- Agency: Upstatement
- Client: Marathon Sports
- Category: Logo Design — Sports
- Location: New York City, New York, United States
- Project Brief: Create a sports logo identity that reflects Marathon Sports’ role in running culture, community engagement, and modern athletic retail.
A sports logo design for a running retailer has to clear two hurdles. It has to read at race-bib scale, and it has to mean something to people who actually run.
Upstatement's mark for Marathon Sports answers both. The M is a digital race clock, with the hour and minute dots forming the letter's pillars.
A gestural figure breaking the finish-line tape sits between those pillars, a callback to the 1975 original mark. That detail carries 50 years of history without leaning on nostalgia.
Yellow on black runs the whole identity at full saturation. A heavy condensed sans handles the MARATHON SPORTS wordmark, with "Running since 1975, New England" set tight beneath in the same yellow.
Safety pins act as the system's second signature graphic. Runners know the pin as what holds a race bib in place, and Upstatement leans on its punk and DIY associations to push the brand past athletic-retail conventions.
On the kraft shopping bag, the logo prints in solid black and pairs with three oversized safety pins on the opposite face. The treatment reads as merch rather than retail packaging.
