Inspiring the Runner in Everyone
Inspiring the Runner In Everybody
One of Fleet Feet’s core values is inspiring the runner in everybody. During my early years in college I discovered a passion for inspiring people to live a happy and healthy life. I wasn’t sure what exactly what the best approach for this was. I pondered switching majors from marketing to being a personal trainer or dietician to have a direct impact on people daily. This would’ve been a big decision to change my major as it would’ve required completely different classes.
Throughout those years I had shifted my passion from running to weight lifting. I enjoyed going to the gym every day and working on what muscles I felt needed to be better defined. It was also interesting altering my diet to make my body look a certain way or respond to the workouts I was doing. Through this I put on almost 40 pounds of muscle within my first 6 months of college. I still had a small interest in running though. During a public health and fitness class I took to help me consider changing my major, I made a personal goal to start running again with my long term goal being to run a marathon. I was naive and went to the marathon pretty quickly, in less than a year. This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. I suffered for about 20 miles of the 26.2 miles finishing in 4 hours and 9 minutes. This is where my love for running really skyrocketed.
I started to aspire to improve my running, participating in bigger and bigger races. From this love I applied for a local running store opening up 5 minutes from my house. Fleet Feet felt like your classic small business. The owners worked on the floor fitting customers, they came to events and runs, and were constantly involved in the community. Their passion for inspiring others to run was what I aspired to achieve and knew I could do it through marketing.
Throughout college I worked my way up through Fleet Feet. I started off just fitting customers for shoes. Then I took some of my marketing skills to the test and asked the owner, Frank, if I could help out with their social media page. The posts were infrequent and often just blurry images. I struggled to find the balance between doing this, working in the store, running, and going to school. After some time we had an opening for store manager at our location in Oakley. I told Frank I was interested in this job and thought I was going to be in a great position to execute it well. There were some ups and downs in that position. While being a good leader and managing my coworkers well, I didn’t exactly love the grind of the monotony at work. I was applying for jobs in marketing and asking advice from people I look up to what I should do to get a job. They gave me a simple solution, ask Frank for a chance at a marketing position.
One day I asked Frank to talk and presented him some basic marketing ideas. We spoke about working on our digital footprint, our in store marketing, while I still help out in the store. Over the last year of working in this position, I have learned I can do a lot to inspire the runner in everybody by being able to show how great the sport is to the people of Cincinnati. We have 55,000 people who are subscribed to our email newsletters and close to 10,000 total across all social channels. I have learned ways to not only market the brands we have in store and how we can help them be more comfortable. I have found ways to inspire everyone to become an avid runner. I focus heavily on local running and how great it can be. I promote our local events. I do blog posts highlighting cool spots to run, different trails to run on, and different races to attend. These blog posts help with Fleet Feet’s SEO but are also a valuable resource to first time runners looking for a new favorite spot to run influenced by ME.
Recently, I have started doing photography as both a hobby and for work. I’ve learned that through photography I can capture valuable moments that make running look fun. These photos can be used strategically in our posts to promote specific products and messages we want to get across. The most important thing though is getting customers to connect with Fleet Feet as a brand. Fleet Feet believes they can inspire the runner in everyone and every day I get to be the person on the front lines sharing our inspiring messages and moments.
