The WNBA’s Million-Dollar Offer Isn’t What It Seems
In the past two years alone, several women’s sports leagues have started from scratch, expansion teams have entered the fray, and clubs have forged fresh identities under new leadership—and they’ve all needed uniforms and logos worthy of their newfound prominence.
Unrivaled, the new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league cofounded by WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, has set itself apart thanks to a unique aesthetic, which will be on full display when its inaugural postseason tips off March 16. The Laces, in mint green and coral, will face Rose Basketball Club, in hunter green and blush pink; while the Lunar Owls, clad in black and purple with winged jersey numbers, challenge Vinyl, in their red uniforms with bright-blue record grooves.
Unrivaled sought out unexpected color palettes and designed six distinct circular crests, taking a cue from European soccer clubs and creating visual cohesion. It partnered with Under Armour to translate the look for the court.
On the front of the jerseys, the team names pop. “Especially for a league that’s just starting, it’s important that people are able to recognize and identify each team right off the bat,” Colby Smith, Under Armour’s graphic designer for team sports and a lead designer on the Unrivaled project, tells Front Office Sports.
On the back, players’ names appear below their numbers, rather than above, so they aren’t covered up by long hair. “We want to make sure her name is loud and proud,” he continues. (The Professional Women’s Hockey League also switched the placement of players’ names as part of a campaign with the beer brand Molson, though these specialty jerseys have so far been worn only during International Women’s Day games.)
The company tailored inseam lengths knowing some players like to roll their shorts, giving them the option to add or subtract length when they placed their uniform order. And, as with all sports, says Kelsey Greenwell, Under Armour’s design director for team sports apparel, designers have been watching the games intently for early signs of what they should tweak moving forward. “We observe. We watch how bodies are moving while they’re playing … like, ‘All right, that girl has done this four times in a game,’” she says, pulling at her collar. “Clearly, her neckline is too tight.”
Like many new leagues and teams, Unrivaled was working on an expedited timeline for its first season. Rather than Under Armour’s usual 12- to 18-month lead time, the designers had about two months to go from ideation to production to get the uniforms delivered by Jan. 1, which meant shelving some custom elements for future seasons. But, unlike in the NCAA (another longtime partner), which allows for decoration really only on the sides of jerseys and the shorts, here they have significant freedom, says Smith—and they plan to take advantage.
The PWHL was working against a similarly short time clock for its 2024–2025 season. The six teams played their first season under city names with jerseys in a primary team color. For their second season, however, they debuted official names, logos, and custom uniforms designed by Bauer. The look was the product of seven months of design meetings, fabric testing, prototyping, and fittings—plus “some heavy-duty finger crossing,” says Mary-Kay Messier, Bauer’s VP of global marketing.
“The process, in many ways, was a race,” Kanan Bhatt-Shah, the PWHL’s VP of brand and marketing, tells FOS. “It was something we heard from our fans from Day One. … ‘We want jerseys with logos and colors and team identities.’ And for us, that was our number-one objective: We know that’s what our fans want. How do we move mountains to make that happen?”
The goal was a matter of both design and performance, ensuring the equipment functioned at the same level as professional men’s gear while taking into account players’ size and range of motion. That meant adjusting the chest and waist measurements, taking up the length, testing various neck widths, and repositioning stripe details at the arms to allow for more movement.
Aesthetically, the six designs needed to feel distinctive and serve as the basis for longstanding brands, which is why they sweated details like the tiny waves and miniature fleur-de-lis accenting the numbers on the Boston Fleet and Montréal Victoire jerseys, respectively.
Nike, a founding partner of the National Women’s Soccer League, has provided gear since the first season in 2013. But it wasn’t until last year that the sportswear giant rolled out custom kits for every team.
“Ultimately, the kit is the most visible thing a club will do each year—full stop. So it should be the absolute essence of what your club and brand stands for,” Tyler Emerick, senior director of brand and content at San Diego Wave FC, tells FOS. “Everything we do as a club is built around our jerseys: Our social graphics for the year, our stadium animations, what you see on the jumbotron, our signage at events, a lot of our ancillary merch products—all of it has a throughline to the jersey that we release each year.”
The Wave’s 2024 Del Sol jersey with its aquamarine, fuschia, and orange to evoke San Diego sunsets was the top-seller in the league—not only in California but also in 21 other states, according to data shared on social media by retailer Soccer.com.
When the Wave first began the two-year process of working on the kits, the club asked Nike to partner with a San Diego designer who would understand the city’s local character.
Without decades of design transition, new teams are finding freedom. “We don’t hear in this league, ‘Well, this is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we’ve always got to do it,’” says Emerick. “Not having that type of mentality really opens up the aperture in terms of what is possible and what we can do creatively, and allows us to take swings.”
There are still boundaries to push. For example, many athletes in the NWSL’s 2025 campaign images promoting its secondary kits have their sleeves rolled up. To Flo Williams, director of women’s sport at Matta, a London-based creative agency for sports and lifestyle brands, that prompts the question of why the league doesn’t offer a sleeveless style to begin with. “If we were to start soccer again in the U.S. for women, would [sleeveless jerseys] be an option?” she poses.
Williams spends a lot of time thinking about how women’s leagues could better serve athletes and fans. A longtime competitive rugby player herself, she recently landed the “dream project” of creating team identities for the six cities comprising Women’s Elite Rugby, a new U.S. league that will play its first game this month. Working with league president Jessica Hammond-Graf, Williams and her colleagues came up with the phrase “aggressively inclusive.”
From there, they came up with a short list of names after speaking with fans and players and researching local history and iconography. Chicago Tempest was an easy “yes,” fitting seamlessly within the framework; Boston Banshees referenced Irish folklore and demonstrated the sport’s unique appeal; New York Exiles was a nod to the city’s historical embrace of outsiders.
“Rugby is a physical sport, and you have to be in it to want to put your body on the line like that,” she says. When you’re risking so much for a shirt, in other words, “it best be a shirt that you believe in.”
Along with players, fans also have to buy into their teams’ branding so they’ll snag merchandise and take a name and jersey beyond a stadium into the wider world. And the gear, too, needs to be available—a system that still has kinks to work out.
Unrivaled, for example, had to strike a deal with the WNBA players’ union to market the name, image, and likeness of its players (all of whom also play in the WNBA) before it could sell any player-related products. That deal was announced in late February, and Unrivaled fans were finally able to get their hands on jerseys in early March—though only in-person at Miami’s Wayfair Arena, and only for the last few games of the season. The league has yet to confirm a date for online sales, but it says it is “working towards making them more accessible to all fans and will share more as soon as more purchasing options become available.”
Making cool products that fans want to wear—and can actually buy—is critical for turning new teams into household names.
Justyne Freud, the Wave’s VP of marketing, points to the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys she sees the club’s players wear on game-day walk-ins. Her team was thrilled when Golden State Warriors player Jimmy Butler was photographed shooting hoops in a Wave jersey during the offseason; it was a sign the brand had legs well beyond the soccer world.
