aerin wang.
Passa Run Club logo, the wordmark between two quotation marks above a pair of running shoes
The idea
in four lines
Category entry point
It's Tuesday afternoon and you realize you have nothing on tonight.
Mental availability
Be the club people picture at that moment, before they've thought about running at all.
Distinctive asset
Two quotation marks, moving.
Physical availability
Stickers on poles, a flag at the crossing, posters up the week before.

The prompts

As you probably already know, I use Clova! Since it's an agent, I just chat with it and tell it what to fix, and each image is like 10 back and forths to get to the final one. So what's below isn't exactly what I typed, it's basically my chat history squished into one prompt per image. Feel free to use whatever generator you want, but I personally use Clova!

A red Passa Run Club feather flag on a city street with runners crossing behind it

The flag

A candid vertical photograph of a group run in a European city. In the foreground, a tall narrow feather flag mounted to a traffic pole, deep terracotta red canvas with a black edge binding, printed in cream with a fat bubble script wordmark reading PASSA sitting between two large quotation marks, a pair of simple line drawn running shoes beneath it, and RUN CLUB in rounded caps below that, with a small web address at the very bottom. Behind the flag, runners cross a zebra crossing in a loose pack, a crowd watching from behind barriers, pale stone buildings and green trees down the street. Flat overcast daylight, shot on a phone, real motion in the runners, slightly imperfect framing.

A cardboard box of natural canvas Passa tote bags

The totes

An overhead photograph looking down into an open cardboard box packed with folded natural cotton tote bags. The bag on top faces up, printed in terracotta red with the line Conversation in motion. set across two lines in a classic serif, and beneath it a small bubble script PASSA logo between two quotation marks, with a pair of line drawn running shoes and RUN CLUB underneath. Concrete floor, a metal railing and a dark doorway at the edge of the frame. Cool indoor daylight, shot on a phone, real creases and shadow in the canvas, nothing styled.

A Passa poster with bubble outline type over a blurred photo of runners at dusk

The poster

A vertical poster built from a candid photograph of runners crossing a city street at dusk, shot from the side with real motion blur so faces are mostly out of frame, everyone in cream and black t shirts with a small terracotta chest print. Street lamps and car tail lights behind them, trees against a deep blue evening sky. Over the photograph, the words CONVERSATION IN MOTION are set in a fat rounded outline typeface in bright red, arched across the top and curving along the bottom, with small quotation flicks beside each word. In cream caps near the base, ALL PACES. TALK THE WHOLE WAY. Grainy, high contrast, flash photography feel.

The strategy

How the club got built, in the order it actually happened, including the parts I threw away.

Where it started

I spent a while trying to make it different

My first instinct was to find the thing that made Passa unlike every other run club, and I went pretty far down that road. A dinner club you run to, where I'd book the table first and build the route backward. Never running loops, because why do three miles just to end up where you started. A rule that you can't run the first mile beside the person you came with.

They all had the same problem. Every one of them was a mechanic. I'd have to explain it every time, and then I'd have to actually run the club that way forever.

So I dropped all of it. Nobody picks a run club off a list of features. People go to the one they can picture when it's a Tuesday afternoon and they've got a free evening, which made the whole job about being the easiest club to picture.

The name

Passeggiata was never really about the walking

The name comes from passeggiata, the Italian evening stroll through the center of town. People get dressed, go out, walk slowly, see who's around, stop and talk. Nobody is doing it for the exercise.

Passa keeps that whole idea inside a word short enough to type in a comment, and it sounds like somewhere you'd go on a Thursday.

The mark

Two quotation marks, moving

The logo holds the wordmark between two quotation marks, with a pair of running shoes underneath. Quotation marks mean somebody is talking. Two of them means two people. Put them around a name in motion and the whole club is in one image.

They also work on their own. The quote marks by themselves go on a chest print, a sticker, a flag, a coffee sleeve, and anyone who has been on a run already knows what they mean.

The color

Why red

Red felt like the opposite of a sports brand to me. It's a flag color, a poster color, the color of a bar sign at night. Warm and a little loud, and it feels like an evening thing.

It also does something useful once there are actually people there. A run club is forty people in whatever they already owned, so the color ends up being the only thing tying them together. Red on a shirt, a flag at the corner, a sticker someone stuck on a pole, and a group jogging through traffic suddenly reads as one club.

The rule

Go at a pace where you can still talk

Fast is fine. Slow is fine. The moment you're too winded to hold a conversation, you've left the thing everyone came for.

It also makes the club easy to walk into, because you never have to know your mile time to work out whether you belong there.

All paces. Talk the whole way.

The lesson

Build around the reason people actually show up

Once I quit trying to make the run itself interesting and built around why people actually turn up, the rest came fast. The name, the logo, the one rule and the posters all came out of the same idea, and none of it needs a mile time to make sense.

Passeggiata was never really about the walking. Passa was never really about the running.

“Conversation in motion.”For the merch and anywhere the logo sits alone
“Talk the whole way.”For the posters, where the club says what it expects of you
A Passa sticker of two quotation marks

Now that's the fake brand for the week!

Passa isn't real.
Yours is.

I build this exact thing for real brands. The positioning, the name, the logo, and the whole world it lives in.

Tell me about your brand