☕ Wristful thinking
The marketing powering Whoop’s next act.
Marketing Brew <[email protected]>
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Morning Brew promotes a story about Whoop, a wearable fitness-tracking brand, and its new CMO, DJ van Hameren, who joined after a long tenure at Nike. The brand is broadening its marketing strategy to diversify its user base and target women users. Whoop is highlighting the connection between sport, health, and daily life.
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553 words · about 2 min to read
September 03, 2026
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Today is Thursday. Soon you’ll be able to know once and for all whether that influencer you follow on Instagram is real: Meta announced this week that it will place an “AI-generated profile” label on certain accounts. Count your days, Mia Zelu.
In today’s edition:
Brace(let) for it ⌚
Mission critical 🎮
Cool it 🛒
—Jasmine Sheena, Alyssa Meyers, Layla Ilchi
BRAND STRATEGY
Whoop, there it is
When wearable fitness-tracking brand Whoop hired its new CMO in July, it marked a new chapter for both brand and executive.
Whoop was fresh off a $575 million Series G funding round that valued the brand at $10.1 billion, positioning it to potentially go public amid a surge in the global wearables market. DJ van Hameren, who spent more than three decades at Nike before exiting two years ago, was looking for his next act.
“I have always had a growth mindset and love to figure out how we tell stories, we build brands, and we grow businesses,” van Hameren told us. “I felt there was a part of me that really was curious about a number of areas, specifically around sports.” After a conversation with Whoop founder and CEO Will Ahmed and other team members, “it was really, really clear within a matter of minutes or hours that this would be a phenomenal next chapter,” he added.
Van Hameren was the first of many new executive appointments, and the brand’s leadership overhaul comes amid a broadening of its marketing strategy that seeks to diversify its user base and highlight how sport and health connect to daily life, van Hameren told Marketing Brew.
Whoop has traditionally been more associated with an “athletic male American base,” per the Wall Street Journal; it’s now focusing on women users. And it’s looking to target both athletes and everyday consumers through methods including partnerships with major fitness competitors and athletes (some of whom are the company’s investors) as well as through owned media, like its weekly Whoop Podcast.
Whoop, which in July announced it had more than 3 million members worldwide, is looking to grow amid more intense competition in the wearables space. Oura, a smart ring that tracks health metrics and is targeting an IPO; the overall wearable technology market was estimated to be $103.1 billion as of 2026, according to Grand View Research, and is projected to increase to $229.9 billion by 2033.
“People’s health is every day,” van Hameren said. “One of the greatest challenges or opportunities we have as a marketing team is to find those key moments…and at the same time, find ways to be relevant to members every second or every minute of the day without that becoming an over-sensory load of messages, ” he said.
Continue reading here.—JS
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