A Belgian brand born less than ten years ago aims to turn visibility into its own product category, and it has hired a Patagonia and 7mesh veteran to prove it.
GOFLUO has appointed John Zopfi to lead strategic partnerships and international market development, tasking the Antwerp-based visibility brand’s newest hire with building out its wholesale presence across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Julie Vets, founder and CEO of GOFLUO, started the company in Belgium after identifying a gap between mandatory visibility gear and design consumers actually wanted to wear. GOFLUO was founded in Belgium in 2018, and in 2023 raised €1 million from investor Hendrik Winkelmans’ Freshmen fund and four business angels.
Zopfi’s appointment is the clearer signal of intent. He spent nearly a decade at Patagonia before moving through W.L. Gore’s apparel business, then joined 7mesh Industries in 2018 as general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, later expanding into global wholesale leadership. Most recently he served as chief commercial officer at tire pressure technology company Gravaa.
Hiring an executive with that specific résumé points to GOFLUO professionalizing its wholesale operation ahead of a planned expansion into the GAS region.
Startup or challenger brand?
GOFLUO is both, depending on which lens you use.
On paper, it is still very much a startup. The company has completed a single funding round, operates with a relatively small team, and continues to describe itself as a Belgian startup. Its scale remains humble compared with established sporting goods players.
But startups are defined by size.
Challenger brands are defined by ambition.
And GOFLUO’s ambition is not to launch yet another apparel line. The Antwerp-based company sits at the intersection of running, cycling, active mobility and lifestyle, built around a simple proposition: people are more likely to wear visibility gear if it looks like something they actually want to wear.
That may sound obvious, but it challenges a longstanding assumption in sporting goods. For decades, visibility products have largely been treated as accessories, while performance innovation focused on footwear, apparel, cushioning, fabrics and wearables. GOFLUO aims at making visibility itself a category worth shopping for.
Zopfi sees the target audience extending well past cycling’s traditional base. “This is a brand for everyone: from children walking or cycling to school to commuters, runners, cyclists and outdoor adventurers,” he says. “That combination of broad relevance, strong design and a very clear point of difference creates significant potential for retailers across the GAS region.”
He describes that ambition in more personal terms too: “As the father of three daughters, I feel personally connected to GOFLUO’s ambition to encourage more women to embrace an active lifestyle with products they genuinely enjoy wearing. Safety matters, but nobody wants to feel defined by functional safety clothing. GOFLUO approaches that differently.”
The running opportunity
What makes GOFLUO relevant to the sporting goods industry is not its current revenue base. It is the trend it is targeting.
Running is increasingly becoming a year-round, all-hours activity. Across Europe, participation growth is no longer driven solely by race preparation. Community runs, urban run clubs, commute running and everyday fitness routines are pushing runners onto the streets earlier in the morning, later in the evening and throughout the darker winter months.
That shift elevates visibility from a nice-to-have feature to a performance enabler. If runners feel safer, they run more often.
Most major brands, including Nike, adidas, On, HOKA, Brooks Running and ASICS, address the issue through reflective trims and details embedded in existing collections. GOFLUO is taking a different approach by putting visibility at the center of its value proposition. In effect, the company is attempting to create a visibility category for active consumers much as Maurten did for fueling or Shokz did for open-ear sports audio: identifying a specific consumer problem and building a brand around solving it.
The SGIE take
GOFLUO is testing whether visibility can move beyond a technical feature and become a standalone sporting goods category.
That question matters as participation expands beyond race day into everyday movement. As more consumers run before sunrise, after work or through the winter months, visibility becomes part of the performance equation. The appointment of John Zopfi suggests GOFLUO believes the opportunity is large enough to justify a more professional wholesale strategy.
GOFLUO remains a small Belgian company. But challenger brands rarely matter because of their size. They matter because they force larger players to rethink assumptions. GOFLUO’s challenge to the industry is simple: what if visibility is no longer an accessory, but the category itself?
Road, track and gravel: the business of running
We track the business story: brand strategies, product launches, financial performance, participation data, and the race formats reshaping the industry’s most competitive category.
Explore Running →
