By Noah Ziegler

The phrase, “Everyone watches women’s sports” is more than a motto on a T-shirt – it’s a movement, gaining traction as TV ratings and coverage, merchandise sales and fan attendance rise, bolster  the fact that women’s sports leagues are growing in the sports zeitgeist.

Playing a role in that rise in popularity is TOGETHXR, a media and commerce company founded in 2021 by the four high-profile athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel and Sue Bird. The TOGETHXR brand is the brains behind the “Everyone watches women’s sports” T-shirts, which generated $3 million in revenue in its first seven months post-release. Says its website, “We shatter the often narrow depictions of women in the media with content featuring a diverse and inclusive community of game changers, culture shapers, thought leaders, and barrier breakers.” The site also notes that women’s sports receive 16% of sports media coverage despite women making up 44% of all participants. We spoke with Jessica Robertson, TOGETHXR’s Co-Founder/Chief Content Officer, about the brand’s role in sports and how it will continue to evolve.

How have the first few years gone for TOGETHXR, and what do you see as ‘There’s still work to do’ in these next couple of years?

We wanted to really be clear on the white space that existed. At the time of 100% of total sports media coverage, only 4% of that was dedicated to women’s sports, and that’s not even to address the quality of that coverage or the breadth of that coverage, the diversity of that coverage. So immediately we saw a huge opportunity just to increase visibility in making women’s sports and these incredible athletes front and center, pulling them from the margins, giving them [a] platform every single day.

There are so many brands that just are dedicated to covering men’s sports and especially where it intersects with culture. In the quadrant where women’s sports and culture intersected, it was pretty wide open. We understand that sports is a prism for culture. It’s not even a microcosm—sports is culture. So it was really important for us, yes, to make these incredible women visible every single day, but to also sort of rightfully place them within the cultural context in which they existed.

 I think if we look into the future, the white space that I was talking about when we first launched has become a little bit more crowded, and that’s a good thing. I think more is more for everyone in this space. Women’s sports is seen as a smart business investment … We’re not talking about the merits or moral stakes of women’s sports at this point. We’re talking about it being the movement right now, and it’s a little less like it’s the right thing to do to invest in women’s sports, and a little bit more like you’re going to miss out if you don’t.

What’s the significance of having prominent athletes being part of TOGETHXR beyond having a well-known name tied to the brand?

Our co-founders are lightning rods for storytelling, for visibility, for community, for audience, for culture, and for all of their shared greatness. I mean, they are four of the greatest athletes in the entire world. I don’t have to say female or woman in front of that to qualify it. They also represent very different experiences in their life and their DNA and their focus and their values. It was central to our mission to sort of infuse what the four of them stood for, how they lived their careers, how they live their lives, the impact that they want to have, not just for this generation, but future generations, to infuse that into our brand DNA. And it was really important … to really lean into the power of a collective, because women’s sports are used to this, and they have to work in partnership with each other, create camaraderie, create these collectives in order to move the space forward. Not any one individual can do it alone. And Alex [Morgan] really, really embraced that and wanted to build this with other incredible athletes and two to have it be athlete-led and founded … being able to bring them front and center and have their experiences sort of really authentically reflected in the brand and the stories that we tell was paramount to get that right.

What does TOGETHXR see as challenges that still persist relative to women’s sports?

How much time do you have? I would say there’s cultural challenges still that exists. Do we really value these athletes as athletes? Are we really embracing the competitive nature of these incredible women? Are we really celebrating and centering their accomplishments for what they are and not comparing them to men’s sports? That would be one. Women’s sports in particular sits at every cultural intersection. It’s almost impossible to talk about the lack of investment and lack of growth over time in women’s sports without acknowledging the -isms that exist in the space: racism, sexism, homophobia. Those are all very, very real. Also, investment. Women’s sports has been held back for generations. It has a lot of catching up to do. It’s happening. We’re seeing the investment growth, and it feels like we’re in a moment where we’re not on a boom-and=bust cycle, which we’ve seen in the past. It feels like this is sustained, that this is lasting, which is incredible to see, but the investment still has to be right-sized relative to the product that you see on the court or on the pitch, the value that these women actually bring and what their value actually is relative to the sports space overall. That’s just going to take some time, also inventory. That’s a thing I think that we’re hyper-focused on in 2025 and beyond.

You joined TOGETHXR after spending five years at The Players’ Tribune. How have you carried the notion of authentic storytelling over, and what were some of the lessons learned while with the Tribune?

What I think The Players’ Tribune did 10+ years ago was rightfully recognize that there’s just an entire population of people—in this case, athletes—who have been dehumanized, who have been reduced, especially in the men’s sports side, reduced to like stats and performances and metrics and assets … There’s also a bit of a media town square too, and I think those walls have come down just a little bit, and there would be power to place value in an athlete, owning their own narrative. Like, what would happen if an athlete could, for the first time, or maybe in a new way, share their real human experience, because oftentimes they play maybe sports where they are anonymous, where they’re wearing helmets or something and you don’t actually know who they are. What social conversation could you drive? What sort of fan engagement could you drive? What value could you drive if you just had real intimate storytelling. Being athlete-led and founded here—that’s something that I mentioned that was really important to Alex—that was really paramount, because not only are you seeing some of those same things in the women’s sports side, you actually just don’t know these women at all. It was really important for us to have athlete-led representation and storytelling to engage audiences, to be a see-it brand where other athletes or our own community could see their real-life stories reflected back and told in a way and related to in a way that maybe never existed before.