In 1995, Greg Glassman opened a small gym in Santa Cruz, California. There was no grand plan for a global brand, no franchise model on a whiteboard, no marketing strategy. There was a barbell, some rings, a pull-up bar, and a methodology built around the idea that fitness should be broad, general, and inclusive — measurable, observable, and repeatable. That gym became CrossFit.
For the better part of a decade, CrossFit existed almost entirely as a web presence. Glassman began posting workouts online in 2001, free for anyone to follow. The CrossFit Journal launched in 2002. Coaches and athletes who found the methodology compelling started opening their own gyms — not franchises in the traditional sense, but affiliates. Pay a licensing fee, hang the CrossFit name on your door, run your box the way you see fit. By 2005, there were 18 affiliates. By 2010, there were over 1,700.
The Affiliate Model
What made CrossFit's growth unusual was the degree to which it was driven by community rather than corporate infrastructure. Each affiliate was its own business, with its own culture, its own coaches, its own identity. Glassman's licensing model gave gym owners enough freedom to build something genuinely theirs. CrossFit provided the methodology and the name; everything else was up to the affiliate.
That autonomy produced something remarkable: thousands of distinct communities, each with their own story, their own rituals, their own vocabulary. Members didn't just go to a CrossFit gym — they belonged to CrossFit Mayhem, or CrossFit Invictus, or CrossFit 818. The name on the building mattered. And as any longtime CrossFitter knows, so did the shirt.
The Shirt as Cultural Artifact
CrossFit affiliate shirts became something more than gym merchandise almost by accident. In a sport defined by outdoor workouts, competitions, and travel, you wore your gym's shirt everywhere — to the park, to the grocery store, to other gyms when you dropped in while traveling. The shirt was a signal. It said where you trained, what you valued, and — whether you intended it or not — something about who you were.
Gym owners understood this intuitively. Some invested in serious graphic design. Others kept it simple — a logo, a location, a year. Some shirts referenced inside jokes that only members would understand. Others made statements legible to anyone. What unified them was the care behind them: these weren't blank hoodies with a heat-pressed logo. They were objects that meant something to the people wearing them.
Today, there are over 10,000 CrossFit affiliates worldwide. Each one has, at some point, made a shirt. Most have made dozens. Somewhere in that archive is a record of CrossFit's growth, its culture, its geography, and the tens of thousands of communities that built themselves around a shared set of movements and values. That's what Affiliate Shirts is here to document.