Marcus Milione built a bootstrapped running apparel brand to sell-out drops with a team of three — and beat the bots

Marcus Milione, Minted New York

Marcus Milione left commercial real estate debt at a regional bank during COVID, started posting outfit photos and talking-head videos on Instagram and TikTok out of boredom at his parents' house, and within eight months had quit his job to run a bootstrapped running apparel brand full time. Five years later, Minted New York operates with three full-time employees, sells out limited drops in minutes, and has two Saucony running shoe collaborations to its name.

The build

Milione's content strategy was volume before craft. He committed to three short-form videos a day for 365 consecutive days, treating it as a reps game, watching analytics to figure out what worked and iterating. At the time, TikTok was still dominated by dances; he was just talking and providing value.

The brand launched January 2021. By month eight, he had run four major releases. He set a three-month revenue target with his father as his exit number from banking. The next drop hit it in roughly five minutes, and he quit.

By December 2021, twelve months in, the largest release in company history landed — and every unit was sitting in his parents' garage. His entire family packed orders for six days straight through Christmas to ship it all out.

“We're bootstrapped now in year five. I would say 99.5% organic — we do very very little advertising. Every single drop, I would run the bank account to $0 on production and hope that it went well. The decoy listings had the correct naming structure but the shoes were listed at 10,000 pounds so you couldn't get a shipping rate — the bots couldn't get through.”

Drops, bots, and the anti-reseller playbook

Minted runs on limited drops. That model generates intense demand spikes but also attracts bot buyers trying to acquire inventory for resale. After the first Saucony shoe release got hit hard by automated orders — some buyers submitting for 30 pairs at a time — Milione went to Twitter before the next drop and essentially crowd-sourced a countermeasure, pulling in past buyers and self-identified botters to find exploitable weaknesses in standard bot behavior.

His solution for the most recent drop was a pair of decoy product listings built to look real — correct naming structure, correct metadata — while the actual listing used none of the expected terminology and had no standard metadata associated with the shoe. Bots navigate straight to checkout without reading the page, so they flocked to the decoys. The decoy listings were also configured so that the items had implausibly high weights, breaking the checkout flow before any order could complete. He estimates roughly 99% of orders on the real listing were placed manually. The few bot orders that did get through were easy to identify and cancel.

He's deliberately avoided the raffle model despite the bot problem, on the grounds that buyers value first-come-first-served mechanics and raffles drain the excitement out of a release.

Brand model

Minted is still fully bootstrapped in year five. Milione acknowledges that limits scale, but frames it as a foundation rather than a constraint — the brand runs what he estimates at 99.5% organic distribution with almost no paid advertising. The logic is that turning on paid channels later, once brand awareness is established, will yield better economics than burning money on cold CPMs from day one.

The Saucony partnership arrived via an email in late 2022 from the Saucony partnerships team. It started as a lifestyle shoe concept; Milione pitched adding a running shoe when they met in Boston, and that grew into two running shoe collaborations.

Supply chain is spread across China for performance apparel, Indonesia for the Saucony footwear (Saucony's own factory), and Italy for jewelry. Milione says the brand has consistently released off-cycle relative to the fashion calendar — hoodies in August, that sort of thing — and describes that as a problem, not a differentiator. The goal for 2026 is to catch up to seasonal cadence.

What's next

Milione says his ambition is global scale, and he doesn't think a slow, well-built foundation is in conflict with that. Beyond running, he's watching cycling as a potential adjacent category, but isn't moving on it yet. The team stays at three full-time people, with his sister handling customer service part-time.