🎾 How Coco Gauff and New Balance Created the Perfect Collab

Turn the TV off. Logging off. Coco Gauff in 3. Roland Garros 2025 ended in the best way possible, with tennis sensation Coco Gauff winning her first French Open after being so close in years past. She continues to prove she's more than just a force on the court - she's a cultural icon in the making. The emotional scenes at the French Open, where both Sloane Stephens and Coco Gauff sat down with Venus Williams and acknowledged her impact after their matches, highlighted the torch-passing moment in American tennis. But while Gauff's athletic prowess commands attention, her influence extends far beyond the baseline.

At just 21, Gauff has masterfully leveraged her platform to become one of Gen Z's most authentic voices in sports marketing. Her partnership with New Balance stands out as a testament to this new era of athlete collaborations - one where the athlete's personality and values are as central to the brand story as their athletic achievements. This collaboration isn't just about selling shoes; it's about reimagining what sports marketing can be when young athletes take the creative lead.

Today, I’m bringing you words from Daniel-Yaw Miller, writer of SportsVerse, powered by Offball.

You can read the original article here.

Every now and then in the sportswear world, a brand and an athlete join forces to create a partnership that puts the rest of the category on notice.

Those who achieve this do so with a magic potion that requires the perfect mix of strategy and effort from the brand, and a natural, lo-fi, DIY, relatable approach from the partner athlete in question, to create the perfect marketing storm.

Adidas, for example, has achieved this in the basketball category with Anthony Edwards. Nike has reached this point with many of its iconic athletes over the years. On is starting to cook with Ben Shelton.

But right now, there’s no better sports-style partnership out there than New Balance and Coco Gauff. People often ask me what a best-in-class athlete-sportswear brand partnership looks like, and this one checks every box. Here’s why.

It’s not enough for an athlete to be famous and good at their sport for them to sell products. Just ask any number of legendary NBA bigs whose signature shoes collect dust on Footlocker shelves (no names mentioned!) It takes a certain secret sauce.

Here’s why Coco is a dream for New Balance:

• First, and most importantly, she’s very good at her day job.

• She’s relatable. She’s not afraid to show her human side and be vulnerable with her followers on her various platforms. She pokes fun at herself for doing very normal human things like walking out for her first French Open match and forgetting her rackets. “No rackets but the 'fit is still a hit,” she wrote. She wasn’t wrong. More details on that later.

• She’s a fashion star. And not in an “always seen at red carpet events in Balenciaga couture or looks put together by a celebrity stylist” kind of way. She just loves clothes, knows how to put a good ’fit together and genuinely enjoys styling herself both on and off court.

• She’s a social media natural and has been on TikTok since it was called Musical.ly.

• She takes an active role in the New Balance partnership, breaking the fourth wall with her fans to show them the daily realities of what it’s like to be a young athlete (ups and downs included), living your dream and working with a brand that plays to your strengths on and off the court.

• She’s funny.

All this and she’s only 21 years old — a seasoned pro and athlete-marketer already. Gold dust for any brand able to work with her. Enter New Balance.

New Balance knows it’s sitting on a marketing goldmine with Coco Gauff. Chris Davis, the New Balance CMO who interviewed last year, is doing an incredible job at marketing this partnership and several others that merge performance sports with high fashion. The brand is on a hot streak and wants to hit $10 million in annual sales in the next few years.

They’re making the most out of their sponsorship of Coco by:

• Putting her in an eye-catching product to drive interest and brand heat at large. Often, we see brands go all in on marketing with no actual product to sell that people want. If you talk the talk, you'd better have compelling products ready to go when consumers come looking. New Balance is getting that right, and in a sport where not many other brands are choosing to invest right now.

• Playing up to her natural fashion interests. New Balance has worked with Coco for some time now to ensure her court walk-ons are the tennis equivalent of the W/NBA tunnel walks. At the French Open, she has been walking onto the court wearing a custom New Balance and Vanson leather jacket on top of a range of eye-catching tie-dye style dresses (pictured above).

• Building hype by investing in high-heat, exclusive collaborations centered around Coco. Beyond a fat paycheck, there’s only one way a brand can show an athlete that they genuinely invested in them as a business partner, rather than a marketing mouthpiece. And that’s by investing in bespoke products made for them, by them, and in their image. That’s exactly what New Balance is doing both with Coco’s signature shoe line (cool, but standard) and also with the NB x Miu Miu x Coco Gauff collaboration, which she has played an active role in designing and bringing to market. Coco’s excitement about being the centrepiece of that collaboration is plain for everyone to see. She has been teasing different outfits from the still-unreleased collab at various tournaments in recent weeks and recently expressed her joy on TikTok that she was currently the only person in the world who had those pieces to wear as she pleases.

That is how you use an athlete to build hype and consumer demand, instead of gifting influencers and paying them to #ad everyone into maybe clicking the link in their bio. Allowing fans to see pieces being used simultaneously in performance (on court, mid-game) and casual (pre-game walk-on, press conferences, elevator selfies) contexts is genius. Again, it’s showing consumers why it’s desirable, rather than telling. Each game, IG story, TikTok dance becomes a fresh product discovery and marketing opportunity, without New Balance having to drop $7 million on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. It’s just smart business.

Stepping back and letting Coco do the talking. No one wants to feel like they are being sold anything by brands on social media. Instead of New Balance putting out cringey campaigns or taking out billboards everywhere, they are keeping it chill (and keeping marketing costs WAAY down) and letting Coco give her fans natural insights into their unique partnership.

Before Wimbledon last year, for example, Coco posted a TikTok flipping through an outfit lookbook and several bags of clothing that New Balance had sent her for use during the tournament. She showed each suggested look and asked people for their opinion on which items she should wear on which day, and shared how she planned to style them.

This is organic sportswear marketing gold because: 1) the brand is comfortable and trusting enough in her as a partner to allow it; 2) Gauff is not putting on an act — she’s just being herself and posting her experiences in the moment, so it’s organic; 3) this isn’t some forced marketing play and we are not being sold anything — it’s just a relatable athlete giving us civilians insight into life on tour and what it’s like to be a sponsored athlete.

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