The activewear shelf, 13 rivals and what they took

The shelf we measured

Alo Yoga, we analyzed our database of 700,000+ sponsored YouTube videos to map the activewear landscape and find which niches are OVER-SPONSORED and UNDER-SPONSORED.

We measured your 13 closest rivals:

Gymshark, YoungLA, Fabletics, Alphalete, Vuori, Buffbunny, Lululemon, NOBULL, Born Primitive, Rhone, Ten Thousand, Ryderwear and Darc Sport.

510 sponsored creators and 2,466 sponsored videos since March 2021.

Gymshark's own first recorded video is dated 29 March 2021, and the shelf as a whole runs from 18 November 2020 to 6 August 2026, so this covers five and a half years of buying rather than one season of it.

Each of those 510 people made 4.8 paid videos on average, which sounds busy until you look at where the videos went. 469 of the 510 have only ever taken money from one of the 14 brands, 37 have worked with two, 3 with three, and exactly 1 person has worked with four.

Across the 510 activewear creators we have on record, Gymshark alone paid 156 of them.

So nobody is fighting over these names. A small number of brands keep the same people, and everybody else hires a stranger, once.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals, pulled 12 August 2026.

What each one took

One chart per brand below, where the roster is big enough to hold one up. A pyramid needs about 100 creators to fill properly, so three brands get a picture here and the rest get their numbers written out.

Alphalete did the same thing on 29 creators

Alphalete did the same thing on 29 creators. 252 videos, 8.7 bookings each.

The same average as YoungLA on roughly half the roster, and 10 of the 29 were booked ten times or more. Health is 107 deals and lifestyle 101, so it split its money almost evenly between the gym and the day around the gym. That is 10.2 percent of the shelf out of 29 people.

Two brands arriving separately at 8.7 bookings each is the closest thing to a method anybody on this shelf has.

Vuori took sports

Vuori took sports, at nearly five times the average, 55% of everything it bought.

61 creators, 181 videos, and 99 of those videos are sports. Health is a distant second at 30 deals, gaming third at 11, and gaming at 2.8 times the shelf rate is a small bet nobody else here is placing. 54 percent came back, at 3.0 videos each.

Buffbunny took fashion

Buffbunny took fashion, at five times the average, on top of a 61% health mix.

27 creators, 158 videos, 5.9 bookings each, and 8 of those 27 were booked ten times or more. Fashion is 38 deals at 5.2 times the shelf rate, health is 96 and lifestyle 18. It is the smallest roster on the shelf that still gets booked over and over.

Lululemon took lifestyle

Lululemon took lifestyle. 72% of its deals, 3 times the average, and only 33% of its creators were booked again.

46 creators, 92 videos, 2.0 bookings each, and not one person was booked ten times. 31 of the 46 were paid once. Fashion is its only other sizeable corner at 16 deals. It is the one wide programme here that misses both halves of our bar, on roster size and on repeat rate, and the last video we hold for it went up on 29 April 2026.

NOBULL rebooked 85% of its creators

NOBULL rebooked 85% of its creators, the highest rate here for any brand with a real roster. Only Ryderwear and Rhone beat it, on five and ten creators.

26 creators, 90 videos, 3.5 bookings each, and only 4 people were paid once. Sports is 31 deals, lifestyle 23 and entertainment 17, and media at 12 deals is 10.6 times the shelf rate, the sharpest single skew any brand here has. It also started latest, on 3 October 2024, so it is the newest programme on the shelf with the best hold on its people.

The five underneath

Ten Thousand is the narrowest buyer of the fourteen, with 31 of its 35 deals in health, or 89 percent. Two of these have gone quiet, Rhone stopping at 12 March 2025 and Ryderwear at 29 January 2024, while the shelf kept publishing into August 2026.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals, pulled 12 August 2026.

Where that leaves you

You have 4 creators and 8 videos. Gymshark has 761. You are the least sponsored brand in your own category by a wide margin, and half of the little you did buy went to music channels rather than fitness ones.

The full split is 4 videos on music channels, 2 on fashion, 1 on lifestyle and 1 on health, which is 0.3 percent of your own category. The first went up on 5 August 2024 and the last on 18 November 2025, while the shelf carried on to 6 August 2026.

That is the whole finding. This is not a crowded category you are late to. It is a small one, 510 creators in total, where two brands built repeat rosters and everyone else is renting attention.

Over-sponsored

Health is the worst. 100 creators carry 782 deals, 7.8 each, 11 of the 14 brands are there, and it is 32% of every deal in the category. Those creators have run this exact ad eight times.

Lifestyle is next, 23% of all deals across 12 brands.

Sports, 4.3 deals per creator across 11 brands.

In counts, lifestyle is 574 deals spread over 135 creators and sports is 283 over 66. Underneath those three, fitness carries 262 deals over 50 creators at 5.2 each, and fashion is the oddest number on the shelf, 14 creators holding 115 deals between them, 8.2 each, with 8 brands already buying there. Fourteen people are carrying a whole corner of this category on their own.

This is where money quietly goes missing, because the health creator who looks right on paper is usually the one whose audience has already sat through seven versions of the same advert, and in fitness apparel the claims made around the product can pull a brand into a compliance argument it never agreed to. We check both before a name reaches your shortlist, so you find out ahead of the invoice rather than after it. It is the same check behind which creators suit a soft yoga audience and which suit a heavy lifting one.

Under-sponsored

Gaming, 17 creators, 5 brands. Media, 10 creators, 4 brands. Outdoors is held by two brands, Born Primitive with 14 deals and Fabletics with 8.

Born Primitive is most of that story. 14 of its 47 deals are outdoors, which is 33.4 times the shelf rate and the largest skew any brand here has toward anything. Gaming is 54 deals and media is 31, or 2.2 percent and 1.3 percent of everything counted, so these are quiet corners rather than open lanes.

The honest read is that the cheap entries here are small, because the whole category is small. The bigger opening is not a category at all, it is the repeat rate. YoungLA and NOBULL prove you can build this on 30 to 50 creators you keep paying, rather than a list of hundreds.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals by creator category, pulled 12 August 2026. The outdoors line is corrected here. The social post said one brand held it, and our count holds two, Born Primitive on 14 deals and Fabletics on 8.

Which thirty to fifty people, then

Only 41 of the 510 have ever worked with more than one of these brands, so if you want names already proven inside activewear, this is close to the entire list.

Read the first row against the fourth. Ashley Gaita has 120,000 subscribers and has been paid 51 times by four of these brands. HopeScope has 8,490,000 subscribers and has been paid 3 times by three of them, once each.

The biggest channel gets used once and put down. The small one gets booked fifty one times. That is the argument against buying on subscriber count, written out by 14 brands spending their own money, and it is the same pattern we found mapping the brands that spend the most on YouTube creators.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals per creator per brand, pulled 12 August 2026. Subscriber counts move over time.

What that looks like from a standing start

Depth first. Gymshark's 156 creators took five years and 761 videos to assemble and nobody is buying that back. YoungLA reached 477 videos on 55 people and Alphalete 252 on 29, and that is a year of work, not five.

So pick twenty to thirty creators whose audience actually matches yours, book each of them four times instead of eighty people once, and make the second booking a decision rather than a habit. The hard part is that the health and lifestyle names that look right have mostly been bought already, so each one needs checking against what they have run before, and the price needs checking against what those audiences return, which we set out in what a thousand views costs by category.

Let us know if you would like an influencer analysis of which ones would work well in this niche.

We find the names, we pull each person's booking history so you know who paid them last and how often, we handle the negotiating and the paperwork, and we keep the claims made around the product inside what your legal team would sign off. If you want to know which of these 510 people are open this quarter and which are already somebody else's, that is the conversation to have.