BRAND STRATEGY

Whoop

When wearable fitness-tracking brand Whoop hired its new CMO in July, it marked a new chapter for both brand and executive.

Whoop was fresh off a $575 million Series G funding round that valued the brand at $10.1 billion, positioning it to potentially go public amid a surge in the global wearables market. DJ van Hameren, who spent more than three decades at Nike before exiting two years ago, was looking for his next act.

“I have always had a growth mindset and love to figure out how we tell stories, we build brands, and we grow businesses,” van Hameren told us. “I felt there was a part of me that really was curious about a number of areas, specifically around sports.” After a conversation with Whoop founder and CEO Will Ahmed and other team members, “it was really, really clear within a matter of minutes or hours that this would be a phenomenal next chapter,” he added.

Van Hameren was the first of many new executive appointments, and the brand’s leadership overhaul comes amid a broadening of its marketing strategy that seeks to diversify its user base and highlight how sport and health connect to daily life, van Hameren told Marketing Brew.

Whoop has traditionally been more associated with an “athletic male American base,” per the Wall Street Journal; it’s now focusing on women users. And it’s looking to target both athletes and everyday consumers through methods including partnerships with major fitness competitors and athletes (some of whom are the company’s investors) as well as through owned media, like its weekly Whoop Podcast.

Whoop, which in July announced it had more than 3 million members worldwide, is looking to grow amid more intense competition in the wearables space. Oura, a smart ring that tracks health metrics and is targeting an IPO; the overall wearable technology market was estimated to be $103.1 billion as of 2026, according to Grand View Research, and is projected to increase to $229.9 billion by 2033.

“People’s health is every day,” van Hameren said. “One of the greatest challenges or opportunities we have as a marketing team is to find those key moments…and at the same time, find ways to be relevant to members every second or every minute of the day without that becoming an over-sensory load of messages, ” he said.

Continue reading here.—JS

      

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SPORTS MARKETING

Screenshot via @ChicagoBulls/YouTube

Some East Coast basketball fans are still reliving the recent NBA Finals. For everyone else, there’s a new season to look forward to—and the schedule for the upcoming season is officially out.

Schedule release day has become something of a holiday for NBA fans, as well as fans of other leagues, like the NFL and WNBA. This season, every NBA team dropped some kind of schedule release content—but not all of them were slam dunks (the Toronto Raptors, for instance, ruffled some feathers with their gossip podcast parody video).

The Chicago Bulls’ video game–inspired schedule release video, which was packed with local references and NBA Easter eggs, seems to be a rare example of sports social content that’s largely lauded in the comments, with multiple “well done”s and calls for the content team to get raises.

Less than 24 hours after it dropped, the video had accumulated more than 1.1 million views across platforms, the fourth most among NBA teams, according to data from content intelligence company Mondo Metrics and the Sponcon Sports newsletter. (FWIW, the Raptors’ video came in at No. 7, with over 900,000 views.)

We spoke with Luka Dukich, the Bulls’ VP of content marketing, about how his team pulled it off.

“We make it for the group chat,” he told us. “For us, the schedule release is just an opportunity to be uninhibited.”

Read more here.—AM

      

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BRAND STRATEGY

Getty Images

For beauty-meets-wellness brand Megababe, meeting customer needs means making unconventional products, especially those that hold stigma or embarrassment for the customer.

Its mission since launching in 2017 has been to create products that “Big Beauty ignores,” according to founder Katie Sturino. The brand’s lineup includes products often not found in the beauty aisle, such as antifungal cream for ringworm or athlete’s foot, an antifriction stick for chafing, and a hemorrhoid cream.

“We are solving for more practical discomfort and less for the aesthetic need or the aesthetic expectation that the beauty industry has put on women,” Sturino said.

In June, Megababe took another step toward addressing its customers’ personal care needs by launching Coldies, which are reusable and wearable cooling patches that can be worn as a neck collar or as bra inserts. According to Megababe, the product generated 40% of its June DTC sales in just six days; the entire collection sold out in one week and there’s already a waitlist of over 500 people for the restock.

In terms of marketing these types of products that are new to the category, Sturino said the brand is “learning on the job” by taking in feedback from customers and being in touch with its community.

Read more on Revenue Brew.—LI

      

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WISH WE WROTE THIS

Morning Brew

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Bloomberg wrote about how Celsius overcame its energy-drink competitors by, in part, marketing to women.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about how Dyson is marketing its latest creation, a $500 toothbrush.
• The Athletic dug into the fallout from the Callaway and Good Good ad that many felt made light of domestic abuse.