Since it was founded in 2007, the upstart women’s athletic-apparel brand Oiselle has collected an eclectic group of women, including national track champions, supermodels and the first female Saudi Olympic runner, while staying mostly out of the mainstream. This fall it adds a new elite squad to its roster, becoming the first solely women’s sports brand to outfit a major college running program: the cross-country and track teams of Yale.
It is the latest milestone for Oiselle, a 20-employee Seattle company that has doubled in growth every year since its inception, and projects $10 million in revenue this year, as it seeks to break into a women’s active-wear space that is dominated by brands like Nike and Lululemon and is worth around $15 billion.
The sponsorship follows a stream of unconventional Oiselle initiatives aimed at keeping postcollegiate women involved in road racing — ideally, of course, in its strappy sports bras and chevron-print leggings, which retail for around $80 — including Fashion Week runway shows featuring its flock of top female athletes, a flagship store it likens to a women-first clubhouse, and a loud campaign against Nike’s exclusive licensing agreement with USA Track & Field, which controls what its athletes wear to major races.
But as it seeks to become what its 47-year-old founder and chief executive, Sally Bergesen, calls “the thinking women’s brand,” Oiselle will have to reconcile the outsider image it has carefully built its following on with its goal of becoming a major player in the space, linking feminism to athleticism, and also to consumerism, while reaching beyond its elite core. She says that to do this, she is adding a word to her marketing strategy that many women’s athletic brands tend to avoid: competition.
“Women’s companies tend to get into a game where they don’t want to offend anyone, but we’ve never been shy about saying we care about winning too, and that’s worked for us,” Bergesen said. “Being at university is all about learning and improvement and exploration, in and out of the arena, and Yale embodies that.”
The college market is dominated by larger brands like Nike, which sponsored Yale and has also begun pushing for exclusive rights agreements for outfitting athletes at the high school level. The track community has recently seen resistance to corporate behemoths wielding their clout to control athletes’ movements, which came to a head before the world track and field championships in August when the Brooks-sponsored runner Nick Symmonds was dropped from the U.S. team for refusing to wear Nike outside competition. Oiselle has used its stance against corporate monopolies in sport to reinforce its image as a scrappy athletes-first, community-driven brand.
And Oiselle says in this sponsorship it sees a chance to galvanize a new generation of female distance runners, many of whom reach their athletic prime long after they’ve outgrown the organized athletic programs that engage girls.
“The national race-running model is focused on high school and college, when males hit their athletic crescendo, but many women run their fastest distance races between ages 26 to 38,” said Bob Lesko, a former Yale track athlete and Oiselle financial adviser whose wife, Sarah Lesko, another top former Yale runner and Oiselle employee, negotiated the sponsorship. “By sponsoring Yale track, Oiselle is exposing itself to a community of motivated women who will likely keep pushing themselves relatively later in their athletic careers, and bring their friends, whom the running community might otherwise lose. So they are trying to create a new team racing model for women where the country doesn’t really have one right now.”
Feminist themes in advertising are increasingly prevalent as companies clamor to convince female consumers that they stand for something beyond the items they sell. The Under Armour company’s female empowerment campaign “I Will What I Want,” which features athletes and artists like Lindsey Vonn and Misty Copeland, helped build its North American women’s business to almost $500 million last year. Outside the athletic space, brands like Always, Verizon and Pantene have undertaken high-profile, feminist-themed marketing campaigns.
The sponsorship is an unusual move for an established program like Yale.
David Shoehalter, who has coached at Yale for 21 years, said he had not heard of Oiselle until Kate Grace, a top American middle-distance runner, graduated from Yale in 2012 and became the first professional athlete to be sponsored by the company. He said Oiselle let the program keep its budget the same as its previous contract but provided it with more gear, designed especially for the range of body types on a track and field team and with the university’s culture in mind.
“Yale is a very traditional place, and we didn’t want it to be some sort of wild neon look like some schools, or to look like a bunch of women who were going to yoga class,” Shoehalter said. “These look like clothes you want to race in.”
Bergesen, a competitive marathon runner with a personal best of 2 hours 59 minutes and a professional designer, said she was drawn to the creative challenge.
“We wanted to reimagine what the college uniform could be,” Bergesen said. “Like if Marc Jacobs was going to design a new Harvard blazer. Women’s track uniforms have been the same for so many years that people haven’t seemed to think about the opportunity for something different, to make them look better and maybe mean something more, too.”
Grace, the recent Yale middle-distance champion, agreed.
“In college, I didn’t care who sponsored me, because it just ended with the clothes,” she said. “But maybe with a brand like Oiselle involved, they could pass on their message of ‘fangirling,’ and getting people excited about track races and their teammates, whoever they are, to a younger generation.”
Yale’s coach said he hoped aligning his program with Oiselle would give him an edge in attracting top high school runners, in a sport where Ivy League distance running still remains competitive with universities that offer athletic scholarships.
“There’s no doubt that this being a potential recruiting tool has gone into our thinking,” Shoehalter said. “Every blue school that is a Nike school has the same blue uniform. We’ll stand out.”
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