Bronte Campbell had the safe option and walked away from it. Four Olympics, three gold medals, then a stint in corporate strategy at EY with structure, guardrails and none of the uncertainty of elite sport. Plenty of people asked her why she’d leave that to become an ecommerce founder, which is arguably less stable than swimming.
The answer is that she gets excited by impact and how much of it comes down to her. In sport the outcome is on you, and the work you put in on a Monday four years out shows up as a result four years later. Something in that appeals to her, along with what she calls colouring outside the lines. So she co-founded Earthletica, a B Corp making high-performance activewear from recycled and organic fibres without the forever chemicals the industry runs on, and she launched it while still training and competing.
Build Sustainability In, Don’t Retrofit It
The idea started with a realisation. Most of what Bronte was putting on her body every day, activewear, is made from virgin plastic and treated with harsh chemicals. She went looking for alternatives, tried the natural-fibre route, and found bamboo couldn’t stand up to an Olympic-level workout. No one was doing sustainable activewear from the ground up across a whole range. There were one-off styles, like a recycled ocean-plastic shoe, but not a full brand built that way.
The reason matters, and Bronte saw it up close at EY while advising big businesses on exactly this. Retrofitting sustainability onto an existing supply chain is brutally hard, with long timelines just to hit basic reporting targets.
To unscramble that egg is really difficult. I could see it was going to be a really big advantage if we could build these practices from the start and scale from that, as opposed to trying to turn this big unwieldy supply chain around.
Bronte Campbell , Co-Founder and CEO, Earthletica
That’s the strategic bet. Her co-founders Libby Babet and Chris Raleigh had already spent two years looking at manufacturers before Bronte joined. Building clean from day one, rather than fighting an existing model, is the advantage a startup actually has over the incumbents.
Performance First, Sustainability Second
This is the counterintuitive one. Earthletica leads with performance, not the planet. The website says “no saggy leggings” before it mentions sustainability, and that order is deliberate.
Some customers want to click down four levels and understand every material choice. Most don’t. What most people need is for the product to look good, feel good and perform, and if it can’t do those three things, the sustainability piece stops mattering.
My example here is paper straws. Nobody wants plastic straws in the ocean. We equally hate paper straws. If they weren’t regulated, we wouldn’t use them, because the performance is inferior.
Bronte Campbell , Co-Founder and CEO, Earthletica
Her point is that a more sustainable product cannot perform worse than what’s already on the market. It has to match it or beat it. Otherwise you get someone buying once for the story and never coming back, which isn’t sustainable either, financially or environmentally. So the bulk of the work goes into fit and tailoring, so putting the product on feels like pulling on a superhero outfit before a workout. For a lot of their customers, busy professionals and parents, that workout is the only space they get to themselves all day.
Speak the Customer’s Language, Not Your Own
Earthletica didn’t start with the right message. It started with “Earthletica, better for the earth.” That reaches people who care about sustainability, but only so many, and it’s not a big enough market to keep chasing.
The shift came from taking a step closer to what the product actually does for the person wearing it. They test for over a thousand harmful chemicals, so you can sweat against the fabric without absorbing them. That’s about your health, not your values. It took roughly a year of playing with taglines to land on “your cleanest sweat yet,” and it came from talking to customers and using their words.
Most people care about themselves and their health a lot more than they care about what values they’re showing to the world.
Bronte Campbell , Co-Founder and CEO, Earthletica
Nathan shared the same move from the other side. Working with a scientific brand, he had Claude read the website, go deep into the reviews and customer feedback, learn the exact language customers used, then rewrite the headlines that way. Same benefit, same message, but written so customers instantly understood it because it was how they already spoke. Earthletica gets that language directly, with a lot of its feedback coming daily through Libby’s gym.
Don’t Build a Brand That Only Works With Your Face on It
Bronte is a public figure and co-founder Libby Babet has a large following, so the temptation to make the brand about them is real. They’ve resisted it, because brands built around one person carry risk and tend to hit a ceiling.
The brand has to mean something beyond both of them. Bronte brings an association with performance and excellence, Libby brings fitness expertise and credibility, but the job is building Earthletica into something bigger than either. They still do plenty of founder storytelling, and it works. One of their best-performing ads is Libby talking straight to camera, a take she described as a word vomit and didn’t even want to run.
It’s not just my face or Libby’s face or our names out there. It’s us behind the work, doing the work. It’s me in the budget spreadsheet every Monday.
Bronte Campbell , Co-Founder and CEO, Earthletica
The credibility comes from substance behind the storytelling, which matters in an era where any influencer can slap their name on a product. Bronte’s clear that a lot of athletes take an ambassador cut and lend their face, and that’s a fine choice, but it’s not what Earthletica is. The story has to explain why the business exists, not just who’s standing in front of it.
Bring an Athlete’s Discipline, and an Athlete’s Recovery
The through-line from swimming is discipline, and Bronte draws it sharply. People think you have to feel motivated to act. She believes you have to act to feel motivated. Discipline is a noun, something you build and choose, not something that happens to you. Build the right structure and you keep turning up to it regardless of how you feel.
She frames the maths in a way only an Olympian would. There are two million minutes in a four-year cycle, and you compete for one of them. Building a brand can feel the same, putting the work into the two million to convert the one, so you spend that time and energy in the right places.
The part founders skip is the other half. Recovery is as important in business as it is in sport, and Bronte is wary of hustle culture that isn’t paired with it. She schedules recovery as deliberately as she schedules the hard pushes, because she can’t lead well or think creatively when she’s running on empty. Her favourite addition this year is a weekly block of unstructured CEO time, no to-do list, sketchpad beside her, spent stepping back from the detail to look at the bigger picture and let thoughts surface.
The Takeaway
Bronte Campbell built Earthletica on a rule she swam by: raise the bar, then raise it again. The lesson underneath the whole conversation is that sustainability only works if the product wins first. She leads with “no saggy leggings” before she mentions recycled fibres, because a clean product nobody wants to wear is just landfill with a better story. Build the supply chain clean from day one instead of retrofitting it, speak the customer’s language instead of your own, and treat discipline as something you build rather than something you feel. Two million minutes of training taught her that, and it’s the same maths behind a brand.
The industry runs on virgin plastic because it’s easier. So what’s the version of “easier” you’re accepting in your own business, and what would it take to build it clean from the start?
Frequently Asked Questions
Is sustainable activewear actually a viable business? Yes, though it’s more difficult. The challenge isn’t that sustainable fabric doesn’t exist, it’s finding suppliers and manufacturers who can produce it at premium quality, especially at small order volumes. The cost premium is real but not so large that it destroys margins or has to be passed on to customers in a big way. Earthletica prices its tights at $139, within about 10% of comparable premium ranges.
How do you find manufacturers for sustainable products? Through relationships and the right introductions rather than cold outreach. Small brands with tiny minimum order quantities often can’t get a supplier to open their email. Earthletica’s co-founder made connections through an MBA network and by seeking out people leading the way in sustainability. Because many of these makers have spent their careers trying to make fabric more sustainable, an aligned brand gets a yes, often without heavy contracts.
Why does Earthletica lead with performance instead of sustainability? Because most customers need the product to look good, feel good and perform before anything else, and if it fails on those, the sustainability story becomes irrelevant. A sustainable product that performs worse gets bought once for the story and never repurchased, which fails both commercially and environmentally. Leading with “no saggy leggings” and “your cleanest sweat yet” ties the benefit to the customer’s own body.
Does being a well-known athlete make raising money easier? It’s more complicated than a simple yes. Earthletica went through the Techstars Tech Central Sydney accelerator, then raised over $1.1 million through equity crowdfunding on Birchal from 429 investors. Bronte deliberately chose a community-backed path over a quiet celebrity cheque, and treats each raise as proof that people want the business to exist, which then becomes the pressure to deliver.
Based on Episode #648 of the Add To Cart podcast with Bronte Campbell, Co-Founder and CEO of Earthletica. Join the Add To Cart community for free
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