How Tracksuit Head of Marketing Mikayla Hopkins Is Making B2B Brands Fun Again
I talked to Mikayla about Tracksuit's joyful branding, why marketing can be a lonely gig, building teams that can build brands, and Barbie
I chatted with Mikayla Hopkins, Chief Marketing Officer at Tracksuit, about joy, branding, Barbie, and how to build a B2B brand that people can’t stop talking about
👋 Hi, I'm Amanda. I'm a brand strategist and fractional CMO. I help founder-led businesses turn belief into brand—and brand into a strategic asset. I share weekly deep dives with actionable advice on brand building—plus interviews with the people in the trenches. I also work 1:1 with founders and teams. Book a chat here.
Who will love this
B2B marketers ready to build brands people actually care about
Anyone who’s ever asked, “Why are B2B brands so boring?”
Brand marketers who've survived 150-slide brand tracking presentations
Fans of Tracksuit — the brand and the tracksuits
Today
Good morning!
I'm excited to share today’s interview. Tracksuit has been on my radar for a while now. When I asked for brand measurement recommendations, no less than 16 (!) people in my network mentioned Tracksuit.
I’ve already written a deep dive on the brand itself. But after talking with the marketing mastermind behind it, I was reminded of something important: clarity 👏 inside 👏 an 👏organization 👏 flows 👏 outward.
It’s rare to achieve the kind of brand clarity Tracksuit has, especially in such a short time. I think that’s because they’ve been incredibly disciplined about the position they want to hold in people’s minds — and they’ve executed it with joy and rigor. And of course - they have a great, disruptive product.
I loved this conversation with Mikayla Hopkins, and I think you will too.
Amanda
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Amanda Gordon: Hi Mikayla! Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to Tracksuit?
Mikayla Hopkins: Absolutely. I've been in the world of marketing for about a decade, and my experience spans a trifecta of worlds: first, beer, then beauty, and now B2B SaaS. I started working at Heineken and saw firsthand how the brand created one of the most valuable international beer brands in the world. They are not light on cash, so I was able to see how they built a brand program and platform that scaled globally. Then I moved into beauty, worked there for several years, and worked my way up into the CMO role. It was an incredible experience, giving me far too much responsibility for someone my age, but it meant I could grow rapidly. We grew it into a multi-million business, but because it was bricks and mortar, I could only scale it so far. There’s always a cap depending on your risk appetite.
Moving into B2B SaaS, I never had any plans or aspirations to work in B2B SaaS. In my head, B2B SaaS is corporate blue, boring, stale, and not sexy. That's not the world I like to play in when it comes to building brands that people can't stop talking about. I struggled in my previous role to prove the value of the brand at the board level, even though I knew instinctively that what we were doing was working and allowing us to carve out the premium end of the market. I was having conversations as part of various marketing groups, and one of my good mates, head of marketing at a fantastic fintech company, told me to check out this tool. She said they had never been able to do brand tracking without $200,000 worth of market research, but they needed to explore it.
It was brand new. They had just launched with 10 launch partners. It was Connor and Matt, the co-founders, working alongside the joint venture company that helped launch Tracksuit. When I saw the dashboard, I thought, "This is what I’ve wanted my entire career." Instead of just money down at the top of the funnel and hoping it stuck, this was finally a way for me to communicate and measure that the work my team was doing was working. At the same time, I was on the eve of signing with a global FinTech company. I stumbled into a conversation with Connor, our co-CEO. His superpower? Hiring exceptional people in a way I’ve never seen before. I drank the Kool-Aid, saw the vision, and took the leap. I joined as employee number three, after Connor, Matt, and our head of sales, Hamish. Four years old, our 140+ human team aspires to become New Zealand's first billion-dollar unicorn.
Amanda Gordon: That’s awesome. So your remit is to take the vision global?
Mikayla Hopkins: Yeah, and it's such a privilege. From being the only marketer to now having a marketing team of 18 who are all smarter than I in what they do, it’s brilliant.
Amanda Gordon: Tracksuit started investing in the brand much earlier than most: why?
Mikayla Hopkins: It comes down to understanding the commercial power of a brand. I could speak to that for the next 50 minutes, but ultimately it means acquiring customers becomes easier and more efficient. Pricing power is realized, and it leads to a higher valuation. For me, I’m never going to work for a company with CEOs who don’t believe in a brand. Understanding Connor and Matt's philosophy around it was the push I needed to be like, "Yes, this is the right place, and they are going to value the work of brand marketing."
You can see it in the way we show up. Yes, we are a B2B company, but we walk and talk like a B2C company. We're fun, playful, and spirited, and everything you see is very deliberate. At the end of the day, we're speaking to humans, and they are the ones purchasing our software.
Amanda Gordon: Yeah, you can feel the energy. It's something interacting with people at Tracksuit, following you all, and seeing how the brand comes to life through people and the tracksuits is so fun. When I see it, it makes me think, why has nobody else done this before?
Mikayla Hopkins: This is something I tell every customer at Tracksuit every time I have a conversation: marketing has two jobs. The first is to harvest the demand of the market in the short term with conversion activity, and the second is to build future demand for the brand among people who are not ready to buy yet but will become a part of your category in the future. Both jobs are equally important. Many people over-invest in the short term, converting all of that small group of existing demand. Eventually, there is no more demand left to convert. All of your forecasting and sustainable vision for long-term business growth go out the window. It becomes more expensive to acquire customers, and companies go bankrupt.
Amanda Gordon: Yeah, that's a conversation more businesses should be having. Framing it that way gives brand a lot more respect — and having the tools to prove it is a total gamechanger.
Mikayla Hopkins: Yeah, you get it. I understand, as a marketer, when we've got all these tools that measure and prove the value of our work in the short term, like Google Analytics, why would you not over-invest when that leads to you getting a promotion, your team succeeds, and the pats on the back each month when you hit your revenue targets? Of course, you're going to continue that kind of activity and behavior. So it's for marketers to upskill themselves in talking to non-marketing stakeholders about the value of a brand. But it's also about CEOs and CFOs believing and trusting in the long-term play of the brand. Just look at the data - it works.
Amanda Gordon: 100%. Writing a brand strategy is one thing — executing it is another. I'd love to hear how you set your team up to bring Tracksuit’s strategy to life.
Mikayla Hopkins: Absolutely. I think it's positioned around two key things. First and foremost, we have a brand platform that sits around the idea of "we champion brand." Secondly, it is always done with the emotional positioning of joy. With those two guardrails, I'm a big believer that the brand doesn't sit within marketing and that every individual within Tracksuit is the guardian of how we show up. Brand is how people think and feel about you, or how they speak about you when you're not in the room.
When I give those guardrails to my team, and I make sure that I hire people smarter than me to do the job, it's very clear the strategy and the vision, which is to have Tracksuit brand data in every single boardroom around the world by becoming the common language. That allows them to go and do their best work. I'm not a micromanager. I never have been. My role is to empower the team. If they understand the business metrics we need to achieve, the vision, and the long-term goal, they can cleverly determine what needs to be done and how to resource themselves appropriately.
Amanda Gordon: I love that. Well, even just hearing your brand vision and positioning, it's incredibly simple and it's human language. I think so many brand strategies that I come across are intangible and fluffy.
Mikayla Hopkins: Totally, and overcomplicated, right? It doesn't have to be. I've seen the world's best brand strategies, but then it comes to the execution and that vehicle for telling that story in a different way, and it falls flat all the time because it's overcomplicated. I go to customer success, somebody in sales, somebody in product - we should all know the vision and how we want to show up. And that isn't just marketing execution. It's how the product interacts, it's how we hire. We hire people who are playful, spirited, and intelligent, and that is how you should feel when you engage with anything from content to onboarding. It's echoed across every touchpoint along the business.
Amanda Gordon: Tracksuit is one of the most fun B2B brands that I've come across. The tracksuits, the headshots, the content strategy telling the stories of your clients' success, Track Bucks for Track Buds - it's all very fun and joyful, to use your word. Why do you think B2B brands are mostly so boring?
Mikayla Hopkins: I mean, it's the million-dollar question that I'm trying to figure out too, Amanda. I genuinely don't understand. The buying committee is still the same - it's humans with emotions who want to feel something when they buy. It's the same thing. The only reason I can think of, and why I didn't want to join a B2B company, is that we haven't had fun, playful, consumer-esque brands show up in the B2B world. We just haven't had those playbooks modeled for us. But I hope Tracksuit sets the new standard.
Companies like HubSpot did a great job, particularly at the start. But yeah, it's lost on me, and maybe that's because I'm biased and I'm in this bubble where it works, and we see the bottom line. But I hope it's done with the same lens because I buy on emotion. It's how I behave and how I move through the world—through emotion and wanting to connect to things.
Amanda Gordon: Yeah, something funny happens when we start getting into three-letter acronyms and analytics. The concept of selling to a business is such a funny concept, right?
Mikayla Hopkins: Look into the why. We're not selling software; we're selling career currency. Because when someone buys Tracksuit and they use that to prove the work they're doing, they're going to get their promotion from VP to CMO. Or if they're an agency, it's better validation of their work; more awards, a larger book of business, and a greater impact on creative work. It's all career and social currency, and that reorientates the way you need to be showing up.
Amanda Gordon: Yes. I've noticed that a lot of brand builders seem to feel a bit isolated — like they don't have many peers to talk to or compare notes with. It feels like Tracksuit’s events are creating spaces that are more joyful and less serious.
Mikayla Hopkins: And look at the people we're serving, right? They're fun, creative storytellers. They're quirky and weird and brilliant, and yeah, we're a product, but outside of that, we are a community. That's been so important, and that's what I felt going through my marketing career. I want to have my WhatsApp groups. I want to have my marketing coffee to vent to and ask for help. The number of marketers I've had crying on my lap because this is damn hard... I think shared problems create beautiful connections, right? So what we're trying to do is create spaces for those people to have those conversations.
Amanda Gordon: I love that. One of the things I hear from B2B marketers is that there's this disconnect between marketing, sales, and product. So I'd be interested to hear what you think about the connection between each function. What's the role of each, and how do they kind of connect?
Mikayla Hopkins: It's such a good question. I think as you go through different stages of growth, that tension can either grow or be shortened, and I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Candidly, I think in the early days, when there were five or six of us, and we were all heads of those functions, it was really easy to yell across the table and say, "This is the problem. What should I do?" But when you're in four different markets, that becomes a lot more challenging. But I think the way you solve that is you have shared goals, right? Like if we're both trying to drive sales and I say we overlay product-led growth motion — then everyone is aligned around the same outcome. It cuts down on ego because you're collaborating on the same mission, not operating in silos.
At Tracksuit, I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful is that we’re incredibly clear on our three core business metrics: ARR, GRR, and ARR per employee. Everyone’s bonus structure is tied to those metrics. It means marketing, sales, product — we’re all accountable. If marketing fills the pipeline with bad leads, that impacts growth retention, which affects everyone. It creates natural alignment.
That said, we're not perfect. And as we scale from $25M to $140M in ARR, maintaining that cross-functional alignment will be one of the most important challenges we work through.
Amanda Gordon: I think a lot of B to B folks see brand building as a luxury. But Tracksuit’s brand, in and of itself, I think, is a testament to the power of brand. What is the business value of brand for Tracksuit?
Mikayla Hopkins: I think brand is everything. First and foremost, we need to become synonymous with the word 'brand.' Exactly as you said — when people think of brand, I want them to immediately think of Tracksuit. Ultimately, this will lead to a higher valuation, a stronger employer brand — and that's so important, because our people are everything. The 140 humans on this team are exceptional.
It's about building a legacy for all past, present, and future employees — so that when they move on, they can cherry-pick the opportunities they want because of the reputation we've built together. And beyond that, look at who we serve: we have to be best in class. If companies are trusting us to measure their brand, we must set the gold standard by building an outstanding brand ourselves.
Amanda: Yes! I think there’s often a bit of mystery around how much work actually goes into visual identities and brand marketing — and just how much effort it takes to look as good as you do, even when it looks effortless. I’m interested in who you tapped for your visual identity, your verbal identity, and how you’ve built your creative team to support day-to-day brand marketing.
Mikayla Hopkins:Yeah, absolutely. Like I said earlier, I’m in a very privileged position — I have exceptional humans looking after that. And again, I think it’s two-pronged. I’ll speak to what the creative team looks like, but also, it comes back to something fundamental I mentioned earlier: brand doesn’t just live in marketing.
That’s so important to how we ensure everything looks the way it does — how we show up, how we interact, how we host events, and how we care for customers. It’s everybody’s responsibility. I try to empower all of the people on our team to believe that, because when they do, you can see it and feel it. I love calling out and championing people who consistently live that out.
Now, in terms of the creative team: Tracksuit was initially a joint venture, and we partnered with one of the best in the world — a brand studio called Previously Unavailable. They really led the foundational work on how we would look and how we would talk.
As our team scaled, we built internally. I have a phenomenal Content and Comms Lead named Elly — she's dynamic, a former journalist — and she’s really the person who created and continues to shape our tone of voice. Her voice is essentially Tracksuit’s voice.
On the creative side, we have an amazing Design Lead named Lauren. She pushes boundaries, takes feedback, and embodies the way I hire: I look for people who challenge me and are open to being challenged themselves. Lauren’s a perfectionist, like so many on our team, and she's always navigating the tension between scaling the brand and preserving the brand platform — the right color palette, typography, tone of voice, and overall design language.
Now, we’re starting to ask ourselves: how do we scale this? What does the next evolution of our design language actually look like? I feel like we’re just scratching the surface
Amanda Gordon: What advice do you have for marketers or founders who want to build a brand or B2B business? How should they think about balancing that long-term future demand, brand building, and short-term growth marketing?
Mikayla Hopkins: That's the question, right? And honestly, it depends on who you're talking to.
But ultimately, you have to look at the data. We know strong brands win time and time again. We know companies with strong brands consistently outperform the S&P 500. The proof is in the pudding.
Once you understand that data, you can use it to communicate, drive buy-in, and influence your wider leadership team. It's really about coming back to what you said — balancing the long and the short. Future demand accounts for 90–95% of a company's growth. That's where real growth comes from.
Existing demand — what you're capturing with short-term conversion tactics — represents only about 5% of the market. You can't scale a business by focusing only on that small group.
Growth comes from light buyers, from new people entering and exiting your category all the time. That’s why brand building — creating future demand — has to be a core focus.
Amanda Gordon: And here's the million-dollar question to take us home: What is your favorite piece of work from Tracksuit thus far?
Mikayla Hopkins: Oh, it's a great question. Amanda, I will tell you the best part. I want to say September 2023, when you'll remember the big Barbie movie came out, and their incredible marketing campaign that made it culturally relevant across every... yeah, I mean, every screen in the world. It was quick, and we took a risk to start brand tracking Barbie and its competitors a little bit earlier. We were able to prove that the work... I mean, you know, a multi-million dollar marketing budget is always going to help, but I think they showed how you can localize in every market through collaborations, partnerships, and reinventing. It was a masterclass in reinventing.
So what we did is we piggybacked off that to make sure that Tracksuit was culturally relevant and part of those conversations. We created an entire campaign that ran across owned, earned, and paid media. We were in every media publication. They asked us for commentary on Barbie and the brand. We threw private screenings of events for our customers to see Barbie. We turned the dashboard pink. We just went all in and it was incredible. I had a post; I think it went viral. It had over 9,000 reshares and more than a million views. And yeah, it was just like timing and seeing cross-functionally, across sales, marketing, product, a group of people come together and work so beautifully to create this moment of joy and this... yeah, very phenomenal marketing campaign that we just piggybacked off the back of and made us synonymous with brands. So it was beautiful.
Amanda Gordon: That's amazing. I did not know about that. And now I'm going to go see if I can find a screenshot of the pink dashboard.
Mikayla Hopkins: Oh, it was so fun, and it was an Easter egg, so they had to type in "Barbie" once they got into the dashboard, and then it was just the hot pink screen everywhere. It was so much fun. It was, it was brilliant.
Amanda Gordon: But to just sort of take people behind the scenes a little bit of a campaign like that, where you are working with product and, you know, PR, all of that, can you kind of talk me through how you led that campaign from a leadership perspective? How do you bring people together to get the brand and get it out into the world?
Mikayla Hopkins: Absolutely. It starts with first knowing I cannot do that all by myself.. So it started with the vision of, we want to become synonymous with the word "brand." How do we do that by becoming culturally relevant and part of that conversation? We had to move really fast the moment we started seeing steam come behind the Barbie movie and the marketing campaign.
Very operationally and tactically, it's about calling in the leads of each function, explaining, "We've got an opportunity here. Do I have your buy-in?" Explaining what could be and setting the real vision for what could happen here, and then allowing people to take ownership. It wasn't my idea to turn the Tracksuit dashboard pink. It was the product function, right? It wasn't my idea to create all of these incredible PR data-led stories. It was my content and comms teams. As a leader, my job wasn’t to control the execution — it was to set a bold vision, create a space for collaboration, and clear the path so the team could move fast and create something magical.
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