The Golden State Valkyries gained’t take the court docket as the latest WNBA franchise till 2025, however their model goes to work at this time.
On opening day for the Ladies’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation, Golden State Warriors svp of selling Amanda Chin unveiled the title and emblem of the Golden State Valkyries—the primary new WNBA franchise for the reason that Atlanta Dream joined the league in 2008.
The Warriors possession group paid a WNBA document $50 million enlargement charge for his or her spot within the league, however Chin informed an viewers at ADWEEK’s Model Play Sports activities Advertising and marketing Summit that it wasn’t the value of admission that made the group need to get the small print of its entry into girls’s basketball proper.
“My 6-year-old and I have been at a Warriors sport a couple of yr in the past, and he or she leaned over to me and he or she stated, ‘Mother, how come women don’t play basketball?’ And I used to be like, ‘I’ve failed her,’” Chin stated. “Instantly, my husband and I ran to Stanford, and we received her to see a Stanford girls’s basketball sport, and now [University of Southern California star freshman] JuJu [Watkins] is her favourite participant.”
After Warriors possession was granted a WNBA franchise in October 2023, it equally made that workforce’s branding a neighborhood effort. It employed Los Angeles-based company Cartwright—which simply produced a Coca-Cola March Insanity marketing campaign focusing on girls’s and males’s basketball fandoms through the Last 4—to assist develop the model and discover a title that may inform the brand, colours and different parts.
Throughout the press convention saying the brand new franchise, Warriors proprietor Joe Lacob—who beforehand owned the San Jose Lasers of the now-defunct girls’s American Basketball League from 1996 to 1998—referred to California’s Golden State nickname a number of instances and famous that the workforce’s title would mirror your complete Bay Space.
For the remainder, nonetheless, the Warriors checked out parts like native tradition (assume Las Vegas Aces, New York Liberty), nature (Seattle Storm, Chicago Sky), and vitality and vibe (Los Angeles Sparks, Washington Mystics). With no clear reply, the Warriors turned to the general public, who despatched again hundreds of submissions with one recurring title: Valkyries.
The Valkyries of Norse mythology are fearless, unwavering, flighted warrior girls who information the souls of deceased warriors to the afterlife. Chin famous they’re “related to brightness and gold, but additionally bloodshed.” Extra not too long ago, nonetheless, Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe evolves from a drunken, blaster-wielding scrap-metal retriever to a redeemed warrior and ruler of New Asgard.
“We need to construct one thing that individuals will need to put on on a shirt or a hat—how can we drive merchandise, and is it one thing {that a} participant goes to be excited to symbolize?” Chin stated. “As a marketer, probably the most essential filters was the storytelling potentialities.”
