The unexpected brands behind the WNBA’s sponsorship growth

The sports sponsorship landscape has long been chock-full of spirits, snacks, and soda brands. Categories like beauty, shapewear, and feminine care, though, have tended to be less active in the space.

That’s starting to change. This year’s Super Bowl proved fruitful for beauty and skin-care advertisers like CeraVe, e.l.f. Cosmetics, and NYX Cosmetics, and this WNBA season features a group of sponsors like Bumble, Skims, Mielle, and Opill, many of which are newer to the sports world. Those partners have helped contribute to an all-time high in demand for league partnerships, according to Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison.

“A lot of the demand and the interest and the growth is coming from brands who are non-endemic,” Edison told Marketing Brew. “They really may have never had sports sponsorships before and are dipping their toes in the water with a partnership through the league.”

And after just a season or two with the W, some of them are doubling down on their investments.

Long time coming

Hair-care brand Mielle first got involved with the W last year, when President Omar Goff was looking for ways to show that its products can “withstand the toughest conditions”—like, for instance, games and training.

“Everybody is showing traditional hair models and traditional standards of beauty, and that has historically excluded many groups,” Goff said. “I felt like the WNBA was the perfect partnership…It’s a league that is 80% Black women who have textured hair, so it was a very proud moment for us to be able to come to an agreement with them to show that beauty doesn’t just have one look. We get to elevate and redefine what beauty means, with women athletes at the center.”

For Selby Drummond, CMO of Bumble, it felt “bizzare” that the brand hadn’t teamed up with the W prior to this summer, since sports are important to its users, she said. Not long after announcing its league partnership, Bumble inked a deal with the New York Liberty, which Drummond said gave the brand better access to players (and, apparently, mascots: much of Bumble’s content from that partnership so far has revolved around Ellie the Elephant.)

Through its partnership, Mielle has activated at the WNBA Draft and All-Star Weekend, this year increasing the size of its booth at All-Star and partnering with players like Chicago Sky rookie center Kamilla Cardoso and Las Vegas Aces center and three-time league MVP A’ja Wilson. Some fans waited in line for three hours to meet Wilson at Mielle’s All-Star booth, Goff said.

The brand also runs digital banners and commercials during WNBA games, and can use league branding in retail displays, which Goff said has been particularly important. Mielle has seen media coverage increase thanks to the partnership, which has helped with “continued business growth,” he said; Bumble, too, has received media coverage and “social love” around its partnership, Drummond said. Mielle’s household penetration is up by more than 30% this year, according to Goff, which he said he partially attributes to its association with the W.

Year of the rookie

Credit for at least some of the surge in non-endemic brand interest goes to this year’s rookie class, Edison said. NIL has allowed college athletes to build audiences of fans and brands that follow them to the pros, and the audience of the WNBA rookies has been particularly attractive to sponsors, including—and perhaps especially—nontraditional ones, she said.

“They’re coming in with this huge advantage of a built-in audience base, and then brands want to tap into that,” Edison said.

Mielle, for instance, started investing in women’s basketball at the college level, Goff said, working with Sky forward Angel Reese last year, when she was a student-athlete at Louisiana State University and signing a deal with University of Southern California sophomore JuJu Watkins in February. Goff said the brand intends to stick with Watkins into her pro career.

Bumble was also an early mover in the NIL space, signing 50 women college athletes to deals in 2022 for the 50th anniversary of Title IX. It’s since signed more athletes to its NIL roster, including Los Angeles Sparks small forward Cameron Brink when she was playing at Stanford University. Brink continues to serve as a Bumble ambassador as a pro.

Now that the brands have started to carve out space in the W, execs said they’re in it for the long haul. Bumble has more up its sleeve with Liberty players, Drummond said, while Goff is already eager to re-sign with the league and has been exploring team-level partnerships for Mielle in the meantime, he said.

“I’ve been very clear with the league and with my team—us investing in the WNBA is not a moment,” Goff said. “We want to be part of the movement.”