In January, Jens Grede, the co-founder of Tom Brady’s athleticwear brand Brady, said the brand had the potential to challenge major players like Nike and Adidas.
But eight months later, Brady has slowed the cadence of new releases and pulled back from much social media promotion, indicating a quieter period for the brand. On Instagram, the brand didn’t post once through the entire month of August, save for a sitewide 40% off sale posted on its feed on August 31 which was deleted the next day. The brand hasn’t posted on X (formerly Twitter) since May or TikTok since June.
This is a slowdown compared to the 4-5 weekly Instagram posts the brand was pushing out in the spring. And it’s sparse compared to the multiple posts per day from brands like Skims and Good American, two other brands co-founded by Grede and a celebrity. Its customer emails have also slowed down. In April, the brand emailed customers daily, but beginning in June the pace of promotional emails slackened. Only six customer emails were sent in August, five of which were promoting a 40% off sitewide sales. Five of 13 emails in July and four of seven emails in June did the same.
Skims is valued at $4 billion and Good American saw $200 million in revenue last year, but Brady, the brand, has declined to share revenue figures in the past.
Brady himself hasn’t posted anything about the brand since June when he offhandedly tagged @bradybrand on Instagram in a post about Formula 1. The last time he posted an actual campaign for the brand was in May. According to a survey of LinkedIn, at least three former Brady employees have moved employment to Skims since June.
When reached for comment, a rep from Brady said the brand has a new collection that launched on September 1 with the University of Michigan and that more collections are in the works. The rep declined to answer further questions about the company’s growth or status. The brand’s creative director Dao-yi Chow also declined to answer questions about the brand’s status.
“The central problem for a brand like Brady is that its ethos is built off the back of the success and name of one person,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at data analytics company GlobalData. “That makes it much harder to cut through in a very crowded market, especially when it is trying to compete with some huge corporations.”
Brady has gone through a number of changes in the year and a half since it launched. After launching at a high price point, with products up to $495, prices have come down 20-30%. It also launched a number of new categories over the last year, including golf and swim.
Activewear is an incredibly competitive category. More than 200 brands launched activewear collections in the period between 2019 and 2022, according to NPD Group, including Brady in early 2022. Brady himself, after retiring from the NFL in February, has faced several controversies lately. That includes losing $30 million in the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he backed in 2022. Brady also owns several other brands including TB12, a fitness and nutrition brand, and an NFT company called Autograph which the New York Times reported laid off more than 50 employees in May due to falling revenue.
