Merrell | Trail Sonified
Brief
How do you launch a technical trail shoe into culture? That was the question facing Merrell, the outdoor performance brand with a clear ambition: to prove that trail running is not a niche pursuit on the fringes of sport, but something that carries genuine energy, identity and community at its core.
The task was to embed the brand within the beating heart of UK outdoor culture – to make it resonate beyond the trail and speak to an audience that would see straight through anything that felt manufactured or opportunistic. What happened on it had never been done before in the category.
Idea
The UK’s first club night powered by trail running.
Trail Sonified transformed raw performance data into music — not metaphorically, but literally. Merrell gathered Strava data from run crews across the country, sending runners out in the Merrell MTL Adapt Matryx to hit elevation, distance, pace and heart rate targets across Britain’s trails. Every climb, every surge, every moment at lactic threshold became a data point with somewhere to go.
That data was then sonified. Pace became BPM. Elevation shaped the build. Heart rate drove intensity. Distance layered texture. The collective sweat of an entire running community manipulated the decks, and the result was a setlist written not by a producer, but by the trail itself.
The venue was as deliberate as the concept. Hosted in an underground car park in Kendal, the night placed underground music in direct conversation with overground running – a collision of two worlds that, it turned out, had more in common than either had previously been given credit for. Headlined by outdoor-orientated creative and DJ Advanced Rock and supported by Berwick, the event blurred the line between summit and subwoofer with the kind of considered abandon that only lands when the idea is genuinely strong enough to carry it.
Trail running did not just fuel the body that night. It fuelled the drop.
The Impact
Trail Sonified repositioned Merrell from performance brand to cultural instigator – a distinction that matters enormously in a category where credibility is currency and audiences have well-calibrated instincts for the inauthentic. By embedding itself within Kendal Mountain Festival, the epicentre of UK outdoor culture for nearly half a century, the brand stepped directly into a conversation it had earned the right to be part of.
The sold-out event of over 400 trailheads brought run crews together from across the country, turning individual miles into something that felt, for a night at least, like collective momentum. It generated organic social conversation, drew creator attendance and landed earned media across the likes of HYPEBEAST and Huck – three territories that rarely find themselves sharing the same story. We call it Creativity. Multiplied.™
More than any metric, though, it demonstrated something that the trail running world has always understood and that the wider culture is only beginning to catch up to: the energy of the trail does not stop at the finish line.
Services
Creative ideation and concept development
Branding and visual identity
Influencer marketing
Event planning and logistics
Experiential activation
Social content strategy and production
Talent and partner management
