Why we added Alphalete to the catalog

We don't add brands quickly. Every new label in the tracker is a commitment — to scrape it cleanly, to keep its prices accurate across four markets, to debug things when the brand changes its product platform. So we deliberately keep the roster tight.

This week we added the eighth: Alphalete. Here's why now, and what to expect on the site.

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Why now

Alphalete sat on a "should we?" list for most of February and March. Two things made us hold off, and one thing flipped the call this week.

The first hold-up was technical. Alphalete's storefront is on Shopify, but they had a soft block on automated requests through the back half of last quarter — a third-party WAF in front of the catalogue endpoint, similar to what Gymshark uses. Adding them would have meant building a second HTML-parsing adapter (the way we currently scrape Gymshark, by extracting product data from rendered category pages). Workable, but slow.

The second hold-up was editorial. The activewear shelf has more brands than any tracker can responsibly cover, and we'd rather track seven brands properly than ten brands sloppily. So the bar for adding one is "shoppers ask for it consistently." Alphalete crossed that bar around mid-March — they were in the top three brands mentioned in our reader email, behind only Lululemon (which we still can't scrape) and the brands already on the site.

What flipped it this week: their soft block came off. Standard Shopify endpoints respond cleanly through our residential proxy. So the technical cost dropped to "add a registry entry" and the editorial case had been waiting for a while. Easy decision.

What their pricing pattern looks like

We've been watching Alphalete prices manually for most of this quarter to get a baseline before automated tracking starts. Three observations:

Their core line is rarely on sale. The Amplify legging — their best-known piece — has held within £2 of its £62 listed price for the entire window we observed. They run two genuine sale events per quarter (typically late January and late June, plus a Black Friday push), and the rest of the time, prices are flat. This is closer to NVGTN or Oner Active than to Gymshark.

Their outlet section is real. Unlike Gymshark, where the "outlet" is effectively the discount-pricing default for half the catalog, Alphalete's outlet is small and tightly curated — typically discontinued colourways, never current-season. Discounts there run 30–50%, but inventory disappears fast.

Sizes go OOS asymmetrically. XS and XL routinely sell through within hours of a markdown; M and L stick around. If you're a non-median size, the price-alert mechanic on Gearfinch will be especially useful here — by the time you see a markdown organically, your size may already be gone.

What you'll see on the site this week

• Today: the brand listing on /brands includes Alphalete with a typeset wordmark placeholder (a real logo can drop in whenever Alphalete ships us one).
• Tomorrow morning: the 05:00 UTC scrape cron picks up Alphalete for the first time. You'll see real products at /brands/alphalete afterward.
• Across markets: Alphalete uses Shopify's market-routing for FR/GB/DE prices on the same domain, so the per-market figures we display are native (€, £, €), not currency-converted.
• Under "Verified by hand" on /dupes: nothing yet. The dupe-curation pass for Alphalete pieces against the existing roster takes a few days of careful spec comparison; we'll publish pairings as we verify them.

What's next on the roster

Three brands sit in the same "should we?" queue right now: Alphalete just exited it; Lululemon, Set Active, and Bo+Tee remain. Lululemon is held by the same pattern that originally held Alphalete — they use bot-detection that we'd need a second technical approach for, and the cost-benefit is genuinely uncertain. Set Active and Bo+Tee are clean Shopify storefronts; the bar there is reader demand reaching the threshold we've set internally. Both are climbing.

If there's a specific brand you'd find useful — and that we can scrape without burning down our proxy budget — write to us. The hello@ inbox forwards to me.

Welcome to the eighth brand. Real prices land tomorrow.