When Danielle Snyder’s husband got her tickets to her first N.B.A. game, she faced a relatable conundrum: She couldn’t figure out what to wear.
It was 2021, coronavirus cases were surging, and she was still getting used to San Francisco, where she had moved from New York, struggling to make friends and managing postpartum depression after giving birth to her first child.
“It was a very disorienting time,” she said. “There was a lot of loneliness.”
Her husband hoped that season tickets for the Golden State Warriors might help. But for Danielle, who has a keen eye for craftsmanship — she runs a jewelry brand with her sister, Jodie Snyder — regular merch with standard team logos was simply not going to cut it.
She chopped up one of her husband’s old Warriors jerseys, stitched it to a plain white T-shirt in a patchwork fashion and covered the number 30 on the front and back in crystals.
It was a small creative project, but it “brought me back to life,” she said. “It became a form of self-expression.”
Speaking over breakfast with her sister in the sun-dappled cafe of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan, Danielle recalled crafting several outfits that first season, and consistently catching the notice of her fellow fans.
“Every time I’d go, I was stopped by five to 10 people,” Danielle said. “They’d be like: ‘Where did you get that? That’s so sick.’” People soon began asking her if she could make them merch.
Her D.I.Y. project would become the catalyst for a new business venture for the sisters: a creative sports merchandise brand called DannijoPro. Only two years in, the brand is sold at about half a dozen stadiums across the country and is worn by celebrities as well as a host of athletes’ wives and girlfriends (or WAGs, as they are sometimes called), including Ayesha Curry. The company taps into the underserved female consumer base within the $36 billion sports merchandise market. According to the payments company Klarna, women’s sports merchandise is a $4 billion market, but 28 percent of female fans have reported they couldn’t find styles that they liked.
“The merch store is very representative of the male customer,” Jodie said. “There’s just, like, 500 options for hoodies and T-shirts,” but when it comes to women’s products, the standard option is “pink it and shrink it,” she said.
As Coach Steve Kerr of the Warriors put it, the typical merch designed for women is “ho-hum.”
DannijoPro “just looks different, you know?” said Kerr, whose wife and daughter wear the brand to Warriors games. “It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s not the usual team gear that you buy at the stadium.’”
Their offerings, which generally cost $200 to $400, go beyond standard T-shirts and hoodies and include chambray oxford shirts with embroidered hand-drawn logos, quarter-zip pullovers and cropped denim jackets with crocheted collars and bedazzled team names on the back.
When the brand released its first licensed collection in 2024, at the Chase Center in San Francisco, it quickly sold out. At Madison Square Garden, where the New York Knicks are currently wrapping up a conference-topping season, DannijoPro sales are up by 150 percent compared with last year, though they didn’t share specific sales figures. In the last week, they shared that multiple Knicks- and Spurs-branded items sold out on their website, and last month, during the N.B.A. semi-finals, they sold out of their inventory of 800 satin bomber jackets on the online retailer Revolve.
Their success is, in large part, great timing. It comes amid a broader fashion-world love affair with athletes. Sports stars across leagues now grace magazine covers and front rows of fashion shows. Even their arrivals to games — known as the tunnel walk — have turned into a kind of runway to flaunt their off-court style.
Simultaneously, there are growing numbers of female fans (one study by a women’s sports-focused think tank recently estimated that 75 percent of women identify as fans of one or more sports) who represent a ballooning consumer base.
The WAGs are also front and center in this convergence. Their meticulously styled courtside looks are drawing the kind of attention that the soccer WAGs of the 2000s era did, and many are creating their own fashion lines or adjacent businesses, like Jordyn Woods’s handbags.
“Fashion and sports have become deeply interconnected, because both are ultimately about identity, performance and self-expression,” said Zac Posen, the creative director of Gap Inc., who worked with Danielle and Jodie on a limited Gap collaboration in 2024. DannijoPro, he added, is “carving out a unique place” in that market.
Almost 40 percent of DannijoPro’s sales come through Instagram direct messages — the favored channel for celebrities and WAGs, who were among the brand’s earliest customers, to request one-off and customized pieces, which Danielle oversees at their atelier in San Francisco. (Jodie, who lives outside Jacksonville, Fla., handles retail and business strategy.)
Before the brand received its N.B.A. license in 2024, the sisters didn’t have permission to recreate team logos, so they instead repurposed some players’ jerseys and merchandise for their spouses.
“You were Rumpelstiltskinning it for a little bit,” Jodie said.
Nicole Curran, wife of the Warriors’ owner, Joe Lacob, said that she approached Danielle in early 2023 to praise her custom jersey.
“The next game she saw me, she had one made for me,” said Curran, who is known for serving high-glam looks at games. “If they can’t see me in the 200s, then I’m not doing my job,” she said, referring to the seats at the top of the arena.
Danielle made Curran an embellished vintage Steph Curry jersey. “She had cropped it, so it was kind of boxy on the top and didn’t look masculine,” Curran said. “I wore it with some high-waisted jeans and some sparkly shoes.”
For Christmas that year, Curran bought all the spouses and partners of Warriors players custom DannijoPro looks, all made by hand by Danielle.
Jordyn Woods, who is engaged to Karl-Anthony Towns of the Knicks, and Ali Brunson, who is married to the Knicks guard Jalen Brunson, have posted their DannijoPro looks on Instagram. Brooke Shields and Leslie Jones have also been spotted wearing the brand courtside at a Knicks game, as well as basketball players like Buddy Hield of the Atlanta Hawks and Curry of the Warriors.
The sisters said they hoped to bring their business model to other sport leagues, like football and tennis.
Because ultimately, Danielle added, clothing that expresses one’s love for a team “strikes an emotional chord with people in a way that just a regular beautiful garment does not.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering style and pop culture.
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