RUNNING IS A TEAM SPORT

by Andre Pinard

I call myself a social engineer: someone who brings people together to create positive outcomes and common objectives. It’s something I’ve done my whole life, combining passion with purpose.

I spent 10 years at Adidas as director of community, mindset and culture – a title I created a er becoming disenchanted with fashion advertising and craving a deeper sense of purpose. At the time, the word “community” wasn’t built into our vocabulary the way it is today. It’s crucial to the way we function and can be built through various mediums – running clubs being one.

Running has always been special to me for the powerful ways in which it promotes collectivity. I’m a child of immigrants from Haiti and was raised in Princeton, New Jersey. As a diaspora, the idea of community has been a consistent factor in my life. I moved to New York in 1994, which has the second largest population of Haitians outside of Haiti. New York has so much energy; there’s fashion, music, art, film – all of these creative things that are rooted in a blended immigrant culture.

I wanted to combine this lens and my background in sociology (I graduated with a PhD from e New School) with my knowledge of consumer insights (from years of working in advertising and marketing at global companies) to make space for something that centered on community. at led to the birth of the community strategy at Adidas North America and then the Adidas Runners: a global running community in multiple cities, including New York and London.

The running landscape is full, that’s no secret. ere are hundreds of running groups in New York alone, so it was about finding a point of di erentiation. For me, that meant creating a community that was diverse by design.

A club led by women and championed by people of colour. When you think of the face of running clubs, it’s someone slim, white and maybe with ta oos. But runners come in all shapes and sizes – Run Dem Crew is a great example, founded by Charlie Dark in London. He changed people’s lives through sport and that’s what Adidas Runners was about too.

To build a community, you start by identifying shared values. For a running club, it’s living a healthy lifestyle and realising you don’t have to be an Olympian to change your life through sport. For a concept like Soho House, which has created a global community, that shared value is rooted in creativity.

I joined DUMBO House when it was launching – it reminded me of a club my friends and I started in high school called the Youth Cafe, for kids to meet others with similar creative interests, learn to collaborate and be inspired. Soho House is a modern version of that: a place where like-minded people can come together. e opportunity to be on the Soho House Inclusivity board came in 2020, following the killing of George Floyd and the global rise of Black Lives Ma er. It was a time when a lot of companies wanted to implement what I had been doing in my career: socially engineering passion with purpose. At Adidas, we did this through the New x3 narrative, which consisted of three pillars. “New era” referred to the changing sociopolitical climate (then, it was Obama coming into o ice and the Arab Spring). “New expression” was about fluidity and people wanting to be multidimensional (athletes wanting to be more than athletes; Black and Brown youth wanting to be seen as more than a stereotype). ou don’t need me to tell you that clothes are important. As a member of Soho House, I happily assume that you have graduated to appreciate the so power that wearing great, well-made, deeply cared-for garments can wield. My own journey to discovering the potency of a well-appointed wardrobe, on the other hand, was not even close to complete until recently. was seated next to the lead singer of an achingly cool Canadian dance band and I distinctly remember feeling intoxicated by the low-fi glamour of the scene. I also remember what I wore that night: a pink pinstripe shirt, undone to the base of my sternum, some over-washed skinny jeans from ASOS and a pair of beaten-up brogues unearthed at a charity shop in Leeds, from where I had recently departed university. made a promise to myself there and then: for any event I was invited to in the future, would aim to look at least as considered as the waiters did that night at Shoreditch House.

Finally, “new expectations” represented the higher expectations young people had for themselves and the institutions that they were associated with.

I approach my work at Soho House with the same model. As a man of colour and an immigrant, every position take includes being a gate-opener. I want to bring in young creatives of colour to have a two-way exchange in this ecosystem. I use my social engineering skills to cultivate diversity of thought and experience because, ultimately, diversity is essential in generating innovation – whether that’s changing your life through sport or creating a community of culture and creativity.

Before joining Soho House as Editorial Director in 2022, I spent the best part of a decade and a half working as a journalist and editor at various fashion glossies. One of the earlier events I was invited to a end during the inaugural months of an internship at Wallpaper* magazine was a small soiree to celebrate the opening of the new bedrooms at Shoreditch House, our much-loved east London club.

Our founder Nick Jones hosted the dinner, the food was served family style (totally innovative, back then), House cocktails were flowing and the guest list consisted of a host of chic people swathed in expensive-looking lashings of navy blue, midnight and black.

If had entered the dinner feeling trepidation about my ou it, le inspired to improve. It wasn’t the other guests that had made me feel unconvinced by what I’d been wearing, but rather the immaculately put-together waiting sta in their understated matching uniforms.

Moving as one, they resembled a sea of perfectly turned-out cabin boys – if Tyler Brûlé did cabin boys – slipping smartly around the reclaimed wooden floors of the club like marbles on ice.

London, UK