The Athletic Community

Text: Silje Strømmen
Photos: Mari Oshaug

Like many others, Portland residents like to mark the start or the end of a journey by taking a photo of their feet on this specific carpet. What other use does social media have than telling the rest of the world that you are home or about to conduct a journey, right?

Sitting at a bar a few years ago, Jeremy Dunn and his friend Max suddenly got an idea. Looking through Instagram and joking about the number of photos of the airport carpet they thought “wouldn’t it be funny to make a full cycling kit inspired by the carpet design, walk into the airport, lie down and take photos of the person blending in?” The cycling kit quickly distilled down to the easiest garment to produce: socks. Hoping that they would be able to get other friends in on the joke, they ordered 72 pairs.

From there it all went crazy.

- The pairs sold out in a manner of minutes. We ordered a few more and after a couple of weeks I got a phone call from the airport going “Hi, this is xxx from the airport. If you could give me a call I would love to talk to you”. I was just like “Fuck, this is it. They are going to shut it down”, but when I called them up they told me they wanted to order the socks for all of they employees, and that they thought it was really cool. So I was just like “cool”, Jeremy, or JD as he signs e-mails with, reminisces about the early start of The Athletic Community. We are hanging out in the brand’s retails store in NW Portland, surrounded by colourful socks, beautiful magazines, sweaters, tank tops and other accessories.

Since they first opened the space has grown into multiple functions: sometimes it is a gallery, it hosts The Athletic Community’s offices and logistics location and it is a retail shop. But mainly, it is a place to visit that intersection between sport, art and culture that they like to call The Athletic Community – and it represents what Jeremy describes as “the point when we really got started”. Rather than being an online-shop and doing all of the packaging from home – frequently texting their friends to come over for “pizza, beers and wrapping”, they now had a physical location - and they were set up and ready to go.

- I think it all happened so quickly that we never really put anything into paper, at least initially. As we have grown over the past two years our goal has been to make cool shit; to make stuff that we are into and that we want to utilise from a sporting point, Jeremy responds to the question about what he wants to achieve with the company. “All the tough questions…” he says and laughs.

Before the socks, Jeremy had founded the magazine Embrocation Cycling Journal and was living in the Boston area. The magazine landed him a job at Rapha, where he stayed for almost 7 years (today they are neighbours with offices right across the hall from each other). Time passed and the magazine “went away” and Jeremy knew that he wanted to do his own thing again.

- I thought the socks were going to be a fluke, or a phenomenon that we were going to roll with and be stoked for doing until it would go away, but it never really did.

Hailing from a cycling background himself, and with a wife and partner (Julie Krasniak) who used to be a processional cyclist, The Athletic Community has a super solid cycling core. But there is more to them than that.

- To be able to take all of our sporting interests and combine them with a design focus and make super cool products has kinda been our goal. That was the whole thought behind the name: we aren’t a cycling brand, but a sports brand in general.

In addition to cycling, Jeremy has a background in running and ran competitively through college (and is “kinda getting back to that”). In addition he plays basketball twice a week.

- I mean, I would say that our background in sports fully informs everything we do. We test all the fabrics on ourselves. We get a sample in and then we go to the trail and run with it. We incorporate the samples into our daily use.

The Athletic Community’s socks are designed to breathe better, smell better, ventilate better and apply comfort better than regular socks. Jeremy and his team apply their designs to it, and the result is a pair of socks that you can use in all situations and still look cool. And if it is one thing we all know about the art of cycling – it is that looking cool is important.

- I like the strict wardrobe rules in cycling and I kind of enjoy all aspects of it. I have been involved in a cycling team, and having everyone match – I get totally geeked out over that: everyone having the same bike, the same jersey, the same shoes and the same helmet. To me, that helps to make a team a team. They all feel unified in their looks as well as direction. So I fully appreciate that. For me, the cool thing to do with that, and the way socks work really well with that, is that you can be a part of a team and wear that whole outfit – and then have your own flair with your own socks. It is the same with the Rapha stuff: you can wear all black, but then have a pop of colour when riding. It allows people to ad in their own sensibility.

Although the colours black, white and grey are at times highly represented in their designs, subdued is not a word to describe the socks of The Athletic Community. Jeremy gets geeked out over a lot, including watching films or stuff on the internet and then being able to translate what he sees into wearable fashion (they once made a sock inspired by the carpet in “The Shining”.) Their inspiration come from pretty much anywhere, including airport carpets, and sneakers:

- I am a huge sneaker fan and I have too many pairs. To be able to make socks that I can pair up with them… , Jeremy laughs, and tells the anecdote of when he was sitting online, looking at a pair of limited edition Nike sneakers that was due to be released in eight weeks and “knowing that I could make a sock in that time” decided to do so.

- By the time the sneakers came out I had the socks to match them. For me, that is the ultimate geeky and fun thing to do.

Jeremy strikes you as the kind of person who has totally devoted himself to what he believes in, and who at the same time is so thankful for being in a place where he is allowed to project himself and his ideas into what he does for a living. The Athletic Community is a living and breathing community of everything he and his team is found of, and it keeps evolving.

- It is funny, because when I had my own magazine, I really wanted to have a shop. Now that I have a shop, I really want to have a magazine. I just need to figure out how to do both. I want to do it all. Our gallery is a super new side to it.

As you can see from the publication side of thing (he says as he nods towards the shop’s magazine section), we are really into photography and everything surrounding sport and sport lifestyle. To some degree the gallery is an extension of that. As we are doing books from the gallery shows we are putting on, the gallery is helping us get the publishing side up and going. For me, that starts to bring the whole circle together. It is a lot, and maybe it is a bit ambitious. But we are having fun while doing it.