Perfect Fit: Applying the Lululemon Model to Women's Volleyball 🏐
Perfect Fit: Applying the Lululemon Model to Women's Volleyball 🏐
League One Volleyball (LOVB) believes it will be the next major sports league in the US thanks to its unique approach, inspired by the community-based retail model of Lululemon.
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BIG IDEA
League One Volleyball, also known as “LOVB,” believes that it will be the next major sports league in the United States.
Olympic gold medallist Lindsey Vonn, two-time WNBA MVP Candace Parker, actress Amy Schumer, and Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum each will be hoping that this belief is right, having recently invested in the start-up women’s volleyball league’s $35 million Series B round.
Kicking off its inaugural season at the end of 2024, right on the heels of Olympic Games in Paris, LOVB aims to take a unique, grassroots up approach with each pro team built from a foundation of ambitious junior volleyball clubs.
The “LOVB” (pronounced ‘Love’) brand is essentially encompassing two key layers: pro and club.
“Pro provides that halo and a differentiator for the club, and the club provides that built in identity, loyalty, and consumer for pro,” explained CEO and co-founder, Katlyn Gao on the Joncast Podcast.
“For us, the idea is that from those two core assets, you’ve basically unlocked all these other value pools, [such as] experiential product, physical products, [and] digital,” she continued.
Gao would know.
Over her illustrious career, she has held high positions at many leading, female-centric retail brands, including Coach, Sephora, and, most notably, as GM and SVP Global Ecommerce at Lululemon.
This experience at Lululemon, Gao noted, “was certainly an inspiration for us from the beginning and [in] thinking about what's the model that we want to [use, versus] what is traditionally done in pro leagues.”
Lululemon, for the uninitiated, has set itself apart from almost every other retailer through its community-based retail model.
As Gao highlighted herself, the athleisure brand’s success is “a very rare occurrence of a major brand that didn't start with the tops down marketing [and instead] started in the communities themselves.”
For example, their experiential stores combine a retail store with a fitness ‘sweat studio’ and ‘fuel bar’ for healthy refreshments. And this has been the thesis from the beginning - starting out launching in Pilates studios, as opposed to simply opening retail stores in a mall and hoping people show up.
The company has also bolstered its community building efforts through ambassador programs and promoting user-generated content (UGC) instead of highly paid celebrity endorsers.
Likewise, Gao believes the key differentiator for LOVB will be that they are starting from the community and fanbase.
“We've been building this community for five years before our first pro game even plays,” said Gao. “This approach is unique and allows us to create something sustainable and thriving.”
A close analysis of each of the areas where they have been cultivating these communities over the past five years has played an important role in identifying where to base the initial professional teams – now known to be Atlanta, Houston, Madison, Omaha, and Salt Lake City, and with one more to be announced.
Basing a team in Nebraska is arguably the best example of building on top of a strong community foundation.
In August, the state was home to a college showdown between the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Nebraska-Omaha, which smashed the world record for attendance at a women’s sporting event by drawing more than 92,000 fans.
That’s not all though.
Beyond community, the other lesson that Gao has arguably taken from her time at Lululemon is LOVB’s focus on being women-first.
In March of 2022, Lululemon made their first foray into footwear, starting with women.
At the time, Lululemon’s Chief Product Officer, Sun Choe, explained, “We intentionally started with women first because we saw an opportunity to solve for the fact that, more often than not, performance shoes are designed for men and then adapted for women.”
The same, Gao believes, is true for sports leagues.
“All the commercialisation that you typically see within women’s sports tend to borrow from their men’s counterpart,” she explained to the Beyond the Bio podcast.
“The WNBA was born out of the NBA, the NWSL is born out of MLS, and that is both a fantastic existing infrastructure to leverage from, but also bit of that comparison effect that could also hinder you and makes you constantly have to pay attention to, or justify in some cases, why you shouldn’t be compared.”
Unlike soccer or basketball, women’s volleyball doesn’t have this existing infrastructure to tag onto or leverage.
This gives it an opportunity to forge its own path – and to do so with significant fandom.
In the US, volleyball’s steady growth recently hit a high school participation boom, making it the country’s second most popular sport among girls in 2022 – likely boosted by their success at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Volleyball is also the women’s sport that US adults most enjoy watching, according to a report from Morning Consult.
Going all-in on women also provides the league a unique but substantial economic opportunity.
As author Lyz Lens has explained in a recent post on Substack, earnings for men without a college degree have not just stagnated but fallen in real terms. At the same time, women have become more likely than men to go to college or graduate school, and their incomes have risen regardless of educational attainment.
As such, women have more money and agency over how they spend it than ever before, and this summer more than ever before, we’re seeing female audiences spending on goods and experiences that align with their personal interests.
Arguably, the timing to launch the ‘Lululemon of sports leagues’ couldn’t be better.
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FREE EVENT
Last month I hosted the first official Sports Pundit Social Club event in London.
The event brought together people from across the sports industry, including rightsholders, founders, VCs, and even the owner of a football club 🏏 ⛳️ ⚽️
Across the room I heard conversations about investing in women's sport, the rise of challenger leagues and content creators, ticketing, impact of working from home, and creating other ways to utilise stadia.
Following its (relative) success, I'm keen to make this a regular occurrence, offering an opportunity to bring together people and ideas (without spending £000s on a ticket!)
Event number #2 is now scheduled for the 2nd of November at Greenwood Sports Bar (next to Victoria station) 📆
It will be great to see the people who made it last time again, as well as hopefully some new faces!
Please RSVP once you know you can make it so I can plan accordingly! 👇
P.S. If you’d like to see this type of event happen in other cities, reply to this email with your suggestions. Manchester, Los Angeles, and New York are all sparking interest…
JOB BOARD
Manager, Apple Partnership - Major League Soccer (New York, US)
Sporting Communications Manager - Formula E (London, UK)
Senior Manager, Growth Strategy - Sports, EMEA - 2K (London, UK)
Senior Partnerships Acquisitions Manager - Alpine F1 (Oxford, UK)
Director Player Relations PGA TOUR Pathways - PGA TOUR (Florida, US)
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Sports Pundit has published 75 newsletters over the course of the year so far... In the process, covering a number of trends from application of AI, to competitive socialisation 📰 🗞
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