Customer Snapshot
- Annual Participants: ~50,000
- Year-over-Year Growth: 25% Across Events
- Race Photos Uploaded for a Single Race Weekend: 55,000+
Mike Wattigny didn’t set out to run a five-state race portfolio. He got into endurance sports as a triathlete, and the love of the sport pulled him into volunteering, then into producing his own mountain bike races in Louisiana in the late 1990s. By 2009, Wattigny had launched his first full-fledged event management company, and in 2019, that company officially merged into FRESHJUNKIE Racing, where Wattigny became one of four partners and took on the role of Marketing Director.
Today, FRESHJUNKIE ‘s portfolio spans Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, with almost 50,000 annual participants across roughly 14 to 15 owned-and-operated events, plus about 15 additional timing-only contracts. The flagship event is the Louisiana Marathon, which will celebrate its 16th year in January 2027 — a 10,000-runner destination race built around a full weekend “finish festival,” seven live bands, and the local staple Jambalaya and Gumbo.
Whether it’s a 10,000-person marquee marathon or a 2,000-person regional race, Wattigny says the standard doesn’t change: “We put a lot of effort and emphasis on the experience overall. It’s not just a race — there’s nothing that we do that is bare minimum. It’s all the same level of execution that we do for our marquee events.”
The Challenge:
Before 2020, FRESHJUNKIE’s flagship events were each run as separate businesses, with five different vendors for registration, photos, email, results, and website hosting. They knew this fragmentation led to inefficiency, but they also understood the significant risk of making major changes midstream. In 2020, the newly merged company was hit by the pandemic, grinding events to a halt.
Then, they found RunSignup.
We realized that with RunSignup, one company does what we are doing with five different vendors.
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing
The Turning Point: One Platform, Zero Guesswork
The turning point came in the middle of 2020, when Wattigny attended RunSignup’s week-long virtual symposium. Immediately, he called his partners and switched everything under one roof — registration, website, email, results and photos — in what he called “an obvious move”.
“Having everything in one home [RunSignup], I think, has contributed to our growth — we’re able to do things quicker, cleaner. If we were trying to do all of the things that now define a FRESHJUNKIE experience without RunSignup, I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but it would just be a whole lot more difficult.”
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing
Despite the risk of switching multiple major events in the same year, the move, along with creative event management, paid off. FRESHJUNKIE hosting a socially-distanced 3,000 person Gulf Coast Marathon and adjusted the the date and size of the Louisiana Marathon rather than cancel it outright.
Images from the socially distanced 2020 Gulf Coast Marathon
Real Time Photos and Results that Keep Pace with Expectations
FRESHJUNKIE hires its own photography team for every event, and RunSignup’s RaceDay Photo Platform is where those photos live: uploaded, organized, and delivered to participants (ideally the same day). For the Louisiana Marathon alone, that means roughly 55,000 photos captured and shared over a single race weekend.
This impressive photo record sets the bar high, and Wattigny knows that participants now expect their results and photos within minutes, not days. Meeting that expectation is something that FRESHJUNKIE consistently ties to the company’s bottom line.
“Without RunSignup we would not be able to get photos and results out that fast, and people have come to expect that instantaneous output. We’ve raised the level of expectations, which I think is why last year we experienced over 25% growth across our events. We have to be moving forward in technology… people want the results right there.”
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing
FRESHJUNKIE Photo Albums Available on RaceDay
Photos Integrated into FRESHJUNKIE Results on RunSignup
Video Banners That Sell the Experience Before Race Day
Wattigny’s single favorite recent RunSignup release is clear: video banners for their race websites, a feature FRESHJUNKIE had previously requested.
For runners who have never experienced a FRESHJUNKIE event, the Video Banner sells the event in a way a photo simply can’t. It walks the prospective participant through a race day journey, not just a snapshot. And, with a custom domain for their RunSignup race website, they are able to present a full, professional website for free (not just a registration page).
“If I had to point to a most recent favorite feature, it would be the video banners. Our editing team has done a great job of constructing them, and it elevates the website and tells the story far better than a static image ever could… Every race has a start and a finish, but a video allows us to tell the story of what the participant can expect.”
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing
A Portion of the Video Banner for Louisiana Marathon (Full Video Banner Here)
Email Marketing on Their Own Terms
FRESHJUNKIE has tried using external email marketing lists before by using a custom campaign from an outside agency. The results weren’t impressive: Wattigny had little control over the content, and the emails had a low click-through rate. Since then, he’s stuck with RunSignup’s free, integrated email tools and FRESHJUNKIE ‘s own database.
Rather than cold outreach to random strangers, this strategy allows FRESHJUNKIE to be deliberate about frequency and purpose. Sends are segmented so that, for example, participants from a corporate 5K don’t get the same content as finishers of a marathon. Additionally, they focus on quality content and real news, with an emphasis on the call to action.
“We try to be very strategic about [our emails] — we send them around our price increases, around medal releases, things that bring value to our participants, not just ‘hey, don’t forget to sign up.’ I don’t want to bombard our database with emails, and I don’t waste my money or time on emails people will trash.“
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing
Examples of Direct, Action-Focused Email Marketing from FRESHJUNKIE
Looking ahead, Wattigny is already excited about what’s next on the RunSignup roadmap: Super Lists and SMS marketing that will break down the silo between events and enable easier cross-promotion between races.
Training, Support, and a True Technology Partner
Beyond any single feature, Wattigny points to RunSignup’s pace of development and depth of training materials as to what enables FRESHJUNKIE ‘s small team to manage more than a dozen event annually. He signs up for nearly every webinar RunSignup offers, and refers back to videos when he can’t join live.
“I’ve got to give [RunSignup] kudos — you update features faster than I can learn them (keep going!). But, the level of training matches that pace… you have a stronger library of training videos than I’ve never seen in other industries or other registration providers.”
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing
RunSignup shares hundreds of webinars and videos for Race Directors via their Knowledge Base and YouTube Channel
Summary
Six years ago, FRESHJUNKIE was taking shape, with a lean team managing five disconnected vendors. Today, with everything consolidated on RunSignup, that same same small team produces around 50,000 participants each year across five states. They’ve seen 25% year-over-year growth, shared tens of thousands of same-day race photos, and stewarded a flagship marathon to it’s 16th year.
All of that success is created by the hard work and creativity of the FRESHJUNKIE team. But it’s helped to have a technology partner like RunSignup that’s also focused on helping events grow and succeed.
“Would FRESHJUNKIE have grown without RunSignup? I can’t say for sure — all I know is that over the last six years we’ve been able to grow alongside RunSignup. Without those tools, it would have made a lot of the things we now take as a normal part of the FRESHJUNKIE experience so much harder to implement. It wouldn’t have been possible without having you guys as our technology partner.”
Mike Wattigny — FRESHJUNKIE Racing