I'm calling it now: the next billion-dollar brand in this space won't be built for the woman who plays. It'll be built for the woman who shows up for her favorite players.
rhode sold to e.l.f. Beauty in a deal valued at up to $1 billion after three years in market. Hailey Bieber didn't get there with a mind-blowing moisturizer. She got there by building a whole universe around the clean girl: pilates, matcha, Alo, and a Stanley in the cupholder. The clean girl was an identity with an economy attached.
Move over, clean girl. Pilates and matcha had their run. The new it girl has a jersey, a setting spray, and a group chat planning the away game.
She Already Has the Rituals
An identity isn't a product. It's a set of habits people recognize.
The clean girl had the 6am pilates class and the iced matcha after. The W fan has the tunnel-fit screenshot, the pregame get-ready, the group chat that goes off at tip, and the player she's followed since college. She rides with a player, not a logo.
She's got Fudd Around and Find Out and Unsupervised in her queue and WBB creators all over her feed. She's saving fan fits on Pinterest, copying tunnel looks for everyday, and cutting up and bedazzling her own merch when the store doesn't have it. She’s wearing the makeup that fell from the rafters in Sephora bags at Valkyrie games and using products from Lexie Hull’s FORTA Cosmetics to look and feel her best. She's trying to get into the next 400 Club watch party.
This is what an identity looks like before the brands catch up.
The League Grew Up. The Merch Didn't.
This season, 3.79 million fans came through the doors, up 20.5% from last year, with two new teams in Toronto and Portland. The Valkyries sold out all 22 home games for the second straight season, and Chicago vs. Indiana pulled 3.31 million viewers on NBC in August. She's buying, too: WNBA merch sales jumped 756% in 2024. And yet women's sports merch is still a $4 billion opportunity nobody's filling, with roughly nine pieces of men's merch on the shelf for every one piece of women's.
Some brands are starting to get it. They're shifting from dressing the athlete to dressing the person watching.
Dairy Boy launched DB Sport in April: everything under $85, sized XXS to XXL, with a pop-up timed to the Miami Open. Founder Paige Lorenze said the goal was dressing women to feel "confident, capable and grounded." Nothing in that sentence is about performance. It's a uniform for the stands.
Nike got the memo too. This month it took its NBA Standard Issue Collection to a New York Fashion Week runway in Bushwick. It covers all 30 teams, it's full price, and it's pitched as tunnel style for the fan. Nike's Lindsey Yamasaki described that fan like this: "He wants really expressive, vibrant, 'look at me,' oversized logos."
The league has millions of her in the stands. So, who's dressing the W fan?
Nobody's Built Her Whole World Yet
The clean girl had Alo and pilates. The women's basketball fan has a camera roll full of WNBA memes and tunnel-fit screenshots she's recreating on apps like OneOff. She's making fan art, planning the away-game weekend in the group chat, and following her players all offseason.
Nobody is building the whole thing. That's what DAMECORE is for.
We're curating this world, starting with our reworked vintage lace shorts, and covering the business behind the game and the brands actually showing up for women's basketball.
This Finals season, we're bringing it to life at our first event.
What I really adore about the W is how the players really get to express their personalities, and it’s bringing in the fans!! We’re still a bit behind over in Europe with that…