New Balance & Coco Gauff, The Best Sports-Fashion Tie-Up Out There
Relatable content, DIY marketing, a smart collabs strategy and bringing the tunnel walk to tennis.
Hi friends! Welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can't find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture. Powered by OffBall.
Before we get into things today, some updates! I went to the Champions League final in Munich on Saturday and had a lot of fun — thank you Nina and Kyle! I then spent Monday at Adidas HQ for a little something I’m working on. I got to visit their archive again, where I spent more time nerding out over some sportswear grails from the past and learning secrets about the brand’s history. Maybe I’ll write a newsletter soon on all the good Adidas lore I learned.
I’m travelling this week, so there will likely be no Thursday newsletter, but regular programming will resume next Tuesday.
Finally… new project alert! A SportsVerse x Launchmetrics joint report on sportswear brands’ ambassador strategies is coming your way later this month. You’ll find more details on how to sign up for the live launch session at the bottom of today’s newsletter.
New Balance and Coco Gauff Are Setting a Fresh Blueprint for Sports-Fashion Partnerships In Tennis
Every now and then in the sportswear world, a brand and an athlete join forces to create a partnership that puts the rest of the category on notice.
Those who achieve this do so with a magic potion that requires the perfect mix of strategy and effort from the brand, and a natural, lo-fi, DIY, relatable approach from the partner athlete in question, to create the perfect marketing storm.
Adidas, for example, has achieved this in the basketball category with Anthony Edwards. Nike has reached this point with many of its iconic athletes over the years. On is starting to cook with Ben Shelton.
But right now, there’s no better sports-style partnership out there than New Balance and Coco Gauff. People often ask me what a best-in-class athlete-sportswear brand partnership looks like, and this one checks every box. Here’s why.
What makes Coco Gauff the perfect brand ambassador for New Balance?
It’s not enough for an athlete to be famous and good at their sport for them to sell products. Just ask any number of legendary NBA bigs whose signature shoes collect dust on Footlocker shelves (no names mentioned!) It takes a certain secret sauce.
Here’s why Coco is a dream for New Balance:
Firstly and most importantly, she’s very good at her day job.
She’s relatable. She’s not afraid to show her human side and be vulnerable with her followers on her various platforms. She pokes fun at herself for doing very normal human things like walking out for her first French Open match and forgetting her rackets. “No rackets but the 'fit is still a hit,” she wrote. She wasn’t wrong. More details on that later.
She’s a fashion star. And not in an “always seen at red carpet events in Balenciaga couture or looks put together by a celebrity stylist” kind of way. She just loves clothes, knows how to put a good ’fit together and genuinely enjoys styling herself both on and off court.
She’s a social media natural and has been on TikTok since it was called
Musical.ly.
She takes an active role in the New Balance partnership, breaking the fourth wall with her fans to show them the daily realities of what it’s like to be a young athlete (ups and downs included) living your dream and working with a brand that plays to your strengths on and off the court.
She’s funny.
All this and she’s only 21 years old — a seasoned pro and athlete-marketer already. Gold dust for any brand able to work with her. Enter New Balance.
Why is New Balance the perfect partner for Coco?
New Balance knows it’s sitting on a marketing goldmine with Coco Gauff. Chris Davis, the New Balance CMO who interviewed last year, is doing an incredible job at marketing this partnership and several others which merge performance sports with high fashion. The brand is on a hot streak and wants to hit $10 million in annual sales in the next few years.
They’re making the most out their sponsorship of Coco by:
Putting her in eye-catching product to drive interest and brand heat at large. Often, we see brands go all in on marketing with no actual product to sell that people want. If you talk the talk, you better have compelling products ready to go when consumers come looking. New Balance is getting that right — and in a sport where not many other brands are choosing to invest right now.
Playing up to her natural fashion interests. New Balance has worked with Coco for some time now to ensure her court walk-ons are the tennis equivalent of the W/NBA tunnel walks. At the French Open, she has been walking onto court wearing a custom New Balance and Vanson leather jacket on top of a range of eye-catching tie-dye style dresses.
Building hype by investing in high-heat, exclusive collaborations centered around Coco. Beyond a fat paycheck, there’s only one way a brand can show an athlete that they genuinely invested in them as a business partner, rather than a marketing mouthpiece. And that’s by investing in bespoke products made for them, by them and in their image. That’s exactly what New Balance is doing both with Coco’s signature shoe line (cool, but standard) and also with the NB x Miu Miu x Coco Gauff collaboration, which she has played an active role in designing and bringing to market. Coco’s excitement about being the centrepiece of that collaboration is plain for everyone to see. She has been teasing different outfits from the still-unreleased collab at various tournaments in recent weeks and recently expressed her joy on TikTok that she was currently the only person in the world who had those pieces to wear as she pleases.
That is how you use an athlete to build hype and consumer demand, instead of gifting influencers and paying them to #ad everyone into maybe clicking the link in their bio. Allowing fans to see pieces being used simultaneously in performance (on court, mid-game) and casual (pre-game walk on, press conferences, elevator selfies) contexts is genius. Again, it’s showing consumers why it’s desirable, rather than telling. Each game, IG story, TikTok dance becomes a fresh product discovery and marketing opportunity, without New Balance having to drop $7 million on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. It’s just smart business.
Stepping back, and letting Coco do the talking. No one wants to feel like they are being sold anything by brands on social media. Instead of New Balance putting out cringey campaigns or taking out billboards everywhere, they are keeping it chill (and keeping marketing costs WAAY down) and letting Coco give her fans natural insights into their unique partnership.
Before Wimbledon last year, for example, Coco posted a TikTok flipping through an outfit lookbook and several bags of clothing that New Balance had sent her for use during the tournament. She showed each suggested look and asked people for their opinion on which items she should wear on which day, and shared how she planned to style them.
This is organic sportswear marketing gold because: 1) the brand is comfortable and trusting enough in her as a partner to allow it; 2) Gauff is not putting on an act — she’s just being herself and posting her experiences in the moment, so it’s organic; 3) this isn’t some forced marketing play and we are not being sold anything — it’s just a relatable athlete giving us civilians insight into life on tour and what it’s like to be a sponsored athlete.
New Project Alert! SportsVerse x Launchmetrics
One thing I’m working on that I can speak about is an in-depth report in collaboration with Launchmetrics, a data and technology company whose insights I frequently pulled while I was a reporter at The Business of Fashion. We’re working on a project (combining Launchmetrics’ quantitative data and my industry insights) which unpacks how sportswear brands seek to gain loyalty among different communities through the use of ambassadors, from top-tier fashion-forward athletes to fitness nerds to content creators to music stars-turned-designers.
I’ll be talking through the key lessons from the report alongside some knowledgeable friends on June 24 at 10 EDT/4pm CET. The live session is free to join.
Sign up here, and we’ll see you there.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM