For those who might not know you or the brand, can you introduce yourself?
Tom Daly: I’m Tom Daly, co-founder of District Vision. We call ourselves “the mindful sports company.” We focus on creating physical mental products for running and other silent sports.
We manufacture eyewear in Japan. We work with a family who has been making eyewear for three generations. They are also runners. Before we launched we used to meet in Hawaii for the marathon to test our samples. We name each frame in honor of our Japanese engineers. It’s a very personal project. We are really happy to reinforce the “made in Japan” label through building quality sports product.
How did you get into running? Was there a certain point in life when you started, or have you always run?
When a person gets into long distance running, it probably means they’ve experienced a problem at one point in their life. I think the sport attracts a kind of addictive personality. For me, I went through a particularly destructive phase in life. Then I got into long distance running and the team structure here in New York. From there, once you subscribe to the collective energy of running, it becomes something bigger. It’s not necessarily about one race or another, rather it helps navigate through life. And when you see how it helps other people, you get locked into the system in a beautiful way.
That’s how I became a runner. For Max, it was a similar conduit of applying yourself to one thing over a long period of time. For him though, it was much more about meditation. When we were considering starting the brand, we had to make some choices. We both have fashion backgrounds, but we didn’t want to make more leather jackets and jeans. We felt like that was being done pretty well. We began to apply ourselves to sport and how we might help people by building a mindful sports company geared towards well-being. That concept is still evolving.
We are trying to connect things that maybe haven’t historically belonged together. That has been our path. On paper, it’s perhaps a lovely marketing idea, but in reality, there was also a fair amount of luck involved in reaching that point in our lives.
You mentioned Max’s relationship to the meditative aspect. How does that play into the brand?
In the beginning, we saw that the running community was changing. There were different types of runners besides the classic stereotype: a guy who puts on an old tee shirt and a spare pair of shorts and goes out just to break a sweat. There was increasing curiosity in how people run, and we wanted to serve the community that we were a part of. We didn’t need to create another training program since most of our friends knew how to run.
At the time though, there weren’t what we call “mental tools.” There was no support for mental aspect. We wanted to take the idea of mental curiosity and apply it to running. At first, it was a service rendered to our friends that began with five people lying on a mat in a room. It quickly grew to 100, 150, 200 people. It always circled back to the idea of how we can help people. I wish it was the result of a master plan, but it really developed out of a series of coincidences.
We’ve seen the District Vision trail running shoes in collaboration with Salomon, and we know you have trail-specific eyewear coming out. Why this movement toward trail running?
We believe in technical collaborations. We would never approach a collab by just changing the color of an existing product and selling it. With Salomon, we only create trail running shoes because that is their expertise. That is our approach with all of our partners. What are they the best at? What can we do in that area that is highly specific? Something that appeals to 10% or 1% of people that run. We aim to serve that diehard community of people that do the sport and feel they are lacking specific tools.
An indirect result of this methodology is that we have a lot of non-sport distribution. Many stores sell our goods to people who don’t even practice running. Maybe it’s because they like the sincerity or clarity of District Vision. In that way, the brand has become bigger than what we envisioned. Our focus remains on building very specific tools though. We often come back to the word “serve”. We want to serve people and give them things that don’t already exist. There is so much stuff out there. For us today, there has to be a distinct reason to make something.
We are continually moving toward more sustainable production methods. You will see more of that in our apparel and the recycled material programs. We want to be responsible. Sport is so broad and being specific makes all the difference. Over time, we hope to reach those goals.
Is there any super-secret info you’d like to share with us about upcoming drops?
(Laughs) Not really! But you can expect a lot from us this year.
