In January, Sephora stepped into a new arena: The retailer was named as the official beauty partner of Unrivaled. The offseason women’s basketball league was founded in 2023 to allow WNBA players to remain in the U.S. during their offseason rather than playing abroad. With the sponsorship, Sephora earned the right to outfit the Unrivaled glam room and have its name appear throughout the players’ arrival hall. But the Unrivaled partnership is just the beginning of the beauty giant’s growing presence in the sports world.
In April, Sephora was named a founding partner of the Golden State Valkyries, the WNBA team which is currently playing its first season. And on Monday, the beauty giant announced it will be the exclusive beauty partner of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, the national women’s professional softball league that launched in 2024 and began its inaugural season in June.
“Women’s sports are absolutely on an upswing right now, and we’re here for it,” said Sephora CMO Zena Arnold. “It’s been fascinating to see how sports have embraced beauty in recent times. There’s this hunger; people really want to know more about athletes — not just their performance on the court or on the field, but also who they are.”
Sephora is far from alone in seeing the opportunities in sports. Beauty brands like Glossier, Paula’s Choice and Estée Lauder have all invested in the arena in recent years through everything from the sponsorship of individual players to the sponsorship of entire leagues. Those investments speak to not only beauty brands’ desire to align themselves with values like community and health and wellness, but also of prestige beauty’s need to find new audiences as it matures beyond a niche consumer base.
“What’s happening with some prestige brands is the growth isn’t as easily there,” said Ariel Ohana, managing partner of investment bank Ohana & Co. “As any industry expands, it will look to address bigger audiences. But the first thing you want to do is try to do it with audiences or partners that share the same values as you.”
After years of growth, prestige beauty sales have run flat. According to market analysts Circana, U.S. prestige beauty sales were flat in Q1 2025. By comparison, U.S. prestige beauty sales rose 14% in 2023.
Prestige beauty brands have turned to a wide range of sports to find those new audiences. Polish tennis star and 2025 Wimbledon champion Iga Swiatek became the first athlete to become a global Lancôme ambassador when she signed with the L’Oréal-owned beauty company in 2024. Charlotte Tilbury signed on as an F1 Academy partner that same year, and in June, U.S. gymnast and Olympic gold medalist Suni Lee was named the face of Tatcha’s Dewy Milk Moisturizer campaign.
But the WNBA, with its rapidly-growing viewership and rising stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has emerged as one of the most viable avenues for beauty brands to reach sports fans.
“[Women’s basketball] is finally getting its moment,” said Ohana. “It’s becoming an interesting way for brands to target women around values of health, wellness and women empowerment, and it’s also very community-driven.”
According to market research firm Mintel, 87% of WNBA followers who are interested in beauty and personal care integrations say they’re more likely to support brands that sponsor women’s sports. And that group is growing, and getting younger: WNBA viewership jumped 170% from 2023 to 2024, and on ESPN, WNBA viewers aged 2-17 grew 181% in 2024.
Key to getting a return on the investment into that audience is not just getting a logo onto a court, but also offering a holistic view into both the sport as a whole and the players as individual personas.
“Any brand that buys these sponsorships should really be amplifying the content across their social media platforms,” said Gabe Sanchez, senior analyst at Mintel. According to Mintel, 86% of WNBA followers who care about beauty and personal care integrations want more content outside of the games themselves. “It seems like Sephora is doing that, with behind-the-scenes interviews and brand integrations across Reels and TikToks, to get consumers, or fans, a little bit closer to those personalities.”
Sephora’s multi-year partnership with the Golden State Valkyries includes naming rights to the Valkyries’ Oakland performance center and activations at games like on-site Sephora kiosks. Arnold said the partnership will also include developing programs across the Bay Area focused on economic development and community empowerment.
Being a founding-stage partner with a new team like the Valkyries, on the one hand, means taking a risk on a still-developing fan base. But it also allows Sephora to showcase its support of female athletes who are traditionally underpaid, compared to their male counterparts. And it lets the retailer tap into its local roots as a San Francisco-based company.
The ROI on those initiatives doesn’t always link to sales outcomes, Arnold said, but rather to consumer sentiment.
“We mainly look at the reach of the things that we’re putting out into the world, whether it’s the media impressions we’re getting or the content we’re creating,” said Arnold. “It’s a little harder to link it directly to some of our sales numbers, but we’re trying. We’ve got some work underway to see how we can link it closer to our business results.”
While Sephora has gone local with its WNBA partnership, Sephora’s move into the AUSL lets it tap into a national but still distinct audience.
“We’re seeing a lot of the interest in softball being much more spread out geographically, and that’s a really cool way for us to activate and have some presence in places out of major urban areas,” said Arnold. “It’s in contrast to something like the WNBA, which is based in a lot of major cities.”
But no matter whether a brand is partnering with an established league or a rising individual athlete, the key to success is to make the partnership seem as natural as Michael Jordan dunking in a pair of Air Jordans or swigging a Gatorade.
“It’s not so much about finding that endemic fit anymore. It’s about making the non-endemic endemic,” said Sanchez. “There’s always a story that you can tell. Whether you’re a potato chip brand or if you’re a beauty brand, you can tell a story if you find one.”
