How These Unicorn Brands Outran Their Legacy Competitors — and What They All Have in Common
There's a particular kind of disruption that doesn't announce itself until it's already over. A startup enters a market that's been owned by the same three or four companies for decades. The incumbents have the distribution, the budgets, the brand recognition, and the retail relationships. By every traditional measure, the challenger shouldn't stand a chance.
And then, in what feels like overnight, the challenger is worth a billion dollars.
This is the unicorn story — not the venture-backed fairy tale version where money explains everything, but the more interesting version where marketing explains a lot. Because the brands below didn't just build better products. They built better relationships with their audiences. They understood something the legacy players were too embedded in their own playbooks to see: the way people connect with brands had fundamentally changed, and the incumbents were still running the old game.
Here's a look at four recent unicorns that outran legacy competitors through marketing — and what every brand can learn from each of them.
Gymshark: The Garage Brand That Out-Marketed Nike
Industry: Fitness apparel | Founded: 2012 | Unicorn valuation: $1.4 billion
In 2012, the fitness apparel market was owned by giants. Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour had the sponsorships, the retail shelf space, the celebrity deals, and the television budgets. A 19-year-old in Birmingham with a screen-printing machine and a part-time pizza delivery job had none of those things.
What Ben Francis had was an instinct. Instead of billboard ads and celebrity endorsements, Gymshark bet on something more powerful: a digital-first approach, strategic influencer marketing, and a hyper-engaged online community. Medium
The play was simple and, at the time, genuinely novel. Francis honed in on his favorite YouTube fitness influencers and realized their subscribers were Gymshark's target audience. The brand then sent clothing samples to fitness stars on social media, eventually sponsoring them to promote Gymshark to followers organically. Gymshark was one of the early adopters of influencer marketing before the concept even had a name. OptiMonk
But Gymshark didn't just do influencer marketing. They reimagined what brand community could look like. In contrast to Nike's big-budget mainstream strategies and Adidas's hybrid positioning, Gymshark's strength lies in engagement across fitness communities. While many other sports brands roll out major seasonal campaigns with coordinated launches and significant paid media, Gymshark uses influencer-led buzz campaigns, countdown drops via creator content, and personal storytelling across platforms. Digital Agency Network
The result was a brand that felt like it belonged to the people who wore it. Gymshark didn't just post products — it posted transformations. Workout clips, progress shots, and personal journeys fueled its social growth, reaching over 7.7 million Instagram followers by 2025, driven by user-generated content and creator amplification. TacticOne
The lesson here isn't about influencer marketing as a tactic. It's about the strategic decision to build through community rather than broadcast. Legacy apparel brands spent decades buying attention at scale. Gymshark earned it one creator relationship at a time — and built something far more durable.
Liquid Death: How Water Became the Most Interesting Brand in America
Industry: Bottled beverages | Founded: 2018 | Unicorn valuation: $1.4 billion
Selling water is perhaps the most objectively difficult marketing challenge imaginable. The product is, by definition, identical across competitors. The legacy players — Dasani, Aquafina, Evian — have decades of distribution and retail presence. There is no reason, on paper, for a new water brand to exist, let alone reach a billion-dollar valuation in six years.
Liquid Death reached that valuation by ignoring every convention of the category it entered.
Founded in 2018 by Mike Cessario, Liquid Death redefined the beverage industry with its bold approach to branding and marketing. By packaging mountain spring water in tallboy cans adorned with heavy metal-inspired designs and the tagline "Murder Your Thirst," the brand immediately stood out in a market dominated by traditional bottled water companies. MarcomCentral
Cessario's insight was both obvious and radical: in a market where every product is the same, brand identity is the entire product. The company's marketing strategy leverages humor, irreverence, and a deep understanding of its target audience — millennials and Gen Z consumers. This combination of edgy branding and environmental responsibility propelled Liquid Death to become one of the fastest-growing beverage brands, achieving a valuation of $1.4 billion and expanding to over 113,000 retail locations. MarcomCentral
The marketing approach was deliberately anti-advertising. Instead of relying on traditional paid advertising, the brand focused its marketing resources on designing stories and experiences that people genuinely wanted to share and discuss. This generated a higher return on investment and proved that brand success today is determined not only by quality or price, but by cultural relevance and bold storytelling. Asiadesignprize
The numbers make the case: Liquid Death grew from $2.8 million in revenue in 2019 to a $1.4 billion valuation by 2024. Just 12 percent of revenue is spent on marketing — compared to the food and beverage industry standard of 20 to 30 percent. Food & Beverage Magazine
That ratio is stunning. They built a billion-dollar brand while spending a fraction of what their legacy competitors spend on marketing — because the content itself did the work. People shared Liquid Death posts not because they were prompted to but because the brand was genuinely entertaining. That's an entirely different cost structure than buying reach.
The legacy players could have done something similar. They had the resources. What they didn't have was the willingness to be weird.
Canva: Democratizing Design While Adobe Looked the Other Way
Industry: Design software | Founded: 2013 | Valuation: $42 billion
Adobe built a dominant position in creative software over decades by serving professional designers. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign — the tools that defined the industry required years of training and expensive licenses. For professionals, there was simply no alternative.
Canva didn't try to compete with Adobe for those professionals. It went after everyone else.
Canva recognized the vast population of potential users excluded from design by complexity, cost, and learning curves. By focusing on this untapped market rather than competing directly with Adobe for professionals, Canva built a massive user base without triggering immediate competitive response. Medium
The growth engine was product-led, but the marketing was genius in its simplicity. Most SaaS companies are obsessed with listing features. Canva realized nobody wakes up thinking "I need vector editing capabilities." They think, "I need to make a resume." Every marketing blog tells you to create great content. Canva ignored that advice and built a content assembly line instead — generating thousands of SEO pages using templates, ranking for the exact problems people were actually searching for. Marketomon
The freemium model was the marketing strategy. By providing core functionality at zero cost, Canva eliminated adoption barriers and achieved scale far beyond what traditional pricing models could have supported. Where Adobe had captured most of the professional segment — measured in millions of users — Canva tapped into the hundreds of millions of people who occasionally needed design capabilities but couldn't justify professional software costs. Medium
The result is staggering in scale. Canva reached $3.5 billion in revenue in 2025, has remained profitable since 2017, operates in 190-plus countries, supports over 100 languages, and now counts over 260 million monthly active users worldwide — with over 65 percent of users coming from non-English markets. Marketomon
Adobe's mistake wasn't ignoring Canva — it was misreading who the customer actually was. They optimized relentlessly for the professional segment they already owned and left a hundred million non-designers entirely unserved. Canva walked in and served them all. The marketing lesson: knowing who you're not serving is sometimes more valuable than knowing who you are.
What These Brands All Have in Common
These are three very different companies in three very different industries. Water. Software. Fitness apparel. The products have almost nothing in common. But the marketing strategies that drove their unicorn growth share a set of principles that are worth extracting carefully.
They found the underserved audience the incumbent ignored. Gymshark didn't try to out-Nike Nike. They served the gym-goer who couldn't see themselves in a Nike ad. Canva didn't try to out-Adobe Adobe. They served the non-designer who found Photoshop terrifying. Liquid Death didn't try to out-Evian Evian. They served the person who thought water brands were boring. In each case, the legacy player's blind spot was the startup's entire market.
They built community before they built distribution. Each of these brands created an audience that was invested in the brand before the brand had the kind of distribution its legacy competitors enjoyed. Gymshark had millions of engaged followers before its first physical store. Liquid Death went viral before it was in every grocery chain. Canva built word-of-mouth that made its user base grow faster than any paid channel could have driven. Community came first. Distribution followed.
They made marketing the product, not the promotion. Liquid Death's content is so good people seek it out. Gymshark's challenges and transformation posts are things users create voluntarily. Canva's SEO templates are genuinely useful tools that also happen to drive acquisition. In each case, the marketing creates value for the audience independent of the purchase — which is exactly what we mean when we say brands need to think like media companies.
They spent less on paid media and more on earned attention. Legacy brands in each of these spaces were spending 20 to 30 percent of revenue on traditional media. These challengers spent a fraction of that — and grew faster. The reason is simple: earned attention compounds. A campaign you bought ends when the budget ends. An audience you built stays.
What This Means for Every Brand
You don't have to be a startup to apply these lessons. In fact, the brands that have the most to gain from this thinking are often established businesses that have been running the legacy playbook for so long they've forgotten to ask whether it's still working.
The question every brand should be sitting with right now is the same one these unicorns answered instinctively: Who is being underserved in our category, and why aren't we serving them?
The answer to that question almost always points toward a marketing strategy — and a brand story — that the incumbents haven't thought to tell. Because they're too busy defending what they already have to notice what they're leaving behind.
That's the gap the unicorns walk through. Every time.
Ritner Digital helps brands identify their strategic marketing edge and build the content, community, and positioning to capitalize on it. Get in touch.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is a unicorn company?
A unicorn is a privately held startup that has reached a valuation of $1 billion or more. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee to capture how rare such companies once were. They're far less rare today — there are now over 1,400 active unicorns globally — but the ones worth studying aren't just the ones that raised the most money. They're the ones that built genuine market disruption, often in categories legacy players had owned for decades.
Did these brands succeed because of funding or because of marketing?
Both matter, but they're not equal. Funding gives you runway. Marketing gives you momentum. The brands highlighted here — Gymshark, Liquid Death, Canva — are notable precisely because their marketing efficiency was exceptional. Liquid Death spent just 12 percent of revenue on marketing while the beverage industry standard is 20 to 30 percent. Canva built a $42 billion platform largely through product-led growth and SEO rather than paid acquisition. Money accelerated what smart marketing had already started.
Why were the legacy companies so slow to respond to these challengers?
This is one of the most important questions in business strategy, and the answer is almost always the same: legacy companies optimize for the customers they already have. Adobe wasn't ignoring non-designers — it simply wasn't organized around serving them. Nike wasn't ignoring gym culture influencers — it was spending its budget on elite athlete sponsorships that had worked for decades. The incumbent's greatest strength — deep knowledge of its existing customer — becomes its greatest blind spot when a new kind of customer emerges.
Can an established brand apply these same marketing strategies, or is this only possible for startups?
Established brands can absolutely apply these principles, and in some ways they have structural advantages startups don't — existing customer relationships, distribution, and brand recognition to build on. The challenge is cultural, not strategic. These tactics require a willingness to serve an underserved audience, to build community before chasing distribution, and to measure earned attention alongside paid reach. Those are mindset shifts that large organizations often resist because they feel risky compared to what's already working. The irony is that what's already working is often exactly what a challenger is about to disrupt.
What role did social media specifically play in these brands scaling faster than their competitors?
Social media wasn't just a distribution channel for these brands — it was the foundational architecture of their growth. Gymshark built its entire early marketing operation through fitness creators on YouTube and Instagram before those relationships had an industry name. Liquid Death's content was engineered to be shared, not served. Canva's users organically spread the product through templates they made and shared. In each case, social media enabled community-at-scale in a way that would have been impossible through traditional channels, and at a cost that made it asymmetrically powerful compared to legacy media spending.
Is community-building a realistic strategy for B2B brands, or does this only work for consumer products?
Community-building works in B2B — it just looks different. Instead of fitness challenges and viral content, it looks like genuine thought leadership, forums where practitioners share real knowledge, events that attract the people your product serves, and content that makes your customers better at their jobs. Canva is itself a B2B success story at scale, with enterprise adoption across Fortune 500 companies. HubSpot built its entire growth on a content and community model — its blog and certification programs created an audience long before its product dominated the market. The principle transfers. The format changes.
How do smaller brands or local businesses take inspiration from unicorn marketing strategies without unicorn budgets?
The honest answer is that the strategies that made these brands unicorns are actually more accessible at smaller scale, not less. Gymshark started with free product samples sent to YouTubers — a strategy any brand can replicate. Canva's early growth came from targeting specific search terms with genuinely useful content. Liquid Death's viral moments cost almost nothing to produce. The advantage these brands had wasn't budget — it was clarity of audience, willingness to be distinctive, and consistency of voice. Those are free. What you need is the discipline to resist the temptation of safe, conventional marketing and the patience to let community and earned attention compound over time.
What's the single biggest marketing mistake legacy companies make when facing a disruptive challenger?
They respond with more of what they already do. When Gymshark started eating into the market, the big apparel brands didn't rethink community — they ran more celebrity campaigns. When Canva started growing, Adobe didn't simplify — it added more features. The instinct is to double down on the playbook that built the business, because that playbook feels proven. But what made a brand dominant in one era rarely defends it in the next. The companies that survive disruption are the ones willing to cannibalize their own model before a challenger does it for them.