Walk into any major women’s sporting event in the United States in 2022 and look at the sponsors around. Car brands. Banks. Beer companies. Telecoms. The same five to six categories that have bought sports sponsorship inventory since the late 1980s. What you did not find was a single beauty brand. Not one cosmetics company had looked at an audience that skewed female, young, and digitally engaged, and decided it was worth buying.
This is the gap e.l.f. Beauty identified. A gap so visible it demands an explanation for why nobody moved on it earlier.
Most sponsorship strategies start with the same question: how do we reach the biggest possible audience? In 2021, if you applied that thinking to women’s sports, the conclusion was usually that audiences were still too small compared to major men’s leagues and that the commercial value was uncertain.
But that was the wrong way for a beauty brand to look at it.
A beauty company does not need to reach everyone. It needs to reach the right people. Women’s sports already had a young, highly engaged female audience that matched exactly who beauty brands were trying to target. The opportunity was never too small. The audience was valuable, underserved, and almost completely ignored by competing beauty brands.
e.l.f Beauty entered sports in 2023 at a time when the business was growing rapidly, with net sales compounding at roughly 30% annually through a digital first strategy built around TikTok, influencer marketing, and performance advertising. The model was working, but the same digital channels that helped build the brand were becoming increasingly crowded and expensive as more beauty companies chased the same audiences using the exact same playbook. Women’s sports offered something completely different. An undercompeted marketing channel where the audience aligned perfectly with e.l.f.’s core consumer and where almost no competing beauty brands had shown up yet.
The architecture of firsts tells the story. e.l.f became the first beauty brand at the Indianapolis 500. First beauty brand in NWSL history. First beauty brand at the PWHL. First beauty brand at the Wonder Women of Wrestling. First beauty brand on a Premier League shirt. Every one of these properties had been selling sponsorship inventory for years without a single beauty brand deciding it was worth buying. These first mover positions are permanent. Being first gives you a completely different story to tell consumers. You are seen as the brand that spotted the opportunity early and moved before everyone else. Once another company has already entered the space, that originality disappears.
Here’s how e.l.f. saw this opportunity before everyone and took advantage?
