{"id":6072,"date":"2023-07-21T13:48:07","date_gmt":"2023-07-21T13:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/marketing\/birdies-co-founder-on-the-brands-first-ever-sports-sponsorship\/"},"modified":"2023-07-21T13:48:08","modified_gmt":"2023-07-21T13:48:08","slug":"birdies-co-founder-on-the-brands-first-ever-sports-sponsorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=6072","title":{"rendered":"Birdies\u2019 co-founder on the brand\u2019s first-ever sports sponsorship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">For some brands (think Gatorade or FanDuel), sports marketing is a natural fit. For others, perhaps not so much.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">That was the case for women\u2019s footwear brand Birdies, according to president and co-founder Marisa Sharkey. But when she and her team first heard about Angel City Football Club\u2014one of the newest National Women\u2019s Soccer League (NWSL) expansion teams that already has been the subject of an HBO documentary series, plus a celebrity ownership group that includes Natalie Portman\u2014they were immediately excited about potentially getting involved.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">\u201cEven though we weren\u2019t looking for a sports sponsorship specifically, we just really liked the idea of supporting women through sports and the way that the team and the leadership themselves talked about it,\u201d Sharkey told Marketing Brew. \u201cWe thought it would be very unique and unexpected for a brand like Birdies, that was relatively small at the time, to even think about sponsoring a sports team.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">The team didn\u2019t have a roster or a stadium locked in at the time, Sharkey said, so there were \u201ca lot of uncertainties involved\u201d in the process. Now, about two years into the sponsorship, Birdies and ACFC have already gone beyond adding the brand\u2019s logo to the team\u2019s kits, including collaborating on a shoe and setting up an internship program.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\"><em>This interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\"><strong>What were some of the details you discussed with ACFC during early talks about the sponsorship?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">We were both moving quickly and working with relatively small teams, so it probably wasn\u2019t as complicated as many sports partnerships\u2026They shared so much about their mission, about equity and equality and having women investors and women founders and [being] women-run, and that\u2019s exactly what we were about at Birdies. We\u2019ve always been about creating beautiful and comfortable shoes, we say to help women fly, and we\u2019ve done a number of initiatives related to that. In particular, we love mentoring young women. We\u2019ve done different programs to mentor young women and really help them fly. Hearing that Angel City, too, wanted to be able to do that, and 10% of the sponsorship\u2014not just for Birdies, but for everybody that they work with\u2014was going to go back into community-specific programs\u2026it just was a natural, great fit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\"><strong>What community programs is your sponsorship in particular helping to fund?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">We started with them something that we call the Soar Internship. They recruit great young women, mainly from the LA area\u2026and it\u2019s a summer-based, paid internship program sponsored by Birdies\u2026The women get to shadow all the different departments at Angel City as well as at Birdies for a different period of time\u2026It\u2019s really around introducing women to leadership, building their confidence, and just opening their eyes to career paths that are hard for any high school girl to even know about.<\/p>\n<div class=\"style__InlineSubscribeWrapper-sc-8ccc5960-1 jArFiG\">\n<div id=\"inline-subscribe\" class=\"style__Container-sc-6fdcc87e-0 style__RoundedContainer-sc-6c630ac0-0 iTWzCH wGFGp\">\n<h5 class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 cVdxJM inline-subscribe\">Get marketing news you&#8217;ll actually want to read<\/h5>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 iEaGlZ inline-subscribe\">The email newsletter guaranteed to bring you the latest stories shaping the marketing and advertising world, like only the Brew can.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\"><strong>Given the fact that this was your first time doing a sports sponsorship and that the team was so new, did that cause any nervousness or hesitation going in?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">Of course. Anytime you do something new, there is that uncertainty that comes along with it, but it felt like a natural partnership and an easy relationship. Sometimes in building a company, you have these ideas, and then you\u2019re lucky to work your way to get that potential opportunity, but as you\u2019re moving through it, it just feels not as easy to do or not as easy of a relationship as you expected. I think in this case, we all saw eye to eye about what we wanted to do together, and so that helped to smooth over some of our fears.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\"><strong>What are your KPIs or general goals for the sponsorship?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">Ultimately, our goal for a partnership like this is really to authenticate who we are and to be doing the types of things that we say that we want to be doing. We want to lift women up. Our whole brand was born out of our network supporting us and helping us get to the next step, the next opportunity, and it\u2019s really critical to us to be able to do that for future generations. With that as a big-picture goal, certainly this partnership helps us achieve that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\"><strong>Four Angel City players (including Ali Riley) are playing in this year\u2019s World Cup. Is Birdies doing anything to engage with the tournament?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dist__StyledText-sc-5a46198a-12 ggMJgB\">Angel City themselves are [hosting] the Equity House\u2026in Sydney during the World Cup to bring women in sports, women and business, women in other leadership areas together to promote the impact of sports on women\u2019s issues and how we can continue to push that forward. Birdies will be participating in some of those interviews and panel discussions. It\u2019ll be really exciting to be there in person, watch a few games, and then be able to further the conversations with a lot of women who are interested in this topic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marketingbrew.com\/stories\/2023\/07\/21\/birdies-co-founder-on-the-brand-s-first-ever-sports-sponsorship?utm_source=&#038;utm_medium=syndication&#038;utm_campaign=feed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For some brands (think Gatorade or FanDuel), sports marketing is a natural fit. For others, perhaps not so much. That was the case for women\u2019s footwear brand Birdies, according to president and co-founder Marisa Sharkey. But when she and her team first heard about Angel City Football Club\u2014one of the newest National Women\u2019s Soccer League [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-marketing"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Birdies\u2019 co-founder on the brand\u2019s first-ever sports sponsorship | Brandiary<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For some brands (think Gatorade or FanDuel), sports marketing is a natural fit. 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