During the 2012 season, the NFL launched it’s largest women’s apparel marketing campaign to date dubbed “It’s My Team”.
While partnering up with Nike, the NFL focused on using team logos and colors in tanks, tees, sports bras, shorts, capris, jackets, and hoodies. Which means the NFL was finally doing something the die hard fan craved, getting rid of the notion that “slapping pink on a jersey would make a chick wear it”.
“It’s My Team” featured well known sports fans like Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Serena Williams and even the daughters and wives of NFL coaches and owners rocking fitted clothing that represents their favorite team.
But the relatively untapped market of a fanbase that spends $1 billion dollars annually on NFL merchandise is something the league should have been doing years ago.
Turning a guy’s licensed team shirts and jerseys into dresses/tanks occurs often, women are finding fully licensed clothing alternatives at a fraction of the NFL cost or just they are simply buying clothes in their team’s colors and coordinating their gameday outfits on their own.
While wearing pink to most games is frowned upon, there’s one particular time that all NFL fans are encouraged to wear pink and that’s during October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month in what has been a very popular program among female fans.
A variety of charities are held, special team merchandise is sold with a portion going to cancer research and the NFL encourages all players to wear special pink gloves and shoes to help raise awareness and assist in fundraising for future research.
Fashion wise, the NFL’s best bet is to continue to license it’s brand to the Forever 21′s of the world to earn some kind of revenue on licensed, cheaper and cuter versions of it’s apparel.
Women have and always will like variety and I’m not sure the NFL can keep up with the demand of the female fan. Women want NFL merchandise, but at a reasonable cost because frankly, most fans want to change up their gameday outfits but how many can afford to spend the roughly $100 cost of a gameday outfit weekly? Not many.
So prices must be considered along with variety or women will continue to take craft scissors to old shirts and simply buy cheap team colored clothing alternatives that both cut into the potential apparel revenue the NFL could and should be earning.
Read more from GuysGirl’s State of the NFL Female Fan
Early in 2013, we highlighted the first of a kind, State of the NFL Female Fan-a 3 part series in which we covered the remarkably low number of women in an executive leadership role among NFL teams. and in the second article we looked at how the NFL is reaching out to the fanbase that makes up 45% of their viewership. Finally, we looked at the role of fantasy football on this ever growing segment and the women who play a key role behind that growth.
