Set Pace, London

In September 2026, SLOWE Living® joined New Balance for Set Pace, a two-day experience created around The Big Half in London and initiated by creative agency GENERATION.works.

Taking place on 5–6 September, Set Pace explored the rituals surrounding race day, bringing together preparation, movement, recovery, knowledge and community in an environment conceived somewhere between a performance workshop and a place to pause.

For SLOWE, the collaboration offered an opportunity to take an idea that has always sat at the heart of the brand, Tools for Relaxation, beyond the home and into the world of performance and recovery.

Creating a space to recover

SLOWE created a dedicated gathering and recovery environment for the event, furnishing the space with three SLOWE Sofa Beds, alongside a specially designed low communal table and 50 custom meditation floor cushions created for Set Pace.

Positioned alongside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the installation provided a softer counterpoint to the more technical language of the performance environment.

Natural materials, low-level seating and a restrained palette created somewhere runners and visitors could sit, gather, reflect and recover throughout the weekend.

SLOWE also contributed to the thinking around the activation, exploring how rest, ritual and recovery could sit within a broader understanding of performance.

The result extended the SLOWE furniture language beyond the domestic environment: furniture not simply designed to occupy a room, but to create the conditions for slowing down, switching off and resetting.

Prepare. Move. Repair.

Set Pace was structured around the different stages surrounding race day.

Saturday focused on PREPARE, beginning with a Formation Lap with Run the Boroughs, followed by body alignment with OM Being, yoga with Martina Raso, a fuel check with Artah, respiratory recalibration and Pace Notes customisation with Varylab.

Allpress provided coffee throughout the day, alongside sandwiches from Mondo Sando.

On Sunday, following The Big Half, the emphasis shifted towards REPAIR.

The programme moved from physical performance into recovery and community, with food and drinks followed by a DJ set from Aychibs and a live set from Brighter Days Family.

Together, the weekend explored performance as something broader than the race itself: the preparation beforehand, the rituals around it and the recovery that allows us to begin again.

Finding Comfort in Less

SLOWE was founded around the belief that comfort is about more than physical softness.

Our wider philosophy, Find Comfort in Less, explores a more internal idea of comfort: understanding what we actually need and creating enough space to recognise when to move and when to stop.

Set Pace provided an interesting setting in which to explore that idea.

Performance is often associated with movement, optimisation and constant improvement. But the moments around performance matter too: preparation, repetition, recovery and an understanding of your own body.

For SLOWE, rest isn’t the opposite of performance. It’s part of what makes performance possible.

From Tokyo to London

The collaboration also connected back to experiences that helped shape SLOWE before the brand existed.

Founder and industrial designer Oliver Murphy spent time living and working in Tokyo, developing an appreciation for spaces and objects that do more with less, and environments in which function, restraint and everyday ritual comfortably coexist.

The influence wasn’t minimalism for minimalism’s sake. It was about intentionality.

A small space can still be generous. A simple object can perform several roles. A pause can be as meaningful as an action.

Those ideas subsequently informed the design of the original SLOWE Sofa Bed: an adaptable piece of furniture able to move between sitting, lounging, resting and sleeping without relying on a complicated mechanism.

At Set Pace, that same thinking was applied at the scale of an experience.

“I’ve always been interested in the time we allow ourselves to relax between being busy all the time. We tend to think of rest as the opposite of progress, when actually it’s exactly what allows us to keep growing and creating"

Living in Japan made me much more conscious of everyday rituals and the value of creating space, physically and mentally. Set Pace explores a very similar idea through running: preparation, movement, recovery and beginning again. It felt like a very natural place for SLOWE.”

Oliver Murphy, Founder & Designer, SLOWE Living®

A shared space for rest

Set Pace brought together New Balance, GENERATION.works and a wider group of practitioners and collaborators spanning running, movement, wellbeing, food, music and design.

For SLOWE, it represented another step in exploring what the idea of comfort can mean beyond furniture itself, and how the objects and environments around us can encourage different ways of moving, resting and spending time together.