When 29-year-old Alice Bugeja quit her job at a global technology company last August to start a women’s-only runwear brand, a lot of people told her that it wasn’t going to work.
‘It was a really bad period of anxiety for me,’ she recalls. ‘You think in your mind that handing your notice in is going to be this amazing moment and it was the complete opposite. There were a few people at my work who said, “businesses fail” or this, that and the other.’
As it turns out, mileoff, which launched on International Women’s Day last month (the date being a happy coincidence rather than ‘an act of marketing genius’, admits Bugeja), has so far proved to be the exact opposite of a failure. Having ordered 1,500 units of stock, the maximum her savings would allow, Bugeja thought that this would be enough to see the company through until the summer. A month on from launch, the collection has all but sold out.
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‘Never did I expect to be in the position that we’re in now,’ says Bugeja. ‘On TikTok, there’s girls that I literally don’t know who are tagging me in other people’s videos recommending our running shorts.’
In 2025, the global sports apparel market is valued at £384 billion, with the global running apparel market valued at £13.7 million and growing 5% year on year. And yet, data shows that it is dominated by five key players: Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, Asics and Puma. Not only that, out of the 21 most significant emerging running brands, many of which Bugeja says she looks up to, not a single one has a solo female founder – only four are co-founded with a male/female partnership, while the other 17 are all male founded.
‘It wasn’t until 1994 that women’s sports apparel was created as a standalone and not as a derivative of men’s,’ adds Bugeja. ‘I really wanted [mileoff] to be different. I wanted the DNA to be core running performance – technical and functional.’
A business graduate from the University of St Andrews, Bugeja says that the seed for a women’s-only running brand was planted when she moved to Dubai for work in 2022 and started up an Instagram account to document her own running journey.
‘It was simultaneously around that time that I started to notice this gap in the market in terms of women’s clothing,’ she recalls. ‘There are very good quality products out there for sports in general, but there seems to be a gap in listening to consumers and what we need for running. For example, every time I went to go and find shorts, they didn’t have enough pockets. I kept thinking, “this is so obvious” – except it wasn’t, because nobody had done it yet.’
Bugeja decided to start from scratch, working alongside two UK-based female designers who took all of her ‘squiggles and sketches’ and turned them into fully fledged designs. The goal was for mileoff to be different in everything that it was doing, with a ‘cool running girl’ look to match.
The ‘hero’ product was to be The Ultimate Running Shorts – a 2-in-1 design with an integrated running belt waistband. Then came the Hydration Run Vest, inspired by Bugeja’s own experience trying to find a vest to help her train in the Dubai heat that wasn’t ‘unisex, black or white, mesh and with a big puffy back’.
‘What happens with the rise of run clubs when you’re in a city but you want to carry your phone, your keys and a little bit of water?’ she asks. ‘I really wanted to use a different material, different colours and get the form and the shape perfect.’
Confident that she’d landed on the right products, in January, Bugeja announced on social media that she’d quit her job to found mileoff. On TikTok, her announcement video amassed over 26,000 views and momentum continued to grow until the brand’s official launch on 8 March.
Now, having already sold through her initial stock, Bugeja has a re-stock planned for May, this time with a wider range of sizes.
‘I really do want [mileoff] to be inclusive and diverse,’ says Bugeja, speaking to criticism surrounding the brand’s current size range, which spans from a UK 6 to 14. This is mostly due to restrictions in minimum order quantities and start-up costs, she explains, ‘but I know there’s still a lot of work that we can do in this space’.
New colours and styles will also be dropping in mid-June, including a running top with storage elements.
‘I want every piece that we do to have a twist in terms of functionality. The tops that we have developed [so far] look amazing, but they haven’t got that extra function,’ adds Bugeja. ‘I’m going to start working on autumn and winter in about a month’s time, which is exciting and terrifying.’
As for longer term plans, for now, Bugeja is ‘just trying to keep up and figure it out’. However, she’s clear on one thing: she wants mileoff to be about more than just running.
‘I know everyone says, “Oh, it’s just a clothing brand”, but this really is about more. Through running, you gain the confidence to do things that you never thought you could do. When I signed up for my first marathon, I didn’t ever think I was going to be able to run 42km. I want people to sign up for their first 5K, sign up for that marathon and then see how that translates into their life, not just in running, but in every aspect: moving to a new country or going for a job – whatever it is.’
Female empowerment has long been a passion of Bugeja’s. At university, her dissertation focused on the gender pay gap after graduation.
‘A lot of it boiled down to female confidence and belief in ourselves and how much self-value and self-worth we have,’ she says. During her four years working in corporate, she also ran an employee initiative focused on raising up and upskilling women across the business.
‘[Now] the mission of being a female founder feels even more important,’ she says. ‘I really want to prove that as women, we can do this.’
Visit mileoff, restocking in May.
