Why the PWHL is launching with temporary jerseys — and without team names or logos

When the PWHL released its first-ever jerseys last week with a basic boilerplate design for all six teams, the fan response on social media was swift and overwhelmingly negative.

“No identity or personality,” one fan wrote.

“They couldn’t design logos for the teams?” said another. 

The response is understandable. Sports fans love their jerseys, and women’s hockey fans have been waiting for a women’s professional hockey league like this — a place to watch all the best players in one spot — for years. Not to mention fans of the now-defunct Premier Hockey Federation had spent the better part of eight years getting attached to the creative branding of original teams like the Boston Pride, Buffalo Beauts and Metropolitan Riveters.

But now the league that has been touted as the most professional in the history of women’s hockey is launching with jerseys adorned with city names diagonally across the chest. There are no logos; the teams don’t even have names yet.

What gives?

According to Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior vice president of business operations, team branding was too important to fit into the league’s tight schedule to prepare for launching Year 1.

GO DEEPER

PWHL jersey unveiled; designs temporary for Year 1

“There are decisions you can make that are fast and if you make an error in your judgment on that decision, it’s easy to walk back, or you can learn from it and move on,” Scheer, who assumed her role on Oct. 31, told The Athletic. “From the team name perspective, it was just better off slowing the process down.

“When you come out with a team name, you want to have a full brand story, why the imagery and the logo, why the colors, why the name. And I just didn’t feel that we should rush it because you can’t walk back from it.”

According to multiple industry experts, including Scheer, creating jerseys for a professional sports team is a long and sometimes complicated to-do with multiple steps, including coming up with names, designing logos, jumping through legal hoops and accounting for a particularly lengthy manufacturing timeline.

It’s a process that takes longer than observers might think — and more time than the PWHL had.

Between the June 30 announcement of a new professional women’s hockey league and the expected January 2024 start date, the PWHL has about six months to prepare not only jerseys but other league-launching items — everything from securing venues, to hiring league and team staff, to getting the proper resources in each market.

“Doing this in six months is nuts,” said PWHL Advisory Board member Stan Kasten in an interview with The Athletic. “The NHL told me I was going to need more time and they were completely correct.”

It’s been over 100 years since the NHL was an upstart, but league executives still speak from experience when it comes to booking venues, making schedules and branding. Whether it’s making tweaks to existing jerseys, re-branding entire uniforms or starting from the ground up with expansion franchises like the Seattle Kraken or Vegas Golden Knights, they’ve done it.

Brian Jennings, the NHL’s executive vice president of marketing, says the most important part of branding and jersey design is time.

“It’s something that we talk about internally with us,” he said in an interview with The Athletic. “We’re giving our teams advice and counsel about when you’re going to go through a branding change to give it enough time so that you can really do what you need to do to ensure, as best you can, that it’s going to have success.”

Every year, in April, Jennings will send out a “uniform change form” to all 32 teams, asking if they are planning any changes to their uniforms — from their jerseys, to helmet colors, even down to the striping on their socks. That memo goes out 18 months in advance to give the league “as much time as possible” for design and production. In April 2024, Jennings will send out the form for any changes for the 2025-26 season.

That’s a timeline Kasten is fully aware of through his role as the president of the Los Angeles Dodgers. In MLB, he said, teams have to give two years’ notice because “that’s how long production takes.”

And that’s just for changes to existing uniforms. The process for a new team (or six) can take much longer. The NHL’s newest team, the Seattle Kraken, took the better part of two years to work on its branding before announcing its team name and jerseys.

The group behind the design spent significant time listening to fans and embedding in the community. They did a poll through the Seattle Times on potential names — the Kraken, Sockeyes and Totems performed particularly well — researched the history of Seattle and met with Indigenous communities to examine different art that would or would not be respectful.

“The time that it takes (to pick a name) depends on how consultative you want to be,” said Katie Townsend, the Kraken’s chief marketing officer. “I would credit a lot of the Kraken’s success to the fact that we did a lot of listening.”

There was a lot to explore creatively when it came time to select a final name, too.

What could the logo and graphics look like? What would fans chant in the arena? How does the name sound when it’s announced? How can it be expressed in game day presentations?

Townsend said there were many lively debates between executives, ownership and investors before the group ultimately decided on the Kraken around January 2020 — almost one year after the work began in earnest in early 2019. From there, the team brought on Adidas — which also made the jersey — to bring their ideas to life.

The team took time to craft a creative brief for Adidas, where they articulated what elements they wanted in their logo and what they wanted to accomplish.

The Kraken’s branding was years in the making. (Courtesy of the Seattle Kraken)

Deciding on colors, Townsend said, was the easiest part of the process, as the team stuck with the same blue-green palette as other professional sports teams in Seattle, like the Mariners and Sounders.

One of the most distinctive parts of the Kraken’s logo — the red eye — came about at the end of the design process, after months of meeting with Adidas over design elements. If they sped through the process, they wouldn’t have landed on the eye of the Kraken.

“I cannot see how our mark could have ever been without that red eye,” Townsend said.

With every new brand comes a lengthy trademark process, too.

“You can’t just pick a name out and then say, ‘I’m going to do that,’” Jennings explained. “In hockey, is there somebody else called that? They could claim that there’s consumer confusion. If it’s another sport, you could probably get a coexistence agreement with the Trademark and Patent Office. But it takes time to navigate that.”

After all that — name ideation, design, trademarking — it took 14 months for the actual Kraken jerseys to be produced. Manufacturing time isn’t always that long, Jennings said, but there is a lot that goes into that process.

Using a unique color? The manufacturer might need to order the right thread to make it work. Want top-of-the-line material? That might take longer to come in. Crests for the jerseys need to be made. The specifications for the jerseys themselves need to be decided on: What size are the jerseys themselves? How tight are the sleeves? How big is the collar?

“There are many elements of a jersey that have to be pulled together that ultimately end up being manufactured,” Jennings explained. “All of those things take time.”

Now, the NHL doesn’t always have the luxury of 18 to 24 months to work on new jerseys or uniform changes. For tentpole events like the Winter Classic, the league must sometimes operate on an accelerated timeline.

“We’ve done (jerseys) in as short as eight months, but I don’t love working under those timelines,” Jennings said. “Sometimes you’ll get a design and it’ll be like, ‘wow, you nailed it.’ And then other times it takes two, three or five different versions and iterations. That’s where we build in those time bumpers.

“Can we work under those (shorter) time frames? We can. But it’s not ideal.”

None of this is new to Scheer, who has spent over 35 years working in the sports industry. She’s worked in Major League Soccer, with the PHF, with the WNBA’s New York Liberty and most recently as vice president of business operations for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun. She knows the impact of proper branding and how long it takes to get right. In her role with the Sun, Scheer started working on new jerseys in 2022. The team won’t officially wear them until this upcoming season.

“In a normal team or league, this is a two-year process,” she said. “Just getting the design is six to eight months. The actual manufacturing takes over a year.”

Regardless of how long the process usually takes, many fans have wondered how the league’s leadership did not have more done in time for the June 30 announcement that a new league was coming.

Mark Walter and Billie Jean King Enterprises got into business with the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association — the collection of players who sat out of professional hockey to fight for a more viable professional league — in May 2022. Kasten got involved in November. The PWHPA was formed in 2019. How did they end up working on a six-month timeline?

The PWHPA was launched as a group of players advocating for a new league. The players themselves weren’t starting a league, or coming up with team names and logos. There was only one full-time staff member, Jayna Hefford, now the PWHL’s senior vice president of hockey operations. Part-time staff members worked in social media, communications and partnerships, but there was nobody on staff who was equipped with the kind of expertise needed for wholesale league building.

Eventually, the group brought in Scotiabank and Deloitte to build a business plan and conduct market research that would attract partners — like Walter and King — to fund and launch a league. Some of that market research, according to sources who worked with the PWHPA, included identifying cities where professional women’s hockey was likely to find success and data on the growing momentum in women’s hockey. There were no names or logos included in the business plan.

When Walter and BJK Enterprises got involved in 2022, there was an examination period — determining what a league could look like, how much it would cost and how they could get it done. In November, Walter brought Kasten in to lead the project. From there, leadership prioritized a collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union — and acquisition talks with the Premier Hockey Federation to unify the sport.

Both of those elements took six months to negotiate and were finalized at the end of June. Getting branding done for this season required a level of bandwidth that leadership, for whatever reason, did not have.

Of course, the PWHL could have taken the NHL’s advice and taken more time. They could have started the season in the fall of 2024 instead of in January. But Kasten and Walter made a commitment to the players that the puck would drop this season, and that commitment has come at the expense of “things being perfect on Day 1.”

“Things would be prettier, more perfect if we had waited a year,” Kasten explained. “But what was most important was getting a league up and running for all these women who had been waiting for this day for so long.”

In only the third week of her new job, Scheer did not want to commit to a timeline for new jerseys with team names and logos. But she did say the decision on team names is still “well away from being made.”

The PWHL notably filed trademarks in October for Toronto Torch, Ottawa Alert, Montreal Echo, Boston Wicked, New York Sound and Minnesota Superior. But that doesn’t mean they will use those names. It is not uncommon for teams to file trademarks for multiple naming options. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office search system, the Seattle Hockey Partners filed trademark applications for the Seattle Sockeyes, Seattle Summits, Seattle Breakers and the Seattle Kraken. In 2016, the Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL’s 31st team, filed for the Vegas Silver Knights, Vegas Desert Knights and Las Vegas Golden Knights.

The PWHL has also trademarked PWHL Toronto, PWHL Ottawa, PWHL Montreal, PWHL Boston, PWHL New York and PWHL Minnesota.

According to Scheer, “Just because they’re trademarked doesn’t mean we’ll end up there.”

“We may, we may not,” she said. “To be determined.”

A new vice president of brand and marketing will be starting next week, Scheer added, and name ideation and team branding is the No. 1 item on her list.

“While everybody is waiting with bated breath for team names, I just think that we need to be very deliberate and take our time and do it properly. I think our fans deserve that,” Scheer said. “We will come out with team names and logos at some point, but we’re going to spend a lot more time on it.”

(Top photo of PWHL Toronto player Sarah Nurse scoring on teammate Kristen Campbell during training camp: R.J. Johnston Toronto Star / Toronto Star via Getty Images)