What happened to Iffley Road?

What the quiet end of Iffley Road says about the industry we’re building

Hey pals,

This email comes to you from somewhere over the Atlantic as I make my way to Tahoe for Trailcon! I feel a mixture of excitement and trepidation, but all will be good.

A short one today, but nonetheless a story I’ve been hoping to get a conclusion to for the past two months. This is the story of a brand that left an indelible mark on the British running industry but without warning shut just as the COVID running rocketship began to take flight.

There was no word online of why they closed, so I chatted to the founders to find out more. Turns out it was a much more complicated and frustrating story than I first imagined.

This is the story of Iffley Road.

Hope you have a great weekend all, and if any of you are around Tahoe hit me up 😊

Matt

A couple of months ago, I went down a rabbit hole. I wanted to know what happened to Iffley Road, the British running brand I always admired from afar. Their website was gone. Their Instagram account was silent. No goodbye post, no closing sale, no public announcement. Just… nothing. When I checked Google, the second-most searched phrase for the brand was: “Is Iffley Road still open?” That one line stopped me. Not because of what it said about search behaviour, but because of what it said about the brand. People still care. They still wonder. They still wear it. For a brand that hasn’t made a sound in years, that’s a kind of legacy most marketing teams would dream of.

So I started digging. I eventually spoke with Claire Kent, who founded the brand alongside her husband Bill Byrne in 2013. What she told me was quiet, moving, and unusually clear-eyed. The story of Iffley Road isn’t about a business that failed. It’s about one that succeeded, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and in a market that didn’t quite know what to do with something so considered. It was built with care, and it ended with dignity. But it still disappeared. And in that disappearance, I think there’s something to learn.

Iffley Road was founded because Claire and Bill couldn’t find running clothes they actually wanted to wear. As Claire put it, “Everything was lilac and pink. Just not us.” They imagined a brand rooted in British heritage, restrained in style, and made to last, physically and aesthetically. No trends, no plastic-feeling techwear, no aspirational neon. Just good clothes, well made, for people who ran not for a leaderboard, but because it was part of who they were. They found a designer from Orlebar Brown who helped them bring their vision to life. On weekends, he’d come to their flat and work on designs. They sourced fabric from mills across Europe, often negotiating with factories that didn’t really want to deal with small brands. They launched with a small collection, used real runners as models, and sold directly through their own site and, eventually, some of the world’s best retailers; Mr Porter, Matches and Barneys New York.

This wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan DTC rocketship. It was something slower, quieter, and more thoughtful. And it grew. It didn’t explode, but it did build a loyal audience. Their newsletter was unusually good. Their customer service had a personal touch. Their product spoke to a very particular kind of runner - someone who felt underrepresented by the typical aesthetic of the category. During COVID, their sales surged. More people were running, more people were buying online, and Iffley Road was in a perfect position to benefit.

Then, in 2021, Bill had a stroke. A major one. And everything stopped. They had to step away from the business. Claire told me it was one of the hardest decisions they ever made. To sell the company not because they wanted to, but because they had no choice. Still, they found a buyer. Someone affiliated with a company called Amazing Group. That buyer said they wanted to grow the brand. Claire and Bill believed them. But after the sale? Nothing. No relaunch. No customer email. No effort to preserve what had been built. The site eventually disappeared. The brand was dissolved. No one ever told the customers. No one explained. I reached out to the buyer myself by email and phone. No response.

And still all these years later people are searching “Is Iffley Road still open?” That’s not a failure. That’s proof of something deeper. You don’t ask that question unless a brand meant something to you. You don’t remember brands that were merely efficient. You remember the ones that had a point of view.

We talk a lot in running about sustainability. Recycled fabrics, carbon offsets, closed-loop systems. But Iffley Road practiced a different kind of sustainability, one rooted in longevity. Their kit was made to last, not just to meet a spec sheet, but to actually live in your drawer for years. Timeless design. High-quality construction. No expiry date. The brand still lives on because the products still live on. Claire told me she occasionally sees someone running in an old Iffley Road top. “Nothing thrills me more,” she said. And that’s not just sentimentality. It’s brand equity in its purest form: love, extended across time. When I first met Claire in April she was wearing with pride a navy blue Iffley road sweater – a jumper just as soft as the day it came out the mill.

If you zoom out, what’s most interesting about Iffley Road is how much it had in common with Tracksmith. Both brands launched within a year of each other. Both leaned on heritage, restraint, and reverence for running’s quieter traditions. But one had venture capital, a US DTC boom, and a customer base trained to expect heritage narratives. The other had London, bootstrapping, and a UK slow to adopt ecommerce and premium running apparel. Tracksmith scaled. Iffley Road endured. Same taste. Different context. And, ultimately, different outcomes.

Claire was remarkably honest about the structural challenges they faced: that no factory wants to work with a small brand, that premium runners don’t want to pay £100 for shorts, that marketing to “serious runners with taste” is a frustratingly hard audience to reach. “You can’t rely on paid media,” she told me. “The audience is incalculable. We’d do it differently now.” She also mentioned how strange it was to sell a product where the quality was so good, no one ever came back - but also so understated, it was hard to communicate online. Most people only ever saw the product on a screen. They didn’t get to feel it, or wear it, or realise how long it would last.

And yet, they built something meaningful. They built it well. They treated customers with care. They made clothes people still wear. I don’t think that’s a failure. I think it’s the best version of brand-building most of us can hope for. And I think the fact that someone else could buy that and let it die without a word should give all of us pause.

If you’re building something in this space, remember: the best brands aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones people miss when they’re gone. And if you’re wearing Iffley Road kit out on a run this week, you’re not just wearing a well-made garment. You’re carrying the memory of what this industry could be, if we built it for care, not speed.

That, to me, is lasting. Even if the website isn’t.