How TJ Maxx is Rewriting the Rules of Sports Marketing with the ESPYs
The discount retailer is carving out its own niche in sports and here's what brand marketers should take from it.
Last week, the ESPYs took place at Lincoln Center in New York and the biggest names in sports showed up on the red carpet to celebrate the greatest in the industry. For the uninitiated, the ESPYs has become one of the most glamorous nights in the world of sporting and is often called the Met Gala of this universe. Over the past couple of years, luxury fashion houses have showed up to fulfill that promise with the Vogue’s of the world dedicating actual editorial space to the red carpet looks.
That’s why it makes it even more surprising that the true winner of this year’s ESPYs was the discount retailer, TJ Maxx.
In 2025, TJ Maxx became the exclusive retail sponsor of the ESPYs, and this year they turned it up a notch by presenting the red carpet show and sponsoring award categories, like the Best Athlete Women’s Sports award. They also ran add spots starring athlete partners Ilona Maher and Mallory Swanson, dressing Maher for the red carpet. Maher, who presented at the show and won Best Breakthrough Athlete last year, wore a Retrofête gown she pulled from TJ Maxx.
In a sea of athletes dressed in heritage luxury fashion brands, this moment stood out. The brand put some earned media legs behind this effort, with E! running a whole segment calling Maher the “ultimate Maxxinista”, and additional media coverage in BuzzFeed, People, Elite Daily.
TJ Maxx entered women’s sports around 2022, well before the post-Caitlin Clark gold rush. Per Marketing Brew, the brand has partnered with more than 55 athletes, coaches and broadcasters, plus institutions like Togethxr and ESPN itself. Their head of marketing Emily Trent describes the strategy as showcasing stories of “originality and individuality” with women athletes outside of their athletic careers.
Maher has been working with the brand for over a year and her entire public identity built on accessibility and being herself has been the perfect match for what TJ Maxx seems to be going for, and clearly making headlines the way they’d hoped for.
At a time when every brand is trying to enter sports and typically going the conventional route by sponsoring a team or signing an athlete, TJ Maxx has gone above and beyond by headlining a moment where sports and fashion actually collide—the one night a year when hundreds of athletes get dressed up and fashion media shows up in force.
No other brand has been able to pick this (or any other) awards show as their centerpiece and build a full campaign around it, with the category sponsorship, the carpet naming rights, the talent, the ads and the retail tie back all pointing at each other. As a first mover, it is a genuinely smart move (and it’s relatively cheap real estate relative to what it earned them).
When it comes to luxury houses, there were a few standout moments: Alysa Liu wore Louis Vuitton at one of her first carpets as an ambassador and won Best Breakthrough Athlete in the dress. Lindsey Vonn wore Gucci, Karl-Anthony Towns and Chloe Kim were styling Tiffanny jewels.
But while the houses showed up, they failed to build a content ecosystem around it in a way that has come to only be expected at more mainstream events. On the other hand, TJ Maxx really did treat it like their Met Gala moment with behind the scenes photos, carpet interviews, paid media, and sponsor integrations.
If you’re a brand looking at sports right now, the lesson here isn’t to sponsor an awards show. The lesson is that TJ Maxx found a moment nobody else was building around and committed to it across every channel they have. Team deals and athlete deals have become stale at this point and the white space truly lies in the occasions where sports culture actually gets consumed, and most of them are still unclaimed.