Beauty Brands Are Cashing In on Sports Culture
Athletes and sports organisations have become coveted partners of beauty brands. These deals are getting ever more creative in an increasingly saturated sponsorship market.
Hi friends!
We are baaaaack. I finally completed my move, and I’m writing this newsletter from my new place in Brooklyn. Everyone who knows me knows how long this was in the works, so thank you all for your support and wisdom throughout the process. I can’t wait to take SportsVerse to the next level on this side of the Atlantic.
Today, I’m analysing the next wave of beauty brands cashing in on sports culture, following the lead of early movers like Glossier and devising creative strategies to cut through what’s quickly becoming a saturated market.
But first, here are three things my friends at OffBall and I are watching in sports culture this week.
Football Manager is hiring for a creative lead. Sounds like a crazy fun job. I spent way too many hours on that game back in the day.
Check out PLAYERS, the new sports-fashion print magazine headed up by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and staffed by the best in the business when it comes to this niche, if I say so myself. The project was profiled in BoF.
PSG has launched an accelerator program designed to scale innovative projects across the sports industry.
Also, don’t forget to refer your friends to SportsVerse for insights and good times they can’t get anywhere else.
The rise of women’s sports has opened the floodgates to beauty brands’ investing their marketing dollars in sports through athlete partnerships and team collaborations.
Last week, e.l.f. Cosmetics announced a multi-year collaboration with the NWSL, making it the first beauty sponsor of the elite division of American women’s soccer, ahead of the 2025 season kick-off on Friday. Designated as the league’s official makeup and skin care partner, the brand will also act as the “presenting partner” of the NWSL Challenge Cup, through 2027.
The deal is e.l.f.’s first foray into women’s soccer, as it looks to associate its brand with the growing influence of the NWSL, whose teams have experienced soaring valuations, unprecedented investor interest, and steadily rising stadium attendances (despite grappling with increasing departures of some of its premier home-grown talent for Europe, like Naomi Girma’s recent transfer to Chelsea).
It’s e.l.f.’s latest in a series of partnerships across sports, building on deals with the Billie Jean King Cup, the Professional Women’s Hockey League, Indy 500 driver Katherine Leage, and Paralympic swimmer Anastasia Pagonis.
The brand is a great case study for the new playbook for beauty brands looking to extend their influence into sports culture and grow awareness of their products among fresh audiences through multiple strategic, purpose-driven partnerships.
Beauty came to sports a bit later than the fashion industry, which started exploring sports partnerships en masse around 2021. But the past year has seen a flurry of such deals coming from beauty, haircare and fragrance companies.
Charlotte Tilbury sponsors the all-female F1 Academy series. CeraVe has partnerships with athletes like Anthony Davis and Paige Bueckers. Glossier extended its influence over women’s basketball with its Team USA partnership ahead of the Olympics, while Sephora became the beauty partner of both Unrivaled Basketball and the Serena Williams-owned WNBA expansion franchise Toronto Tempo. Jo Malone has increasingly tapped athlete ambassadors from the NFL and even invested in a Super Bowl ad earlier this year. The list goes on.
Mass-market beauty brands are quickly cottoning onto the sports industry as a fertile marketing ground, said Daniela Morosini, beauty correspondent at The Business of Fashion and The Business of Beauty.
“Sport comes with a naturally positive message and association. There’s also the fact that it can help beauty companies speak authentically about their commitment to female empowerment, and it’s also a pretty risk-free space in terms of the likelihood of scandals that could throw off a brand,” Morosini told SportsVerse.
Deeper Partnerships Than Ever Before
Initial crossovers between beauty and sports tended to be surface-level, with teams and brands unsure of how to make the most of each other’s audiences or how to put forward collaborative products.
“I think it’s more difficult for premium brands especially, and some of the partnerships come across very inauthentic because they just don't make sense,” said Morosini. “It's literally just a brand name plus a certain sport, and there's no logic, reasoning or rationale.”
The market is now saturated with a seemingly endless stream of such deals across a range of different sports. To make an impact, brands are getting more strategic and creative as to how they structure and present their partnerships with teams, leagues and athletes.
For example, beyond a mere sponsorship deal or product release, e.l.f. has geared its NWSL partnership around the parties’ shared ambition to widen access for women in sports with a series of planned initiatives. e.l.f. was represented by Billie Jean King Enterprises in negotiations with the NWSL, along with media company Footballco which operates Indivisa, a women’s soccer-focused platform and the NWSL’s official media partner. Footballco will “lead activations on behalf of e.l.f. across digital, social and experiential channels”, according to the press release.
Sephora’s Unrivaled Basketball partnership, meanwhile, includes tunnel walk sponsorship, with players arriving on the “Sephora Carpet”, capitalising on the glamour and fashion appeal of women’s basketball’s biggest stars, and recording pre-game GRWM videos with known beauty-lovers like Angel Reese and Dijonai Carrington. The tournament’s refs are also decked out in Sephora-branded gear.
Creative Link-Ups
The unprecedented cultural influence of sports teams and certain athletes is underscored by the sorts of brands which now consider working with them, as well as the type of content they create to promote their products with them.
We’ve seen CeraVe get creative by leveraging high-profile athlete partners like Anthony Davis for marketing stunts, like when he was spotted carrying a jumbo-sized tub of the brand’s moisturising lotion on his first visit to the Mavs locker room in February. Haircare brand Madison Reed has also been cashing on the viral popularity of women’s college hoops, leveraging the even more viral popularity of UConn standout Paige Bueckers and her fellow TikTok-loving teammates like Azzi Fudd, for low-fi commercials and paid social media content.
The brand even released (probably) the world’s first signature athlete hair colour shade—“UConnic Blonde”—in honour Bueckers, projected #1 pick in the 2025 WNBA draft this April. As part of the deal, Madison Reed also made a $10,000 donation to the UConn women’s basketball program, underscoring how far brands are now willing to go to secure key athletes or teams amid stiff competition and bidding wars.
Tapping the Male Beauty Market
The biggest opportunity when it comes to the intersection of beauty and sports is the chance afforded to brands to get their products in front of men, Morosini said.
Its why brands like Sally Hansen have gravitated towards signing bright young male athletes like Jared McCain (below), who was a strong contender for NBA Rookie of the Year before a knee injury ended his season, but who also happens to enjoy painting his nails and singing and dancing to Drake songs on TikTok.
(The topic of leveraging male athletes to reach untapped fan groups is one Daniela and I reported on together—in relation to the fragrance category—in my final story as a BoF staffer in December.)
“Given how much young men especially, worship their favorite male athletes and how those men are increasingly interested in things like fragrance, grooming and skincare, that to me feels like a much more natural reason for beauty brands to explore partnerships in sports,” Morosini said.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Until next time!
DYM
If you enjoyed this article, check out my other recent stories on similar topics:
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Great piece! Very curious about that statement though, "it’s also a pretty risk-free space in terms of the likelihood of scandals that could throw off a brand." Obviously good for sports that some of these brands don't know a lot about sports ah ah! Why do you think tennis is (again) being left out now? Are the players too expensive or is it the slump I think tennis is getting into? Even more eye-catching was that "e.l.f. was represented by Billie Jean King Enterprises in negotiations with the NWSL".
Let's go for a run in Brooklyn next month