GLISSADE
Glissade was Sarrosi's sporting alter ego. Same obsession with quality, completely different energy: gritty, performance-led, built for the runners, cyclists and tennis players who train like they mean it.
Defining minimalism as a tool, not just a trend, in modern branding:
Sarrosi had proven something important. Women didn't just want anti-chafe they wanted anti-chafe that felt like a brand worth owning. Beautiful, natural, something you were proud to pull out of your bag. The lifestyle space was ours. But the more we looked at who was buying Sarrosi, the more we kept seeing the same thing. Runners. Cyclists. Tennis players. Women and men who trained hard, moved fast and needed protection that could genuinely keep up. The sport category for anti-chafe was a wasteland. Functional to the point of being aggressive. Nothing that spoke to people who cared about performance and aesthetics in equal measure. Sarrosi's sporting alter ego was sitting right there, waiting to be built. So we built it.
We thought sport meant masculine. The sales told us otherwise. We moved fast.
Our first instinct with Glissade was to go more masculine. Sport. Performance. Grit. The kind of visual language you see across the category: dark, aggressive, all caps, built for men. We launched with that direction and we watched what happened. And what happened was that it didn't land the way we expected. So we pivoted. Fast. More Nike than masculine. Hits of neon. Energy without aggression. A brand world that felt high performance but spoke to women as well as men and immediately felt more right. More exciting. More ownable. What made that pivot possible was the way we'd designed the packaging from the start. Amazon had taught us that you need to be able to move quickly to test messaging, change imagery, read what the data is telling you and act on it without a six-month agency process. We could update the brand world, refresh the visual direction and relaunch within weeks. That speed is a superpower. Most big brands can't do it. We built Glissade specifically so we could.
Same obsession. Completely different energy. And a lesson in knowing when to move.
Glissade was Sarrosi stripped back and pushed forward. Same natural, vegan, cruelty-free DNA: shea butter, citrus oil, Vitamin E but with a completely different attitude. Grittier. More focused. Built for the runners, cyclists and tennis players who train like they mean it and expect everything they use to keep up. Together Sarrosi and Glissade covered the full spectrum of what women actually need, the gorgeous everyday product and the serious performance one. Two brands, one clear territory, a genuine point of view on a category that had been ignored by everyone who knew what good brand building actually looked like. We built Glissade to six-figure turnover with no outside investment and no safety net. When the funding conversations didn't land and the right acquisition offer didn't materialise, we wound it down on our terms. What we kept was the instinct. Knowing where to go next before anyone else does. Knowing when something isn't working and moving fast enough to fix it. That's not something you learn in a classroom. That's what Glissade gave us.
