🏈 How a $65 Loan Built a $10M Football Brand

Happy Wednesday,

Football gear used to be simple: match your team colors, shut up, and play.

Now it’s identity. It’s culture. It’s drops.

This week, Jake and I sat down with Nathan Dorton, founder of Phenom Elite; his story is basically a case study in how the sporting goods industry is getting dragged from “scale-only” into “personal + expressive + direct-to-consumer.”

Phenom didn’t start with a breakthrough material or a lab-grade innovation. It started with a structural gap: when Nathan left college football, he lost access to the gear pipeline and realized a huge chunk of the sport was paying full price for equipment the big brands didn’t really care about.

A $65 loan from his dad turned into five prototype gloves. That turned into a first order. And now it’s a business Nathan values at ~$10 million, with real volume behind it: 40,000 cleats and 35,000 gloves sold D2C in 2025.

Let’s break down how he did it.

🎧 [Listen to our full episode with Nathan Dorton]

5 Takeaways From Our Conversation With Nathan Dorton

1. The sporting goods industry wasn’t built for most football players

Nathan’s first “aha” wasn’t about performance; it was about access.

At App State, he had a Nike deal behind him, but when that went away, it was, “I’m tired of paying full price for gloves and cleats and mouth guards.” So he did what the big brands weren’t set up to do: he built for the long tail:

• High schools

• Small colleges

• Semi-pro teams

The elite programs massively outnumber them, but they rarely get real attention.

However, he quickly realized that this market isn’t some consolation prize; it’s the base of a much larger pyramid.

2. The $65 loan worked because the first sale was baked in

The origin story of Phenom Elite is funny because it’s so small, but it’s also revealing.

Nathan found a factory in Pakistan, mocked up gloves in Photoshop, and asked his dad for $65 to make five prototypes. Then he sold his first real order to Emory & Henry University (a DIII school he’d just finished playing for), 24 pairs, at around $24 a pair, and he admitted, “I don’t think we probably made anything at all… I was so excited to create something, sell it, and have somebody buy it.”

That first sale happened fast because the market didn’t need convincing; it just needed someone to show up.

3. “Custom everything” doesn’t scale… until you turn it into storytelling

A lot of Phenom’s early business was made-to-order team gloves. It worked, but it was operationally brutal.

One of the smartest lines in the episode came from someone on his team: “We’re a glove company with no gloves to sell.” That’s when the model flipped into holding inventory and building a real product engine.

But here’s the twist: customization didn’t disappear, it just evolved into storytelling. Nathan talked about seeing his gloves on national TV for the first time when Southern Miss wore them against Alabama after ordering 800–900 pairs. That moment isn’t about gloves. It’s about identity and visibility, the same forces that now drive alternate uniforms, helmet decals, and custom cleats.

4. Licensing became Phenom’s moat, but it’s basically just streetwear logic

Phenom’s breakout move wasn’t trying to out-Nike Nike. It was becoming the licensing brand in football: DC Comics, Nickelodeon, Kool-Aid, Sonic, Call of Duty, and more.

Nathan was blunt about the economics: licensing deals typically come with minimum guarantees plus royalties (he said royalty rates can range ~8% to 14% depending on the deal). And his insight on why the big guys don’t chase it was simple: they don’t need it, and they don’t want to pay extra when they can recycle their own archives.

Phenom does need it, because licensing creates instant differentiation in a category that’s historically been “red/white/black/team color.”

And it’s working. Nathan said they now sell more cleats than gloves, and the licensed product is about 50/50 youth-to-adult, boosted by 7-on-7 and flag football culture, where athletes aren’t boxed into team color rules.

Then there’s the 2026 proof point: Kool-Aid Cherry Cleats dropping February 1, 2026, limited stock, countdown timer, waitlist. That’s not sporting goods behavior, that’s drop culture.

5. NIL didn’t create this trend; it just made it impossible to ignore

NIL validated what Phenom was already building: athletes want to look like themselves, not like a template.

Nathan connected the dots well: 7-on-7 and flag are growing fast, the NFL is investing in flag, and the lack of helmets makes athletes more marketable because you can actually see their faces. Put NIL on top of that, and you get a perfect storm: identity becomes monetizable.

And Phenom is positioned for it because they built trust before NIL was a headline. Now they can do the more traditional athlete strategy (without paying superstar money) while still owning the “culture gear” lane.

Why It Matters

Sports are moving in the same direction retail moved years ago: from uniformity → personalization → community-driven drops.

The big brands are built to win at scale. But scale is exactly why they struggle with:

• Low minimums

• Fast customization

• Niche communities

• Short-cycle product moments

• Culture-first storytelling

Phenom’s whole story is what happens when a challenger brand solves the fundamentals first (price, access, speed), then layers on hype (licensing, scarcity, drops) once the engine is real.

And the engine is real: 75,000 D2C products sold in 2025 across cleats + gloves is not a side hustle. It’s a signal.

🎧 [Listen to our full episode with Nathan Dorton]

📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.

See you then,
Tyler & Jake