Dirk-Jan van Hameren has always been about sports. He represented the Netherlands as a track cyclist at the 1992 Barcelona and 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, then he got a job at Nike’s European headquarters in the fax mail room.
“I became the kid in the mailroom. It was one of the most valuable experiences I have had in business,” says van Hameren. “In school, you learn how to think. In the mailroom, seeing every piece of communication come through taught me how a company works. I saw advertising briefs, marketing plans, sports marketing contracts, product assortment plans, and financial forecasts. Those years taught me how different functions created value and came together to become a company and a business.”
At Nike, van Hameren is credited with leading $7 billion of revenue growth across Nike Sportswear. He helped drive the success of iconic franchises including: Air Max, Air Force 1 and Tech Fleece. He also led the ideation and execution of the Livestrong initiative, the award-winning “Dream Crazy” campaign and the company’s global marketing for the 2004, 2012 and 2024 Olympic Games.
This summer van Hameren left his post as executive vice president and chief marketing officer Nike to join wearables brand Whoop as chief marketing officer.
Whoop is experiencing a massive upswing. The Boston-based brand reported 103% year-over-year sales growth in 2025, reaching a $1.1 billion run rate. Currently valued around $10.1 billion after raising $575 million in a funding round this year and recently passed 3 million global members. Investors include high-profile athletes Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy, as well as healthcare stalwarts Mayo Clinic and Abbott.
Van Hameren was brought on to help scale the global business. Brand Innovators caught up with van Hameren from his office in Seattle to discuss the new role, his vision for the brand and what he learned at Nike. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your vision as CMO of Whoop?
I am joining a company with a very strong foundation and consumer connection. Will [Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop] and the team have spent 14 years building Whoop into a product people use every day and, in many cases, really rely on. That is a very different starting point from simply marketing a device. When Will and I started talking, one of the things that stood out was his commitment to investing in the brand, the product, and the team. He was one of the only CEO’s I met who was unapologetically committed to building a world-class brand across human performance and proactive health. That matters deeply to me.
The product is exceptional. The science is strong. The member base is highly engaged and growing at a fast pace. The opportunity now is to help even more people around the world understand the role Whoop can play in their lives.
For some people, that starts with training. For others, it starts with sleep, recovery, stress, heart health, or healthspan. The entry point may be different, but Whoop can help people understand how the choices they make each day affect how they feel, recover, and perform. My vision is to expand the role Whoop plays globally while protecting the authenticity, credibility, product truth, and member trust that made the brand special in the first place.
What is the brand mission and how does that show up in your creative?
The mission at Whoop is to unlock human performance and healthspan. The job is to make that feel understandable, meaningful, and useful in someone’s actual life. Whoop has a phenomenal set of capabilities, but if you only talk about features, the story can become very technical very quickly. The emotion is in what the information makes possible.
It may help someone sleep better, recover smarter, see how stress is affecting them, or understand that a small decision they make every day is having a real impact. The data becomes a reflection of your life. You can see what happens when you sleep more, train hard, travel, drink alcohol, take a break, or go through a stressful week. I have always looked at marketing through the lens of making people feel something and then giving them a meaningful way to respond. You have to make people care first and then make the role of the product clear.
What is your approach to sports marketing and how will that look like at Whoop?
Sport, the relationships and insights we get from athletes and teams, and the emotional connection sport offers around the world are foundational to Whoop. Athletes demonstrate preparation, recovery, discipline, pressure, and improvement in a very visible way. They are also some of the most curious, ambitious, and committed personalities in the world. That pushes us to create better products, stories, and member experiences. Whoop has a real place in sport because athletes use it when the information matters. You see it across global football, basketball, Formula 1, golf, tennis, cycling, cricket, running, and many of the biggest moments in sport.
Some of those relationships are formal. Some are not. When an athlete chooses to wear Whoop because they believe it helps them prepare and recover, that is a strong expression of trust. Sport should never be used as decoration. It has to be connected to the product and the truth of the brand. I do not see Whoop as moving away from sport. The opportunity is to stay close to athletes and teams while using those insights to make human performance more relevant to a broader audience. Sport remains the foundation.
How do you think about brands showing up in culture?
Brands have to earn their way into culture before they can say they are part of it or even shaping it. You cannot force it or attach yourself to a moment simply because it is popular. People understand very quickly when a brand does not belong. For Whoop, the opportunity comes from the fact that health, performance, and longevity are becoming part of everyday life. People talk about sleep, recovery, stress, alcohol, training, aging, and how they want to live. The question for any brand is whether it has a credible role to play. Are you contributing something useful? Are you helping people understand something differently? Does the product create enough value to become part of their routine? Whoop can earn a meaningful place in culture by making health feel personal, motivating, and grounded in what someone can actually do.
The first thing is awareness. One of the things I learned early in my career is that you have to have insatiable consumer curiosity and centricity. You do not get that from sitting in an office or meeting room. Awareness is job number one, but it has to lead to relevance, consideration, adoption, and an ongoing relationship. I come back to two questions: is this relevant to someone’s life, and does it give them a reason to act? That means staying close to members and understanding what matters to them, whether that is training, recovery, sleep, stress, heart health, or being more proactive about their health.
Whoop is built on a close relationship between the members, their physiological data, and the insights we provide. Members check the app multiple times a day. The average is about eight times a day. When Whoop helps someone notice a pattern, understand what may be driving it, and make a different decision, the brand becomes useful in a very real way.
What are the biggest marketing challenges you see in the marketplace and how do you navigate them?
There is so much being thrown at consumers: more messages, products, channels, claims, and content than ever. In that environment, saying more is not always the right thing. The best marketing starts with clarity, simplicity, and consistency. From there, you can think about creativity and how to bring a story or experience meaningfully into people’s lives. Sometimes you need to be clearer. Sometimes you need to be quieter. Sometimes you need to be louder.
In wearables, the category can become very technical and overwhelming. It can turn into a conversation about hardware, form factor, features, or price. Those things matter, but they are not the whole story. The better question is: what does the product help someone understand, and how does that improve their day and ultimately their life?
The other challenge is trust. If you are going to ask people to engage with their health every day, the product has to be credible, the science has to be strong, and the brand has to be worthy of that relationship. The way through all of that is to stay close to the member, keep listening, and keep making both the product and the story clearer and more valuable.
Can you reflect on what you learned at Nike that will help shape your perspective in the CMO role at Whoop?
I was an athlete before I was a marketer, and I think being an athlete is one of the greatest lessons in life. You learn work ethic, how to study your competitors, how to understand different people and cultures, and how to cope with success and disappointment. That has shaped how I think.
I learned at Nike that product, brand and marketplace have to be connected. The product has to be exceptional, the innovation has to be real and marketing’s role is to make that innovation meaningful and emotive. A lot of the best work I have been part of started with a simple question: what if? What if you could make people see sport differently? What if you could make innovation feel more human? What if you could help someone believe something different about themselves?
At Whoop, the opportunity is to ask what becomes possible when people have a clearer understanding of the choices they make every day. Can that knowledge help them prepare differently, recover more effectively, or recognize a pattern they may otherwise have missed?
What I bring from Nike is not a playbook to copy. It is a way of thinking: start with the person, make the innovation meaningful, connect product, brand, and experience, and keep improving over time. The opportunity here is to apply that thinking as Whoop continues to grow and lead in human performance and proactive health.
