In 2022, Jenny Nguyen launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to put four walls around both a dream and an underserved market in the industry: a sports bar built entirely and intentionally for women’s sports.
Four years later, The Sports Bra has evolved from a viral success story into an emerging asset class of its own.
Now, the Portland, Ore. based company is launching a public crowdfunding campaign called “The Own a Piece of The Bra,” allowing fans to buy equity in the company for as little as $250. The campaign, hosted through the investment platform Republic, aims to raise $1.2 million as the company looks to accelerate national expansion, grow its franchise infrastructure and open a second company-owned location in Portland.
The announcement comes at a moment when women’s sports has shifted from cultural movement to financial juggernaut; the NWSL’s new Columbus NWSL expansion franchise commanded a $205 million expansion fee, while the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries are being valued near $1 billion before even establishing a long-term on-court history.
“When we came onto the market in 2022, folks were doubtful of the concept,” Nguyen told The Athletic. “Trolls saying nobody cared about women’s sports, that we’d last two months because we weren’t showing men’s sports.
“To have the kind of feedback right out of the gates both locally and internationally, it just helped springboard this new movement, creating a new market in the food and beverage industry, and then immediately we started to see other places opening up, because the proof of concept was there when the sports bra became successful.”
Nguyen is encouraged not only by the success of The Sports Bra, but by how quickly others followed. She has watched the shift happen in real time as more bars across the country opened spaces where women’s basketball, soccer, hockey and volleyball no longer had to fight for a single television in the corner while an NFL preseason game dominated the rest of the screens.
“When we first opened in 2022, the vast majority of our guests were women and nonbinary people,” Nguyen said. “A huge part of Portland’s LGBTQ+ community saw The Sports Bra as a place where they belonged, where they felt seen, represented and included. Back then, probably 95 percent of the people coming through our doors were either part of the LGBTQ+ community, women, nonbinary people or diehard women’s sports fans.”
That audience has since broadened alongside the bar’s popularity. Today, Nguyen said, the all-ages venue regularly draws families, children and a much more diverse crowd. And somewhat unexpectedly, some of the loudest evangelists for women’s sports have become straight male customers.
“Honestly, cis men are sometimes the most vocal about why they love women’s sports,” Nguyen said. “We hear it all the time from men who say they’ve stopped watching men’s sports and started gravitating toward women’s sports instead. They’ve become huge allies for spaces like ours.”
The popularity of the first Bra and momentum around women’s sports is what pushed her to begin thinking about expansion through a franchise model, an approach she studied closely and realized aligned naturally with the bar’s community-driven roots. The Sports Bra announced plans to franchise in April 2024, launched its franchise website that October and publicly unveiled four franchise cities last summer.
“We’ve gone from one brain trying to figure everything out to dozens of people from different backgrounds constantly thinking about new ideas,” Nguyen said of why the franchise model works for The Bra. “Instead of everything coming from us, franchisees bring their own creativity and local perspective, which is what helps franchise systems really grow.”
Today, five new locations are already in various stages of development, from lease negotiations to build-outs and opening preparations, in Las Vegas, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Boston and Portland, Maine. Launching a Sports Bra franchise requires an estimated initial investment of $400,733 to $1,108,958, including a $55,000 franchise fee.
With the current fundraising campaign, Nguyen is going back to the community, intending to open 40 locations by 2031, including a second, larger Portland location to serve as both the corporate headquarters and the training ground for incoming franchisees.
“This is what the raise is about, it really is the future of The Sports Bra, and it’s in the hands of the community,” Nguyen said. “We want people to become longtime fans and supporters of the Bra to finally have that opportunity to get in the game and own a piece of the bar.”
The Sports Bra generated more than $1 million in revenue in its first eight months of operation, attracted backing from Alexis Ohanian’s 776 Foundation and secured partnerships with major brands and leagues, including Nike, Adidas, ESPN, WNBA, Buick and Strava. The company projects it could grow to more than $75 million in annual revenue by 2030.
“Women’s sports is big business, and supporting through investment will yield returns,” said WNBA legend and Atlanta Dream co-owner Renee Montgomery, an investor in The Sports Bra alongside Ohanian. “If you’ve been paying attention, it’s easy to see how backing The Sports Bra is a winning move.”
Within the first 24 hours of the initiative, the company raised $94,505 from 125 investors and has reached more than $120,000 across nearly 200 investors so far.
Nguyen, who worked as a chef before becoming an entrepreneur, knows restaurants and bars remain notoriously difficult businesses to scale, with thin margins, labor challenges and soaring real estate costs. But the broader sports bar industry has grown significantly since the pandemic. According to industry estimates, the global sports bar market is expected to grow from roughly $61.4 billion in 2026 to $88.6 billion by 2035, with the U.S. accounting for nearly half of the market.
But the fundraising push and planned expansion are Nguyen’s bet on the continued growth of women’s sports, which is projected to generate $3 billion in revenue in 2026, a 340 percent increase since 2022, according to Deloitte’s latest report.
And her real bet is not simply whether people will convene to watch women’s sports. That debate feels superfluous now, at least from Nguyen’s perspective.
“We [Portland] just signed three professional women’s teams in the city this year. So we are not concerned with content or busyness, it’s going to be chock-a-block full of things,” she said when The Athletic asked about her “summer of soccer” plans during the men’s World Cup, which will be co-hosted by the United States.
“We don’t plan to show the men’s World Cup at The Sports Bra, but we’ve talked about having a presence at certain World Cup events through pop-ups,” Nguyen said. “We do pop-up bars and concessions at watch parties all the time, so we’d be open to showing up at a men’s World Cup events as long as we don’t personally have to put the games on our screens. We can show women’s sports instead. We can have the WNBA on during the World Cup.”
The bigger question now is whether fans believe in the business enough to invest in it, too.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
WNBA, NWSL, Sports Business, Women’s Soccer
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