DRESSED FOR IT

A marketing student's notebook on the rise of women's sports merch in Indianapolis

I leave the office most weeknights around six, and lately my walk to the car has come with a soundtrack: the low hum of a crowd that isn't at the game yet, but is clearly headed there. Downtown Indianapolis has a tell now. By seven, you'll pass clusters of fans already deep into their pregame ritual, walking the Cultural Trail in Fever red, ducking into a restaurant patio still in their jerseys, taking photos in front of the skyline before the doors even open. It's become a familiar rhythm of an Indianapolis evening, the city quietly rearranging itself around tip-off, one candy-apple-red outfit at a time. I work in marketing, so I notice branding the way some people notice bad grammar, and I can't watch that rhythm without thinking: someone designed this well enough that people built a whole evening around it.

This is what women's sports fandom looks like now in Indianapolis: intentional, stylish, and impossible to ignore.

What I Was Wearing Mattered More Than I Expected

Last year, I went to the Fever's Playoffs '25 semifinal with my sister, and neither of us wore a plain team logo shirt. Mine read “Now You Know”, in the same red and white as the playoff signage behind us; hers read “Shoot Like a Girl”, a shirt she'd bought on Etsy rather than at the team store, even though the store had plenty of merchandise that night. She simply wanted something more specific than what was on the shelf, and she found an independent seller offering exactly that.

The detail stayed with me, because for years, women's sports merchandise - if it existed at all - meant an oversized shirt cut for a body that wasn't yours,  and fans wore it anyway since supporting the team sometimes meant working for it. Team stores are well stocked now, yet fans are still seeking out independent sellers, not out of necessity but because they want a shirt with a point of view rather than a generic crest, an appetite independent designers had identified well before the larger brands caught up to it.

The Mural That Made Me Look Twice

This year, a building a few blocks from my office appeared with the team's entire season painted across its wall: home games, away games, color-coded, with All-Star weekend picked out in red.  I must have passed it a dozen times before I stopped to look at it properly. Somebody had decided this season was worth announcing to the whole city in advance, in paint, before a single game had been played, which is not a minor marketing decision; it requires a budget line, and someone willing to argue for it.

Standing there, I understood the mural wasn't really about one game or one player. It was about permission; permission for a city to treat a women's sports season as significant enough to paint on the side of a building. Once I noticed that, I began noticing it elsewhere too, in merch tent lines, in what people were wearing, in how deliberately all of it had been assembled.

The Night I Actually Looked at the Store

Not long after, I went to a Fever game against the Valkyries and, for the first time, I actually looked at the merch store instead of walking past it toward my seat. Gainbridge was hosting a mixed crowd that night, Fever red alongside a scattering of Golden State gear, with fans still finding their seats an hour before tip-off. I arrived early, hoping to beat the line at the store, and quickly learned that wasn't possible.

The line stretched past a wall of Fever flags before I'd even reached the entrance, and families, kids, and older fans queued patiently, as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world. It is now.

The store itself no longer resembled a stadium kiosk; it looked like a flagship retail space, with full racks, styled mannequins, and a sign advertising a limited-edition game patch the way a sneaker release would. Children shopped alongside their parents, comparing jersey numbers, with no smaller or lesser selection tucked in back, and the crowd wasn't only women and girls. Boys pulled Clark and Mitchell jerseys off the racks beside their fathers, and by a rough count, men in Fever gear were nearly as common as women, evidence that whoever is purchasing this merchandise now is a broader audience than the old inventory assumptions accounted for.

Standing there, I noticed how specific each piece was. No two shirts on the rack said quite the same thing, and none looked lifted from a generic template with a new logo dropped in. A designer had made deliberate choices about fabric, fit, and wording – choices that showed in what fans were willing to wait in line for.

In the concourse, families had claimed whole tables, jerseys on, food out, kids still settling in from the drive over. This wasn't a crowd killing time before tip-off; it was a crowd that had planned a full evening around being here, the way one might plan around a concert.

A few rows up, a mother and daughter watched the game in two distinct jerseys: the mother’s  reading Cunningham, her daughter's reading Clark. The daughter hadn't inherited her mother's player. She had her own idol, the kind of hero worship that makes a young girl braid her hair like the woman she came to watch. It's a small detail, but it captures the larger shift: a little girl who gets to choose her own icon now, rather than whichever name happened to already be on a shirt in the house.

The broadcast cut to the crowd more than once that night, and each time the mix was the same; women in Fever red, men in navy alternate jerseys, a child holding a handmade sign. Nobody on screen read as an exception to who this team's fans are supposed to be; they read as the actual range of who they are.

Asking the Person Who Runs This

After that game, I wanted more than my own impression of the crowd, so I asked to sit down with Lauren Roa, Vice President of Merchandise and Retail for the organization that runs the Pacers, the Fever, and the Noblesville Boom, the team's G League affiliate. She oversees merchandise and retail strategy across all three, and she has spent ten seasons with the Fever, long enough to have watched the whole arc firsthand. She described the growth in terms I hadn't expected: “I've seen the Fever business grow out of the back of my car.” Early on, that meant setting up at the county fairgrounds, laying out boxes of product on folding tables, and counting it as a good night if she sold fifty or seventy-five t-shirts. Today, the team fills a five-hundred-square-foot store before tip-off, the same store where I'd just stood in line.

Her philosophy hasn't changed as the scale has grown: product comes first, and once a product is truly good, she said, everything else follows, provided you know your consumer and choose what's right for them rather than what's easiest to produce. Design happens entirely in-house. As she put it, “[w]hen you're getting a piece from us, you're getting a piece from the team.”

The organization works closely with Nike on brand identity and jersey design, she explained, always returning to what feels relevant to fans and what the team is proud to put its name on. Red has become the Fever's color in a way that extends beyond the uniform; it is an identity the organization built and now owns. Part of that work, she said, involves thinking strategically about women in sports and how they choose to express that through what they wear.

I asked whether a particular moment had marked the turning point. Her answer surprised me: Caitlin Clark was the entry point, she said, but the growth hasn't remained centered on one player. The rest of the roster has built from there, with players across the team earning recognition of their own, and the business expanding well past any single name on a jersey. I asked who is buying now, compared with a few years ago. The fan base has gone national, she said, with product shipping across the country rather than staying local to Indiana. The age range keeps skewing younger, and the customer base is broad rather than narrow, which matched what I had counted in that store line: men, boys, older fans, all dressed for the same team.

I checked the wider numbers afterward, since an impression isn't the same as evidence. WNBAStore.com and the league's flagship store in New York reported combined sales up 601 percent in a single year, and Dick's Sporting Goods reported a 233 percent increase over the same period, according to figures the league released. Player-specific merchandise - jerseys and tees built around one name rather than a team logo - grew even faster: over 1,000 percent by the All-Star break, according to data Fanatics reported to Sports Business Journal. The women's sports apparel market as a whole has crossed six billion dollars, against an inventory gap that has historically stood at roughly one piece of women's team merchandise for every nine pieces of men's. Roa's account from the sales floor and these figures describe the same growth from two different vantage points.

Why I Keep Coming Back to This

It would be easy to treat all of this as a retail trend: nicer shirts, bigger sales numbers. But merchandise works like a cultural thermometer. When an organization invests real design resources into its apparel, that's a statement about long-term commitment, not a one-off promotional push. When fans line up to spend real money on that apparel, they're signaling that this is identity and community, not a passing interest.

For years, one argument against greater investment in women's sports was a supposed lack of demand. Every sold-out drop, every line wrapped around a merch store, is a quiet rebuttal to that argument. Visibility and commerce are feeding each other now, in a loop that's getting

harder to dispute, and the arc Lauren described - from a car trunk at the fairgrounds to a five-hundred-square-foot store that sells out before tip-off - is proof the loop is real.

It began with my sister choosing an Etsy shirt over the one already on the shelf, because she wanted something more specific than what was available. It continued through a season painted on a building, a mother and daughter with two different names on two different backs, and a vice president who still remembers selling shirts out of the back of her car. None of it was ever really about the fabric. It's about who gets to be seen, who gets to belong, and who gets to choose her own icon instead of inheriting someone else's. That's not a niche. That's the main event.

---

Written by Anna Almeciga

Photos courtesy of Chris Elliot and Peyton Thompson of Pacers Sports & Entertainment