Rhone is a performance lifestyle company engineering premium activewear for men, designed to fill the niche between big-box retailers and high-end yoga brands. Its products can be found in all Equinox locations, 175+ specialty stores and gyms, and Peloton Studios, to name just a few.
We sat down with Nate Checketts, Co-Founder and CEO of Rhone, to learn how the brand has multiplied its growth efforts into an efficient omnichannel engine. Topics include:
- How COVID-19 inspired a spirit of brand collaboration for the Rhone team
- The key impacts they’ve derived from Disco, from intuitive UI to stronger AOVs
- Why Nate doesn’t hesitate to recommend Disco to every DTC name in his Rolodex
“Disco is a platform we absolutely believe in. They’ve created a situation where all ships rise with the tide. DTC no longer has to be a zero-sum game.”
Rhone Shows Strong Retention but has Struggled with CACs & Unreliable Data
Nate points to the two underlying pain points in Rhone’s digital growth struggles before Disco:
- Retention and stickiness have rarely been issues for the brand, seeing as users typically fall in love with the product as soon as it’s in their hands.
- However, capturing and then convincing those users to purchase in the first place was quickly the most challenging step of the equation.
The team could also chalk this up to the brick walls that every brand was running into:
- Soaring CACs across traditional paid channels, i.e., Google, Facebook, Instagram
- Unreliable user attribution data produced by those very same platforms
“Once we get in front of a customer, we know they’ll fall in love with the product, experience, and brand. But finding those folks gets harder and harder over time.”

Cooperative Commerce as the New Normal
Nate was later introduced to Disco by a long-time colleague working on the platform. He was all-in on the idea, as he tells it, due to the team’s experience throughout the pandemic.
During the initial 2020 lockdown, they strived to find tangible ways to support health workers in a struggling medical system — but felt there was little to do as just one brand.
- Nate then figured his friends (and even his competitors) in the eCom space were likely also feeling that urge to contribute and that sense of helplessness.
- He called them up to suggest aggregating their impact, and across a week, participants elected to donate up to 10% of their proceeds to COVID related relief such as purchasing and redistributing PPE.
- They signed on 150 brands and raised nearly $4 million in COVID relief, eventually culminating in the Brands x Better coalition.
The experience formulated a guiding principle for Nate, which would then lead him to jump at the opportunity to leverage Disco as a platform for cooperative commerce.
“We have more to gain from working together than we do from picking each other’s pockets on paid channels. Disco is the perfect outlet to do just that.”
