While all eyes are on LSU head coach Lane Kiffin ahead of his first visit back to Ole Miss since leaving his post there, another Kiffin is using the spotlight to her advantage. On Monday, Kiffin’s daughter Landry, who is still a student at Ole Miss, launched a college-inspired clothing brand called Fifth Year.
Like her father, 21-year-old Landry has a large online following—nearly 300,000 across Instagram and TikTok. She’d been teasing the brand on her personal social-media channels for several months prior to the Sept. 14 launch, including in a promotional video filmed at LSU’s Tiger Stadium.
Landry tells Front Office Sports she partnered with talent agency Teall Management and design company Wyt Space to bring the brand to life. She says LSU Athletics is not “formally involved” in the venture, and her parents “are not financially or operationally involved,” either. (A representative for Kiffin at LSU did not respond to a request for comment.)
Still, “having a family involved in college sports definitely helps from a marketing perspective,” Landry says. And the influence of the Kiffin college-football pedigree certainly shows in the brand’s launch: Blue-and-red and purple-and-gold colorways feature prominently throughout Fifth Year’s initial collection, which includes activewear sets, sweats sets, and accessories like scarves and hats. Landry also personally hosted pop-ups in both Oxford, Mississippi and Baton Rouge, Louisiana this week.
“College game days and the passionate energy around them are such a big part of the inspiration behind Fifth Year, so I really want the brand to have a physical presence on college campuses,” she tells FOS. “The plan is to continue bringing pop-ups to more college campuses, especially around big game-day weekends.”
Fellow college football star Kirk Herbstreit and two of his twenty-something sons, Jake and Tye, are following a similar playbook with Peter Fan Club, the clothing line they launched earlier this month on behalf of the College GameDay host’s popular dog.
In addition to its online store, Peter Fan Club is holding pop-up shops at the college campuses GameDay visits this fall. (Through the season’s first two weeks, these temporary stores were held next to the flagship Raising Canes location in Baton Rouge and at the Texas Zeta sorority house in Austin.)
While college football celebrity offspring peddle their upstart brands, legacy companies are also employing the campus-tour model. Nike sponsored sororities during recruitment at more than a half-dozen major universities this back-to-school season, and told FOS they refer to sisters as “campus athletes.”
As the spectacle around college sports continues to grow—fueled in no small part by coaches and programs like Kiffin’s LSU, which proactively courts pomp and circumstance—the commercial activity around university towns seems only in its early days.
