Melbourne Marathon spanner

RUNLY NEWSLETTER #129
Thurs Sep 25th 2025

We've had a lot of new faces here recently, so I better re-introduce myself.

I'm Robbie - founder of Runly.

Every week I put this newsletter out to give you an insight into what's happening behind the brand, and give you a no BS look into what goes on.

And of course, if you've been here for a while, you know things rarely go exactly to plan.

That's the nature of the beast.

As the subject line suggests, we've got a little bit of a spanner in our Melbourne Marathon expo plans.

Around a month ago I shared that we got in - huge!

Then a couple of weeks ago I shared that we'd been approved for a BIGGER space - genuinely unreal.

So, a bigger activation space, something we've never contended with.

First of all, at the start of this year I bought a frame that would serve us incredibly well for both Gold Coast Marathon + Sydney Marathon.

It was an L-shaped steel frame that would fit beautifully into a corner booth - which we had locked in for both of those events.

But the problem is this:

First of all, it is incredibly painful to put together, and take down.

I've been lucky enough to have my old man come to both Gold Coast & Sydney to help me set it up, but it's a minimum few hours of painstakingly screwing together steel joints over and over again.

Not to mention the frame weighs well over 100kg.

As good as it has been, and as good as it looks, the effort and struggle to get it up with two people, and then down by myself at bump out is significant.

Secondly, because we don't have the smaller corner booth for Melbourne now, it actually doesn't make sense to use it.

So I went ahead and designed a new option for us.

Instead of one large steel frame, and it's two smaller pop-up frames that we can move around depending on the size of our activation.

But there's a problem.

Of course there is.

The expo map got revealed to us last week 👇

Now, we have been planning on our space thinking that we were on the end, say #14 for example.

But we're actually #11.

What that means is that we have two short openings on either side of the booth and two long walls to contend with - something we have not planned for.

If you're reading this, you might be thinking 'oh yeah, big deal, so what?'

The problem is we don't have the gear for a setup like this.

I honestly just assumed that we would be on the end, because I haven't seen a booth/activation like #11, well, ever.

So we've been scrambling to try and make it work.
Because we've got a lot of things to consider;

Where do our frames now go?
How do we position our displays?
Do we need more staff to cover two entries?
How do we minimise white walls?
Where do we setup our display screen?
Do we have enough room now?

And for one more spanner:

We're planning on giving away over 1,000 pairs of limited edition MELBOURNE SOCKS.
I know it's crazy.

We thought hey, this is our home town race. Let's make a splash. Do something cool.
The socks just arrived to the studio yesterday and they're seriously cool:

We're not exactly sure how we're going to do this.

But what we do know is that all you need to do to get a free pair of socks is:

1) Have a race bib or be over 16
2) Scan a code
3) Get a free pair of socks

But my lovely wife who has worked in events her entire career, tells me this could be chaos. We're gonna' need to think through how we do this.

It is just one more spanner to consider in what is a very strange activation space.

FINALLY, before I go.

In case you missed it, we just launched brand new running caps! Get our launch offer - any 3 caps for just $99. Shop here.

Run well,
Robbie