line now looks as valuable to a luxury house as the front row of a fashion house. But discipline is harder to fake than a handbag. And a brand that attaches itself to a discipline attaches itself to identity at a depth that lasts longer than any fashion trend.

That is the prize the “Movement Class” makes available again. Not exposure. Belonging. The difference between a consumer who wears your product and a consumer who organises their identity around it.

However… something that is not talked about enough is this:

Buying access to discipline is not the same as owning meaning inside it.

On x Erewhon works not because it is a collaboration but because it is an ecosystem — product, ritual, and a recurring community that brings the same people back, week after week, into physical space the brand will never fully control. The juice and the shoes are not the point here. The Wellness Club is. One is product that sells once. The other compounds over time, at the same rate as the identity behind it.

The brands that will lose money in this gold rush are the ones treating the Movement Class as a media buy — bolting a run club onto a deck, sponsoring a finish line, generating the impressions, and wondering three campaigns in why nothing accumulated. Showing up where the consumer runs and sweats is not the same as meaning something to them outside that space.

Most importantly, there is a second story unfolding at exactly the same time, in exactly the opposite direction.

While capital pours into optimisation, the Global Wellness Summit named the defining wellness trend of 2026 the “Over-Optimisation Backlash.” A growing population — exhausted by the dashboards, the sleep scores, the cortisol-managed mornings — is doing the most countercultural thing available to them. They are taking the watch off. I am one of those people.

Illustration: Jess Jenkins/The Guardian

There is now a clinical term, “orthosomnia”, for the insomnia people develop from anxiously tracking their sleep. The strap meant to optimise rest is, for a measurable number of people, destroying it. The nervous system has replaced the six-pack as the thing the most knowing consumers signal. Presence has become the new performance.

This looks like a contradiction. It is not.

Both consumers are responding to the same condition: a quantified, saturated, exhausting world that has made being a person feel like a job with KPIs. One responds by mastering the system — training harder, tracking tighter, wearing the discipline like a watch. The other responds by exiting it — choosing the analog, the unmeasured, the deliberately un-optimised.

The Optimiser signals control. The De-Optimiser signals the freedom not to need it.

And both are now markets. Both are identity declarations. Both will be courted, monetised, and chased with the same generic wellness language that means nothing to either.

Because that is the real lesson underneath the “Movement Class”, and it is the same one the attention economy keeps teaching brands the hard way: the trend is never the asset.

On does not win because running is having a moment. It wins because it has spent fifteen years building a specific conviction about movement, and the right moment arrived to meet it. Erewhon does not win because wellness is hot. It wins because it is so completely, unapologetically itself that other brands now borrow its meaning to become visible. Whoop does not win because everyone tracks now. It wins because it owns one idea — discipline, made visible — more completely than anyone else.

Performance exhausts. It always has.

That exhaustion is precisely what created the counterculture. Meaning is the only thing that carries a brand through a consumer’s swing from one pole to the other — because meaning does not ask the consumer to optimise or to opt out. It asks them to recognise themselves in the brand proposition, and the experience offered to them.

So the question for anyone watching luxury capital chase the finish line is not which side to bet on. Both sides are real. Both will be gigantic opportunities.

The question is the one underneath every trend that has ever moved this fast:

When the “Movement Class” moves on — and it will, the way every class eventually does — what will come next? And which side do I position myself on?

My upcoming book, The Architecture of Meaning - What Makes Great Brands Last and Impossible to Copy, is dropping this September. Get on the waitlist here.