No Rivals
Brand Identity
A league of your own.
Building a collegiate lifestyle brand from the ground up, combining premium headwear, nostalgic design, and a distinct visual identity. As co-founder, I helped shape everything from the brand's positioning and product design to its digital presence, creative campaigns, and expansion into a multimillion-dollar business.
My Role
Co-Founder, Head of Brand & Product, Creative Director
Disciplines
Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Product Design, Ecommerce, Creative Direction, Licensing
Scope
Brand Identity
Impact
$8M+ Revenue by Year 3 / 150+ Collegiate Licenses / 600+ Product Designs
Year
2023
Industry
Apparel
Each hat tells a story, not only of the school it represents but of the brand philosophy that has come to define No Rivals.
The Brief
College merchandise had a design problem.
College fans have no shortage of ways to represent their schools. The problem was that most merchandise looked and felt the same.
Oversized logos, predictable color combinations, and products designed primarily around school affiliation left little room for personal style.
We saw an opportunity to build something different: a collegiate lifestyle brand that treated headwear as a fashion product rather than another piece of fan merchandise.
The ambition wasn't simply to make better-looking hats. It was to build a recognizable brand that people would want to wear regardless of whether they were headed to a game.
The Strategy
Build a brand people follow, not just a logo they recognize.
From the beginning, I wanted No Rivals to feel like a brand with its own point of view, rather than a company selling licensed merchandise.
“A League of Your Own” became the foundation. It connected school pride with individuality, giving the brand permission to celebrate collegiate culture without relying on traditional sports marketing.
The visual strategy paired nostalgic athletic references with a more contemporary, premium aesthetic. Vintage typography, restrained color, thoughtful materials, and editorial photography helped establish a recognizable identity.
That approach also informed how we built the business. Every new school, product collection, and campaign needed to feel like part of the same brand while leaving enough room to celebrate the individual identity of each university.
The Decisions
Make the brand recognizable before you see the logo.
One of my biggest priorities was creating an identity that could remain consistent across hundreds of products without making every release look identical.
I developed a mostly black-and-white visual foundation, using vintage orange and green as distinctive accents. The restrained palette gave our colorful collegiate products room to stand out while making the surrounding brand feel cohesive.
The logomark, typography, packaging, photography, and copywriting all needed to reinforce the same personality: confident, nostalgic, and intentionally different from traditional fan merchandise.
Product design required a similar balance. Every university had its own colors, history, marks, and licensing requirements, but the products still needed to feel unmistakably No Rivals.
Rather than treating those constraints as limitations, I used them to develop a flexible design language that could accommodate different schools, silhouettes, and collections without losing the brand's identity.
The Build
From a logo to an entire business.
As co-founder and Head of Brand & Product, my responsibilities extended far beyond creating the visual identity.
I developed the brand direction and designed more than 600 products, helping establish the creative foundation for a growing portfolio of collegiate licenses.
I also directed campaigns, photography, packaging, ecommerce experiences, and the broader visual expression of the business. That meant moving constantly between creative strategy and hands-on execution, from refining a hat design to preparing a collection for launch.
As the company grew, the challenge shifted from creating individual assets to maintaining a recognizable brand across an expanding product catalog, digital storefront, wholesale relationships, and licensing opportunities.
The work required balancing creative ambition with production realities, commercial priorities, and the operational needs of a growing company.
The Impact
A design-led brand became a multimillion-dollar business.
Over three years, No Rivals grew to more than $8 million in revenue, expanded to over 150 collegiate licenses, and developed a catalog of more than 600 product designs.
The brand also built a social audience of approximately 100,000 followers and expanded its creative work through campaigns, partnerships, and new product categories.
What started as an effort to rethink collegiate headwear became a recognizable lifestyle brand with a distinct identity and a growing commercial presence.
The most meaningful result was proving that design could be more than a supporting function. It could help define the products, positioning, customer experience, and direction of the business itself.
The Reflection
Building the brand was only half the job. Building the business changed everything.
No Rivals fundamentally changed how I think about design.
When you're building your own company, there's nowhere to hide behind a beautiful presentation. Products have to sell. Production deadlines are real. Licensing requirements matter. Customers have opinions, and sometimes they're very different from yours.
I learned how to balance the work I wanted to make with the work the business needed, without losing the creative conviction that made the brand different in the first place.
It's the reason I approach design the way I do today. I care deeply about typography, composition, and the smallest visual details, but I care just as much about what those decisions accomplish.
A strong brand isn't just something people recognize. It's something that helps build a business worth recognizing.
Full Credits
Branding
Martick
Product Design
Martick
Product Photography
Made Free Creative
Table Photography
Hayden B Productions
WHAT'S NEXT
There's more where that came from.
One project only tells part of the story. Explore more of my work, the teams I've led, and the experiences that shaped how I approach design.
MORE WORK
Different challenges, different industries, same obsession with making things better.
EXPERIENCES
A closer look at my background across technical design, brand-building, creative leadership, digital systems, and hands-on execution over the last few years.