High on life: finding the creative mindset with Minor Planet's Jason Levine
Minor Planet’s Jason Levine has one of the boldest young brands in the running world. Blending yoga, punk, and running, it’s left-field but clear in its intent.
Among the hundreds of brand pop-ups and events and shakeout runs at the 2025 NYC Marathon, I found Minor Planet. There had been record-breaking rainfall that day, but my plan was to watch the short film of German pro ultrarunner Mikey Kratzer, which was being presented by the brainchild of Jason Levine in conjunction with New Balance. I was 45 minutes early. It wasn’t enough time to hit another location but slightly too long to sit there alone. So I took a seat.
Jason broke from setting up the room to greet me enthusiastically with a fancy-looking soda. I was grateful for something to sip on. I asked him if he was with Minor Planet. He was.
“It’s interesting to take this athletic world, with all of its subcultures and colorful characters, and now you fuse that together. You have a nice recipe for an interesting life.” Jason Levine, Minor Planet
I’d kinda seen the brand knocking around on Instagram but hadn’t fully engaged. Messages of ‘Centre For Beginners,’ ‘Baby Steps,’ and ‘Let Go To Hold On.’ I was monitoring this brand that was dealing in the kind of spiritual sloganeering that I believe in. More recently there’s been ‘100% Runner,’ but we’ll get to that in due course.
In 2025, I somewhat moved my emphasis away from writing about the fashion side of running culture when Cole Townsend’s Running Supply arrived. When someone niches down on your niche so well, you simply sit back and enjoy it. Minor Planet, however, is doing something in the running space that no other brand is doing with such clarity. I had to dig in.
District Vision also has a meditation aspect, but is somewhat more esoteric, and Lululemon has moved from the yoga world into trying to conquer running. Younger brands like Schism, Furies, and Rose Endurance are bringing very specific hardcore punk aesthetics to the running world, and Satisfy is the punk band headlining Stade de France. Minor Planet sits in the middle of all of that without selling technical running performance apparel at all.
Of course, all clothing can be running apparel, but mostly I’ve seen Minor Planet popping up in Rome and London with yoga and breathwork events at the New Balance Marathon House with well-designed hats, cotton tees, and other accessories.
Rome’s marathon event was spent visualizing marathon moments in a 15th century papal hospital with grand, frescoed walls and London’s big events included qigong and tostadas plus pre-race body regulation in Somerset House, an equally grand Tudor palace. They’re the kind of places — and activities — that a young Jason Levine would’ve scoffed at and then tried to skate down the marble steps of.
While Minor Planet leans on the ideas of thinking more deeply, more slowly, and more purposefully, it really wasn’t like that for Jason until 15 years ago.
“For the first, like 30 years of my life, I had like a story in my head that was dictating my personality. I was smoking, I was drinking, I was doing drugs. I was posing to be a cool person. That was how I maneuvered in the world, even since I was a teenager. It lasted a long time and really got me nowhere.”
That’s not entirely true, of course. He was an early employee at premium fashion brand Rag & Bone, but being in the fashion world, he was out partying late and often. It was part of the job. Or so he told himself.
It got to a point, however, where he was 35 years old and still in a bitter cycle of being the last one at the party, perpetually hungover, but still reading books about Eastern philosophies or finding one’s passion in his spare time.
Jason tells me that he “always gravitated towards subcultures like the hardcore music scene, the underground rap scene, the graffiti scene, and the skate scene.” He talks about going to school for acupuncture and herbal medicine and getting into kung fu. He tells me that diving in and learning has always been an essential part of him.
But there came a point when Jason needed to make a change and rail against the narrative that he’d built for himself. Declining a drink at 3am was just one of thousands of decisions Jason Levine made that day, but it changed everything. It led to him making more and more good decisions. First it was sleep, then it was food, but he needed the activity, so he started taking yoga classes.
He talks about the lightness and openness of walking into a yoga studio for the first time: “It was like I was returning to my childhood. There was an innocence.”
Something else from his childhood was running. Jason tells me that he was athletic as a child, “pretty good at all sports,” but “was a degenerate so would never try hard enough to get good.” That’s something that he puts down to childhood insecurity.
This time was different, though. He took up yoga because he knew he needed to move his body, and he needed more. The openness that he felt in that yoga studio allowed him to start running – something that he never would’ve committed to previously. It became a new form of meditation. The running became an ever-present in his life.
It reminds me of a similar moment in my life when I declined a 5pm drink from a colleague. I told him that I was training for a 5k. It’s when I started running again. For Jason, it was a choice to make the next day less painful. He’d noticed that newcomers in the skate community were different to those he grew up with. They were less about a nihilistic lifestyle, and more into veganism and yoga. But they were still skaters.
Extreme music is unconventional. An even deeper strand of the punk subculture, for instance, is straight edge hardcore, where the community doesn’t drink or smoke. They’re kind to animals and politically clear-thinking. It’s quite opposite to how mainstream media often enjoys portraying the scene.
When Jason’s time at Rag & Bone came to a natural end, he decided “to fill [his] time with the things that are number one on [his] list.” That was going outside and moving his body thoughtfully – a reaction to his time spent sitting in meetings “toiling for nonsense.” He took a yoga teacher training course.
That came from a position of relative privilege, of course. He got a payout from Rag & Bone, but he chose to spend his new free-time on himself, creating. Financial stability has been proven to shift a person’s focus from survival to creativity. They choose more personal, meaningful work. Removing fear of money troubles removes the anxiety and fear of financial ruin, allowing the mind to focus upon innovation. If it feels crass, blame the tax system rather than the individual who’s reverting to the most natural human instinct. Don’t hate the player, etc.
Either way, Jason had to teach some free yoga classes as part of his training, and did that at a Japanese textile company in New York. Soon, he was hired by them to create a brand. The concept was a “cool yoga brand – a bizarro Lululemon.” He wanted to deliver his yogic message but retain the “subculture street world” that he continued to live in. Minor Planet was born.
When Trump’s tariffs hit last year, however, the parent company pulled the plug on any part of the business not making money. Having poured all of his creative energies into this fledgling brand, the company kindly agreed to transfer all rights to Jason as easily as possible. He was a small business owner now.
Starting afresh in midlife, Jason talks to me about Shoshin – the beginner’s mindset. It’s again linked to that feeling he had when he went to his first yoga class: the openness; the lack of preconceptions, both about yourself and about others.
“You can always be a beginner if you approach things in the right way. You don’t need to be the guy that knows everything. If you have an understanding of these mindsets, it changes the way that you feel, it changes the way that you act, and it opens up this creativity. You’re open to expressing yourself. The guy that’s like, ‘I got this all figured out,’ is all rigid.”
Here’s a listicle that I wrote at the end of last year. Scroll down to no.5, and you’ll find Shoshin, and there’s more.
It’s a good list – one that encapsulates much of the process that I’ve developed over my career – and it’s distilled into just 1,000 words’ worth. The reason that Jason’s work with Minor Planet feels so cohesive is because he’s taken the same approach of reading books and learning deeply over time to create a singular brand that blends everything that makes up Jason Levine in a snapshot.
Jason repeats that young him would likely reject his current self, but that was a less well-developed version. It’s a path that is very similar to others in this space. It’s not a reawakening as such, but all the learning experiences just take a little longer to percolate into a carafe of cool shit. Maybe good things really do come to those who wait.
Thanks for reading,
Raz x
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I think yoga the perfect accompaniment to running. You gain strength, flexibility, and balance with yoga, which are all essential tools in a runner’s toolkit. One of the first articles I wrote here was with Ann Mazur AKA @RunnersLoveYoga on IG.
