Meet Nicky, Founder of FLANCI

Nicky is not a founder who took up running for a good marketing story. She has more than 100 marathons and ultra-marathons behind her, including some of the hardest footraces on the planet. The Marathon des Sables, a self-sufficient slog across the Sahara carrying your own kit for days on end. Grand to Grand. Alps 2 Ocean. She has run through Patagonia and Peru, climbed Kilimanjaro, and still heads out for a Sunday long run with her dog Billy waiting at the finish. So when Nicky talks about what running kit needs to do over 26.2 miles (or a good deal further), it comes from her own legs, not a spec sheet.

FLANCI began with a simple frustration. Years ago, Nicky went looking for running kit with a bit of personality and found rail after rail of black. If she wanted colour, print, or anything that actually felt like her, she was out of luck. So the hunt for something brighter became a mission, and by the end of 2017 that mission had a name. FLANCI is an anagram of Nic and Alf (Nicky and her partner, Alf), and it happens to live in the urban dictionary too: better than fancy, and almost fabulous. It fit the brand perfectly.

Because Nicky runs, she knows what runners actually want, and she builds it in rather than bolting it on. Every FLANCI skort is developed in collaboration with runners and a professional sportswear designer, and the details are deliberate. One honest 7.5 inch inseam, cut mid-thigh, right across the 2XS to 4XL range, so the fit is the same whatever your size. Deep, no-zip pockets that hold your phone without the bounce. Regular built-in shorts underneath, not squeezy compression. A slightly heavier fabric that keeps its shape wash after wash, season after season. None of that is an accident. It is what happens when the person designing the kit is the person wearing it on the start line.

Before FLANCI, Nicky qualified as a nurse and midwife, then spent 20 years in pharmaceutical sales, so she is at home with detail, evidence, and explaining things plainly. Add tens of thousands of training miles to that, and you get the voice behind FLANCI's guides: someone who has tested the advice herself, on real runs, in real weather, at every stage from a first parkrun to a multi-day ultra. When you read a FLANCI guide on skort sizing, fabric, or race-day kit, it is grounded in her own experience, not guesswork.

Nicky has always believed activewear should be about more than the gym. That is why FLANCI skorts are made to carry you from a hard session to the brunch table without missing a beat, and why they come in prints you would actually choose to be seen in. If you want to see the range she is talking about, have a browse of the FLANCI running skort collection, or read her guide to plus-size running skorts for a sense of how she thinks about fit at every size. Her full story sits alongside Alf's on the FLANCI about page.