Faces of Fitness
objective
Faces of Fitness is Chicago's largest fitness and wellness festival - two days, four stages, celebrity trainers and DJs, and roughly 12,000 attendees across a July weekend in River North. The property had built something brands rarely get access to: an audience that is 65% women, concentrated between 22 and 45, and a strictly sober environment that made every food, beverage, and recovery category unusually valuable.
What the festival did not have was a sponsorship sales operation. Filling a roster of that size means running dozens of category conversations simultaneously, protecting exclusivity between brands that compete with each other, and closing every one of them before a date that cannot move. Traditionally that means hiring a sales team or handing the inventory to a brokerage that takes a cut and owns the brand relationships.
CAMPAIGN
Rather than build that team, Faces of Fitness listed its 2026 Chicago inventory on Anvara and let the marketplace run the sales cycle.
The listing put the festival's full activation footprint - Wellness Village placements, sampling rights, stage and signage integration, and category exclusivities - in front of brands actively searching for live wellness activations. Anvara's team ran discovery, fielded inbound interest, structured each package, and coordinated negotiation and paperwork through the platform, handing each brand off to the festival's production team once terms were signed.
Over roughly six months, the roster filled in category by category:
Sunnyside Dispensary
Celsius
Liquid Death
Sprout Living
Painterland Sisters
Cleveland Kitchen
Egglife
RESULTS
Faces of Fitness went into its 2026 Chicago weekend with a complete sponsor roster
Seven sponsors closed across seven non-competing categories, from a returning anchor partner to first-time challenger brands
The full roster sold in advance of the festival, without a dedicated sponsorship sales hire or a brokerage layer
Tens of millions of social impressions generated across festival, sponsor, and attendee channels
Thousands of product samples distributed per brand across the two days of the festival
Sponsors already renewing into 2027
For the brands, a single listing replaced months of cold outreach into a property most of them had no path into. For the festival, the marketplace did the job of a sales team.
Key fact
Faces of Fitness used Anvara as its sponsorship sales operation. By listing its Chicago inventory on the platform, the festival reached brands actively hunting for live wellness activations, sold seven categories, and filled its entire 2026 roster.
