How do you make tech that’s truly wearable? For Whoop, whose core product is a performance and recovery trackings band, the answer is to make it invisible.
“Whoop as a product needs to be worn continuously, and if you’re wearing something on your body continuously, it starts to blend into your fashion, identity, and status,” says Whoop CEO Will Ahmed. “So we wanted to push the boundaries of what that could feel like.”
This ambition led to Whoop’s first foray into fashion. After appointing A-Cold-Wall founder Samuel Ross as its global creative director in January, Whoop collaborated with his design studio SR_A on a collectsion named Project Terrain. The first drop, out on March 12, comprises a new SR_A-branded Strata Whoop band, a men’s undershirt, technical shorts, and a technical shell running jacket, as well as a women’s performance bra, shorts base layer, and a technical shell running jacket. Users can choose between wearing their sensor on their wrist via the Whoop band, or they can remove the sensor and place it in special pockets embedded into the clothing. “It’s an opportunity for Whoop to live underneath this apparel and in many ways, disappear across the body,” he says.
While the consensus among most of the wearable health tracker market is that the placement of a device on the body matters, with optimal wrist placement associated with maintaining better contact with the skin and therefore the more accurate measuring of things like heart rate, Ahmed says that wearing Whoop’s sensor on other parts of the body doesn’t compromise the accuracy of its data collectsion.
As thousands of health tracker watches, rings, and bracelets sit gathering dust in consumers’ drawers, it’s a bold move into yet more product optionality, based on the paradoxical premise that more fashion-conscious consumers may sometimes not want to be seen wearing a Whoop.
“We like balancing this idea of Whoop being a product that you show off and it’s cool and vibrant, with the idea that Whoop is a product that can disappear, and you’ve got other apparel that’s doing the talking for you,” Ahmed says. The partnership with Ross will see limited-edition drops over the next two years, all incorporating its health trackings sensors within products.
It’s an idea that the company has been plotting since 2021, when it first developed its Any-Wear sensor, which can be removed from the wrist device and slid into special pods within various apparel. Since then, both the wellness and performancewear industries have grown exponentially. As has our collectsive obsession with health trackings data, fueled by the proliferation of capabilities that emerged after the breakthrough of generative AI. Where Whoop launched its first band — which provided 24-7 heart rate, sleep, strain, and recovery trackings — to elite athletes only, it broadened to selling to the general consumer market in 2018. Since then, Ahmed says, “extraordinary growth” subscriptions have grown twenty-fold since 2020, accelerating over the last two years, when its member base has grown 75% year-on-year. Whoop is a private company and does not publicly share revenue figures, but Ahmed says the business “at large” grew over 100% last year.
Unlike Oura, whose CEO recently told Vogue Business its growth is being driven by women and Gen Zs, Whoop’s growth is not specific to any one demographic, Ahmed adds. The company is seeing “record numbers” of Gen Zs and teenagers joining, wanting to understand their sleep and mental health, while the release of its first ECG (electrocardiogram) and blood pressure monitoring features, as well as its first medical grade device, the Whoop MG, last year, have seen a large number of older consumers join Whoop to monitor their blood pressure.
“I think it reflects the fact that the technology and product offerings keep getting better, and globally, health and longevity has never been more important,” Ahmed says. “People really want to understand their bodies and are realizing that they can take back control of their health by measuring all this information about themselves. It feels like there’s huge tailwinds in the market.”
SR_A founder Ross was among that growing user base, having started wearing the Whoop band five years ago. After beginning their conversations around Whoop’s design and features back then, Ahmed and Ross felt that in 2026, the wearables market is at an inflection point where consumers are receptive to a merging of this data-heavy tech with bolder design.
“I think we all feel that there’s a revolution happening in the wearables space, and perhaps it hasn’t been as exciting as it is now since the 2000s,” Ross says. “I’m fascinated by this sense of self-development, where some particular faculties of luxury have to be earned more, so grouping tools to help enhance that process was quite a natural fusing of interests. It’s an intersection of design, weaving, technology, and luxury fashion, and these products are an extension of how we live. We’re simply broadening their form and really answering the needs we see within the market at this point with people and their health.”
Wearable health trackers are divided into two main groups: wristworn devices and smart rings. The main challenge the crowded sector faces is form — while devices have gradually gotten smaller since the first smartwatches and rings were released a decade ago, they’re by no means discreet. Wearing one is a statement that seems to carry equal amounts of positive or negative weight, depending on one’s social and style circles. When most of Whoop’s competitors are quizzed on how they’re tackling the challenge of designing a device with good enough aesthetics to be more universally accepted, they say they’re focusing on different colorways and making their devices smaller and smaller over time.
So far, Whoop is the first wearables brand to launch clothing, because it doesn’t want to be confined to a band that many consumers don’t want to wear. The next challenge is designing garments consumers do want to wear — something Ahmed is well aware of — which is the motivation behind the collaboration with Ross and SR_A.
“I think it’s easy to make the mistake of saying, ‘Oh, because we’ve developed this cool technology, everyone’s going to want to wear our boxers or our shorts.’ But the reality is, those need to stand alone as great pieces of apparel, and you’re competing with the best apparel brands in the world when you put out a pair of shorts,” Ahmed says. “So what we’ve done with Samuel is to say, ‘We want this to be exciting and beautiful in its own right.’ And yes, of course, but in addition to that, you can now take your Whoop and wear it around your waist. We think this has to perform at the highest level from both a design and technology standpoint.”
Ross’s first collectsion for the Project Terrain collaboration features recognizable design codes for those familiar with A-Cold-Wall, as well as his brand’s collaborations with luxury and performancewear players like Nike, Diesel, and Oakley. Streetwear and performancewear form equal inspiration, with welding throughout technical nylon garments, laser perforation for breathability, and lightweight outerwear pieces with retractable hoods, which Ross says are geared toward customers who want to wear the pieces on their trail runs, just as much as city dwellers on their coffee runs.
“In terms of construction, there’s a sense of functionality at the collectsion’s core,” Ross says. “We’re also designing a system that can be worn and integrated into the wearer’s wardrobe rather than trying to overpronounce itself. I think that speaks to the sensibility of Whoop’s existing community. They already have a really tight design sensibility. They know exactly what they want things to look like, and we’re looking to broaden that offer in the sportswear category. It’s a collectsion that’s designed to be truly used.”
Ahmed indicates that form factors could get even more discreet — or invisible — in the future. “In the case of a specific sport [like basketball, boxing, or jiu-jitsu], you may not be able to wear something on your wrist,” he says. “But separately, it’s possible that you’re going to a function or an occasion where you’ve got other things on your wrists so you don’t want to wear a Whoop, and you want to be able to still have all this data. That’s where women’s underwear, for example, might allow for a black tie event where she otherwise won’t be wearing her Whoop, and that’s OK too. So it’s just creating these different use cases for our members where they can get 24-7 data that helps them understand their health, alongside a fashion environment that’s flexible.”
Ahmed is cognizant that tech has historically struggled to gain design stripes, despite million-dollar fashion collabs, and is banking on the ability to hide Whoop as a way around this tension. “This execution is intended to be design-first, or at least a beautiful marriage of design and technology,” he says. “But we’ve also tried to design it so you might not even know the technology is there. It’s in many ways taking the tech out of the tech and making it feel like something that should be worn in everyday wear.”
While Ahmed teases this move into even more discreet wearables, Ross is convinced that there’s a cohort of fashion-conscious consumers who are as equally drawn to Whoop’s band as they are to his streetwear designs as status symbols. When it comes to future designs, he plans to play into both.
“We know that the luxury sportswear consumer who is buying from A-Cold-Wall or Moncler or Stone Island completely understands the stature that comes with it,” Ross says. “If you walk past any aesthetic coffee shop in any key city, you will see a Whoop 5.0 super knit band on our audience. It’s almost become this parallel to a sense of soft power and being in the know. So we feel deeply confident with the positioning of the collectsion and the placement of the Whoop sensors, in terms of what that conveys outside of the product.”
Ross and Ahmed say they’ve figured out Project Terrain’s product roadmap for the commercial line right into 2027. Beyond that, Ross says they’re also working on a second tier “concept line”, which could involve new functions applied to Whoop’s hardware and garments, as well as new garment categories. “You’ll see new tooling, hardware, patents, material developments, and more experimental placements of the sensor come into play, and new use cases develop that are slightly more conceptual,” Ross says. “Our intent with that line is to really think about the next three to five years of what can happen within the space between wearable technology and functional garments. You’ll see those slightly more esoteric aspects at play, but it won’t cannibalize what look to do in terms of ready-to-wear power in the next few years. We have a pretty clear intent of where we’ll go, which will loosely follow a seasonal calendar.”
Public installations, as well as runway moments and design week activations, will all be key pillars of Project Terrain’s world-building strategy as the collaboration evolves, says Ross. “It’s all about deeply engaging with our audience through those moments. And the drop model means that those in the know — fans of luxury, technical sportswear — have a chance to experience the product first,” he adds. “It all has to be cohesive, and we’ve been quite careful about who we’ve invited into that world for the first chapter.”
