naked sports innovations is a vashon island, washington company that made the first running waist band, and lindsay dakota designed it in 2014 while running in the mountains above malibu. he did not sketch it first. he saw the finished object complete in his head, the same way he can walk into an empty room and see every surface of it furnished. the company he built with his brother rick incorporated on vashon in 2016 and now has distribution in more than 35 countries. after a decade the principles hold firm: no zippers, no stacked seams, no waterproof pockets, nothing on the product that does not need to be there. the product is named for what it is trying to add to your run, which is nothing at all.
running from feel
to understand the gear you have to understand how dakota runs. no music. no watch. no splits. he goes out and looks at the scenery.
i run from feel and from looking at the beautiful scenery. it has nothing to do with performance per se, but all along what i’ve created supports performance in the most uninvasive way possible.
— lindsay dakota, naked sports innovations founder
that is the inspiration behind the whole company. he is not building for the athlete optimizing a split. he is building for the person who wants to stop thinking about their equipment. but in this case, those turn out to be the same product.
the thing he saw in his head
it started in the malibu mountains, sometime in 2014. dakota had been running with a fanny pack, then an armband, and neither worked. he was also running with no phone at all for a while, which in that terrain means being faced with the reality of rattlesnakes and no way to call anyone, and that sharpened the design from carry less into carry less but carry smart.
i already saw the physical thing in my head. i can design a room and see every single piece of all four walls, ceiling and floor.
lindsay dakota. the room, and everything in it, before it exists.
lindsay took it to a seamstress in downtown los angeles, someone he already knew from sample work on earlier projects. he sourced his own materials from seattle fabrics inc, the local shop supplying outdoor & recreational fabrics since 1976, and the la garment district, grosgrain ribbon, mesh, fold-over trims, cut the pieces himself, and brought them to her in batches of ten or twenty with rough flat sketches. she sewed them. he ran in them. then he changed something and did it again. six sizes, roughly xs to xl. four pockets, one front, one back, two on the sides.
he wore the prototypes under his shirt at his running club and would flip it up to show people. nobody had seen anything like it, so mostly they were confused.
so he sent one to rick, his brother, a stubborn age-group ironman with no talent for flattery. rick’s verdict came back unfiltered: this really works.
normally i’m working in a vacuum, only hearing the crazy thoughts in my head.
rick helped fund the first hundred units and came in as an equal partner. he also named it. naked.
the original. three yellow tabs and the only product that gets to keep the name.
it’s naked
the name is the best and worst thing about the brand. it is exactly right, and it has caused a decade of trademark trouble, bad enough in china and germany that archaic filing law means they are still working to enter the market.
it’s a great name and it’s perfect for the brand. it has caused some lasting problems.
it also took dakota years to realize the name was the story. this is the part most founders would not admit. he came out of ralph lauren, where the job was building entire lifestyle worlds around a garment. who is this person, what are they wearing, what are they sitting on, what does their house look like. he tried to do that here. he chased the instagram version of a brand narrative and it kept not fitting, because there was no elaborate world to build. there was a strip of mesh that you are supposed to forget you are wearing.
the more i talked about it, the more i got it. it’s naked. it’s like wearing nothing at all. that’s the brand story.
he is still a little suspicious of how much of the industry now runs on narrative rather than product. his question is whether we are all standing around admiring the emperor’s new clothes.
hong kong
the launch was a wix site, a short film he and rick made themselves, and dakota as the model, shot by a friend from his running club. no budget, no agency, direct to consumer from day one because as he puts it, websites are great, it is a hundred percent markup.
the whole marketing department, 2015.
a retailer in hong kong found the product on its own. the thread almost certainly runs through john, a chinese-australian ultrarunner who co-owned the store, fell hard for the band, and started winning hundred milers around hong kong wearing it. he went on to found t8. the store wanted to distribute across asia, and then other hong kong shops started ordering too, and naked quietly outgrew the arrangement that had made it.
then, late 2015, more designers in the space started placing orders. shipping naked belts to the headquarters of some of the biggest trail brands in the world felt like he was making an impact.
those little moments where you start to feel like, oh yeah, maybe we’re becoming something.
the whole thing has been bootstrapped. what outside money there has been came from extended family on his wife’s side, and there has never been much of it. sales go straight back into the brand. the factory is in central america, fair labor trade certified, and the largest distributors in spain, china, and australia receive direct rather than routing through the island. warehouse and offices sit in separate buildings on vashon. dakota treats stock on a shelf as a liability, not an asset, and watches it accordingly.
stock on a shelf is a liability. this is the version dakota likes, the kind that is already moving.
all of it is exciting but none of it has produced the feeling of having arrived.
i feel like a dog chasing its tail. it’s this fear that just keeps driving you to succeed.
the vest that came apart at utmb
every rule dakota follows traces back to a failure he watched happen.
he was at utmb, standing with jean-luc diard, who co-founded hoka and occasionally wears naked products. a runner came through gunning for second place with his vest falling apart on him. the safety check nearly pulled him from the race. not because he was hurt, not because he was slow, because his equipment was disintegrating.
the terrain the rules were written for.
fewer zippers. fewer seams. fewer failure points. fewer chances of the thing coming apart at the worst possible moment. that is not a design preference, it is a conclusion.
so: no zippers, because they break. no waterproof pockets, because they trap heat and cause chafing, and because there is already a solution.
use a ziploc. that’s what every professional cyclist does.
there is a key hook in the range for people who want one, but dakota’s position is that the pocket already has it handled. whether you are carrying a hardware store copy of the house key or a bentley fob worth five hundred dollars, it is not coming out. don’t worry about it.
i don’t want to be searching for a zippered pocket in a race. i just want a pocket i can go into without thinking about it.
four pockets to three
about a year in, dakota worked out that four pockets was the wrong answer. in a fixed amount of space, four openings meant four small ones. he dropped the two side pockets, moved the seams, and ended up with three larger ones that could each take a flask.
the hong kong community confirmed that decision. the market there skewed toward smaller women’s sizing, size 1, where the side pockets were nearly useless. so he went from six sizes to twelve.
nobody else wants to touch that. everybody’s still working off the old naked idea of six sizes, xs to xl, four pockets.
read that line again, because it is the most elegant thing he said about being copied. the competition reverse-engineered the version he had already abandoned. he never has to make the accusation. he just points at the pocket count.
a lamborghini crossed with a spider
in 2021 dakota built a trail shoe, and it is the most ambitious thing naked has ever made.
the idea came from ski racing, which he did as an alpine racer long before he ran. he wanted a shoe that locked the foot down the way a boot does, because he kept sliding forward inside wide toe-box shoes and losing his footing on steep technical descents. and he did not look at trail runners for the movement reference. he looked at soccer players, who stop dead and change direction faster than anyone.
so he found the former head of soccer boot design at puma, who had just gone freelance in germany, and hired him. the mood boards were ski boots, race cars, insects crossing rocks, and lamborghinis.
we started building this case for a cross section between a lamborghini and a spider.
what came out was laceless, because why use laces when you don’t have to. sewn-in insole with injected tpu so the foot cannot slide forward, which is also how you stop losing toenails. cat tongue material in the heel pocket to prevent lift. a split carbon plate, bulk under the big toe for climbing, split to let the foot flex and distribute load. translucent uppers to broadcast lightweight. a vibram light base outsole with traction lugs, among the first to combine the two. every box shipped with a shoehorn, and the box itself won awards.
the shoe won a red dot and three major footwear awards. the technicians in vibram’s lab told him it was a damn good shoe and that he was simply too far ahead of his time.
it found a smaller audience than it deserved. the fit was specific, unisex and the size curve was roughly six to eleven, which is a narrow window in a category where people are loyal to the shoe they already know. and there was a simpler obstacle underneath all of it: not many people expected a band company to make a shoe, so plenty of them never tried it. jean-luc diard told him at the time that a first shoe should probably be more democratic, that he would sell more that way.
dakota is still paying the project off. he expects to be until next year. but ask him whether it was a mistake and you get something more useful than yes or no. he is proud of the shoe. he thinks it is revolutionary, and he will tell you so without hedging. what he would change is not the shoe, it is the direction.
i had to stick with what we do. but looking back, the best way to grow is to pick the low-hanging fruit, which is the markets you’re not in.
naked still does not sell in france, switzerland, or italy. one store in the entire uk. his own take now is that there is tremendous growth available without spending another dollar on development, and that reaching for a new category instead of a new market is a version of ferrari building an electric car. it might be an excellent car but it is not the reason anyone walks in.
the t/r. no laces, a split carbon plate, and a shoehorn in every box.
the bar for apparel
what is next is deliberate and slow. eighteen months of co-design with hydrapak has produced flasks and reservoirs built flat and narrow for the band specifically, including a one liter reservoir made for it. the high capacity band takes up to six 500ml flasks. there is new mesh in the pipeline that dakota calls spectacular, waiting on existing factory stock to clear before it can go anywhere. the rhythm now is updates and releases each spring, spring 2027 included.
the branding is going through its own subtraction. the naked name is coming off most products, and the yellow tab is becoming the logo, the way levi’s has a red tab and prada sport has a red stripe. the original band keeps its three tabs and gains a legacy label inside, because the original band earned the name.
apparel is the obvious move and he is in no rush to bring something to market. he thinks the running apparel assortment has never been more crowded, mostly with commodity blanks and standard perforated singlets, and he is not interested in adding to the pile.
i won’t do apparel unless it’s at least as good as our bands.
so the first piece is not even a running piece. it is a sleeveless cycling base layer with a built-in reservoir pocket, shipping bundled with the reservoir, paired with the riding band as the start of a cycling and mountain bike line. a rep in colorado is putting it in front of stores now. a full apparel launch is a 2027 idea with no date on it.
who gets seen
one thing dakota does not advertise: naked supports native women running, the organization verna volker founded in 2018 to build visibility and community for indigenous women in the sport. naked helps with travel costs and gear. there is a land acknowledgment on the website and at the bottom of every email the company sends, and it is not there as decoration. dakota grew up in vancouver around indigenous communities and describes the connection as personal rather than positional.
verna volker, founder of native women running.
it is consistent with everything else about how he operates. no announcement, no campaign, no hashtag. the support exists whether or not anyone writes about it, which is the only real test of whether a brand means it.
our take
the easy version of this story is that restraint wins. the truer version is that dakota’s restraint has been tested and it has cost him something. he built a shoe that won major awards and found a smaller audience than it deserved, and he will walk you through what he would do differently without ever pretending he is sorry he made it. that combination is rarer than a good product. anyone can hold a line when it is working. we are testing the hc band through the fall and we will report back honestly. you can find the full range at naked sports innovations. but the reason naked is worth your attention is not only the band, it is that a man who can see a finished object before it exists looked at running, a sport drowning in features, and decided the opportunity was in what you leave out.