FP Movement’s rise from a Free People offshoot to a global activewear brand is no accident—it’s the result of community-first strategy, smart creator partnerships, and bold brand building. On this episode of Earned, FP Movement’s Courtney Wartman Weis shares how the brand is fueling intentional growth through live community events, athlete ambassadors, and global expansion.
Courtney shares how FP Movement evolved from a sub-brand of Free People into a global community-led brand of its own—and reveals how the pandemic-era shift to athleisure created new momentum. From launching Run Day and the Moving Together activity series to building a thoughtfully curated ambassador program (featuring top tennis athletes like Sloane Stephens, Sofia Kenin, and Danielle Collins), FP Movement is doubling down on creator and athlete partnerships to fuel impressive brand growth. Tune in to hear the brand’s plans for international expansion—with new stores launching in London and Paris, and eyes set on Asia and Australia—and learn how creators have continued to drive engagement and brand awareness across 55+ locations since 2020. Whether you're building a creator strategy or scaling a brand globally, this episode offers a front-row seat to what it takes to lead with authenticity and impact.
Check out highlights from the episode below, or or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
“We rely on creators to make and produce content for us”: How FP Movement fosters brand loyalty by building a creator-led community
Brit Starr: How do you think about community and who makes up the community of FP Movement?
Courtney Wartman Weis: Our community is really any of our customers, fans, or followers. I even consider community members to be people who just shop in our stores, whether they're purchasing that day or not. Our employees—we have 55 standalone FP Movement stores now, so stores that are just dedicated to movement, which is such a large hurdle for the team. We opened our first store in October of 2020, so almost five years later, we’ve had that growth. Our community that we interact with on a daily basis and is actually fueling the community with their content is our creators and our ambassadors. Our ambassador program has a few tiers to it and is quite nuanced, as is the brand, and it's so exciting that we have athlete ambassadors.
Our top tier is our athletes, and then we have content creators. Sometimes creators that are living and breathing the brand can represent the brand better and reach more consumers than we can by just casting models. So we rely on creators to make and produce that content for us. We have those everyday creators where we send out probably about 10-15 products to them and they might not create content that they're going to post on their own channels, but they create the content for the brand. So we call those our UGC content creators.
Then we have our ambassadors that are posting on their own channels and we are leveraging them for their audience reach and brand awareness, for those impressions and shares. And then we have affiliate influencers. We have a few different tiers in the structure there and different KPIs each way, and CreatorIQ absolutely is such a powerful tool. You guys have done such a good job and are always releasing new iterations and new features. To discover new talent, because we always want to reach new audiences with new content creators and new styles, it’s so important to us to be able to curate talent with the tools you have. That's really the community that we rely on to reach our external customer community—our creators.
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