Sports merch that’s cute? It exists

In 2021, newly relocated to San Francisco from New York City, Danielle Snyder Shorenstein went with her husband to her first Golden State Warriors game. She wasn’t a sports fan, really, and especially not a Bay Area sports fan. “I identify as a New Yorker,” she says. Having owned and run a fashion and jewelry brand called Dannijo with her sister, Jodie Snyder Morel, since 2008, and looking around at the game merch, she thought to herself how unlikely she’d be to wear any of it. 

Over the course of the season, Shorenstein continued to go to games with her husband and began experimenting with her own take on fanwear. She cut up a jersey, added a crochet collar, some crystal work—and wore it to games. Soon enough, players’ wives and girlfriends were sliding into her DMs. Strangers were stopping her in the arena bathrooms, all asking the same question: “Where did you get that?”

“It woke me up,” Shorenstein says. “Sport is huge. I used to think about sports like, slap a logo on a product and show off your team. But I thought, I’m going to make this chic. That was the aha moment. That was the unlock.” 

As Shorenstein began to cultivate her own grassroots following at the Warriors games, she and her sister, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, got to work on a second business, DannijoPro, a fanwear brand that blends fashion and sports fandom. The effort has been an experiment in innovating across two mature industries that rarely intersect. 

Now, nearly two years in, the business has a full line of fan gear, from understated button downs with a tiny, offset team logo embroidered on the shirt to bespoke vintage gear with hand-sewn details, crocheted collars and rhinestone touches. They’ve even started a line they’re calling 1/won, using vintage fan gear to make bespoke pieces at higher price points. Items at DannijoPro run anywhere from $85 to $495, and are sold on the company’s website, as well as at brand-hosted pop up shops and events. At the end of April, the brand will launch on online fashion retailer Revolve. 

Right now, DannijoPro is growing 120% year over year, with 40% of their sales coming from DMs on social media. The brand has grown through word of mouth, with a boost from the likes of Brooke Shields, Ayesha and Stephen Curry, Selena Gomez, and Benny Blanco wearing it. The brand has also brokered a licensing agreement with the NBA. 

Fashion reworked

The founders’ experience building DannijoPro has been entirely different from their first foray as fashion founders. “The lay of the land in sports licensing is complicated. There is no road map,” Shorenstein says. “Every league operates differently and every team is different. The distribution is complicated. It’s layered and nuanced. Relationships really matter. But, there’s a lot of opportunity to be entrepreneurial. We are creating our own path within the confines of this landscape.” 

And, that path, says Morel, is focused on the female consumer in fandom—a buyer that’s been largely ignored in the sports fan apparel business, favoring an infamous “pink it and shrink it” model. “We’re trying to build something from the ground up,” says Morel, noting that there’s no preexisting distribution channel for what DanniJo Pro offers.

“Our stuff doesn’t live on plastic hangers in an arena. We are taking a risk, trying to cultivate and create community organically. It’s not a short cut,” Shorenstein says. 

When you’re trying to take up space in a market you’re new to, you have to justify your presence, which, the sisters say, is more difficult than they ever expected. They’ve had to be creative to establish a toehold in fandom, brokering relationships with players, hosting events, and focusing on the bespoke aspect and craftsmanship in what they do.

Looking at DannijoPro with a wider lens, it’s clear the company is also capitalizing on a thread emerging at the intersection of business and culture wherein brands like Hathaway Hutton with its viral Boatkin, Kristin Juszczyk’s Off-Season (in partnership with Skims founder Emme Grede, Fanatics and the NFL), collegiate artwork at Axis Hats and the Clearly Collective with its college campus and city-map scarves are leveraging established, legacy IP as a sort of growth hack. Even on Etsy and Instagram, budding designers are peddling reworked Ralph Lauren button-downs and Nike sweatshirts for a refreshed, unique look. 

The very existence of these businesses raises a question around innovation and originality, and whether building a brand from established IP, or creating brand adjacency, is equally as wise as building one from scratch.

“Licensing is a win-win-win trifecta,” says strategist and licensing expert April Beach. “It is amazing for the creator of the IP—in this case the NBA—the licensee at DannijoPro and it’s amazing for the end users. It increases profit and it gives the licensee the opportunity to take someone’s incredible work and build their genius with it.” 

Nicole Dolgon, partner at New York City law firm Esca Legal, says that one of the best bits of a licensing agreement like the one DannijoPro has with the NBA is that there’s exponential growth in fanbase with very little lift for the NBA. Morel and Shorenstein do the heavy lifting, maintaining constant communication and product approvals with the league. And, so long as they can jump through the right hoops and maintain that relationship in all of the best ways, everyone does well. 

Perhaps the most validating interaction for Morel and Shorenstein came when Divya Mathur, chief marketing officer at online clothing retailer Revolve, called. “My focus is always where our customer is spending her time,” says Mathur, noting the brand will launch on Revolve at the end of April. “On my radar was an increase in attending sporting events. I was looking at brands in this space and I came across DannijoPro. I was really drawn to very specific things: their silhouettes, the sweatshirts. None of the product out there felt like it fit our customer.” 

But, she says, DannijoPro offered an opportunity to play in the sports space without leaving the fashion world: “It exists beyond game da. It crosses over into everyday life, with a lot of craftsmanship and detail. These are pieces you’ll feel proud to wear. That’s the white space in the market.” 

Morel says filling the void has evolved into three buckets of the business: NBA-licensed pieces with Dannijo signatures (crochet collars, hand-stitching, crystal work), available for any NBA team; the Atelier (or what the sisters call blanks), where customers take Dannijo “blanks” and work with in-house artists to personalize their pieces; and then 1/won vintage, which is sourced through longtime vintage dealers in California and Florida, reworked by hand (cut, stitched, painted). Organizing the business this way, especially with its vintage 1/won line and its hand-added details, is a resistance to fast fashion and AI-generated sameness in our culture, says Shorenstein. 

Sports fandom is a generational loyalty that has nothing to do with trends. (You don’t send your Warriors jacket to the RealReal, says Morel.) There’s a greater emotional attachment to these pieces, especially when they’ve been altered and created by humans. The community DannijoPro builds is as much the product the brand is selling as the clothing itself. The stadium bathroom becomes as much the trunk show as the athlete’s tunnel has become the runway.

Says Shorenstein: “The NBA is our window to the world. People are buying joy and community with DannijoPro. And having an eye and style matters in this space. We are going to be lending our fashion house aesthetic to other sports and leagues outside of the NBA.”