Tom Brady’s Brand Taps College Athletes for First Campaign
Tom Brady is inching closer to the launch of his first eponymous apparel collection — and it won’t conflict with another trip to the Super Bowl if the Tampa Bay Buccaneers make it there again this year.
The superstar quarterback’s namesake brand, Brady, is now slated to launch on Jan. 12 online on its e-commerce site, as well as in select Nordstrom stores starting Jan. 19.
For the launch, Brady picked a group of 10 NCAA and newly drafted athletes to star in the campaign for the collection. They include Shedeur Sanders, son of legendary football player Deion Sanders, and Cade McNamara of Tom Brady’s alma mater University of Michigan — the school’s first quarterback to beat Ohio State in 10 years.
Other athletes include Jermaine Samuels, a basketball player from Villanova University; Julian Reese, a basketball player from the University of Maryland; tennis player Andrew Fenty from University of Michigan; football player George Pickens from the University of Georgia; football player Grayson McCall from Coastal Carolina University; baseball player Henry Davis of the Pittsburgh Pirates; hockey player Jack St. Ivany from Boston College, and tennis player Patrick Zahraj from UCLA. They were chosen because they embody Brady’s principles to be the best while “inspiring fearlessness, resilience and confidence toward achieving peak performance,” according to the brand.
“Having these 10 athletes represent our first Brady campaign is really special,” Brady said. “They are hardworking and driven players in the early stages of their careers and each one of them embodies the spirit and ethos in which our brand was founded.”
The seven-time Super Bowl winner has partnered on the Los Angeles-based line with Jens Grede, an entrepreneur who has launched three successful fashion brands from the ground up: his wife Emma Grede’s Good American denim with Khloé Kardashian; Kim Kardashian West’s inclusive lingerie line Skims, and the Frame men’s and women’s contemporary brand with cofounder Erik Torstensson. Revenues between the three brands are expected to reach $500 million in 2021, Grede told WWD in June.
The Brady line is being designed by Dao-Yi Chow, the cofounder of Public School New York.
Brady has been working on the brand for three years and it features “advanced fabrications and more sustainable practices to create an intelligently designed and highly engineered collection for optimal performance on and off the field,” according to a statement from the brand. Its first drop will feature a range of product from the Train + Live system.
