This week, we take a look at the growing world of golf tunnel fits. As golf continues to grow in popularity, apparel brands like J.Lindeberg are capitalizing on the opportunity to dress athletes on their way to tournaments. Later, we talk with Cakes Body co-founder Taylor Capuano about tariffs, recruiting and paying for employees’ childcare.
At this point, the “tunnel fit” has become a well-known phenomenon in sports like basketball and football. What the players wear on their way into the game has become a topic of fascination for viewers and a marketing opportunity for the brands that dress them.
Now, enter the golf tunnel fit. J.Lindeberg, a Swedish apparel brand known for its connections to golf, tennis and ski, has been pushing the tunnel fit moment for its golf ambassadors since January. Working with pro athletes like Matt Wallace, Viktor Hovland and Kathryn Newton, J.Lindeberg has been dressing its ambassadors before major golf tournaments like the Masters and the Valspar Championship.
The strategy marks the latest crossover between the worlds of fashion and sports. While basketball players, both men and women, have become fashion icons, the same transformation is rippling out to other sports like tennis, Formula 1 and now golf.
J.Lindeberg’s approach was the brainchild of Emilia Esser, senior PR and marketing manager at J.Lindeberg.
“I’ve been trying to do this for such a long time,” she told Glossy. “The arrival fits in the NBA and NFL are such a huge moment for fashion brands and brands put so much work and money into it. But no one was really talking about what golfers wore off the course. It was this obvious opportunity for us to show off our ready-to-wear and more of the fashion side of our business.”
While J.Lindeberg’s ambassadors wear its performance apparel on the course, the brand also has a large selection of more fashion-oriented products. This week, for the PGA Championship held in Charlotte, golfers like Matthieu Pavon, Hovland and Wallace arrived in J.Lindeberg’s fashion collection. All of the athletes posted their looks to their social media accounts, as did J.Lindeberg.
Golf has comparable viewership to sports like basketball in the U.S. Sunday night final rounds of the PGA Tour average about 2 million viewers, which is about the same as an average NBA game. For important tournaments, like the Masters, viewership can jump to 12 million, again on par with the NBA Championship which averages around 12 million viewers.
And while there may not be as many household names in golf as there are in basketball, some golfers command huge audiences. Viktor Hovland, for example, has over 760,000 followers on Instagram.
“Especially during Covid, golf became more accessible and younger audiences started playing and watching because there was nothing else to do and it was a sport you could do safely,” Esser said. Over 45 million people play golf in the U.S. and the amount of young people playing the sport has grown 40% since 2020.
J.Lindeberg isn’t the only brand capitalizing on the star power of golfers. Malbon, another golf-focused fashion brand, has been dressing players like Jason Day. Day has been asked multiple times to tone down his dressing during tournaments because his Malbon looks, with bold and ostentatious branding, have been deemed too distracting on the course.
Golf viewers also tend to be more affluent. One poll from 2024 put around 74% of American golf viewers in the mid-to-high income range, making $70,000 a year or more. That makes the sport a good opportunity for brands offering a more premium product. Hovland arrived to the Masters earlier this year in a patterned sweater from J.Lindeberg that depicted the course he was to play on. Esser said the sweater, which sells for around $250, sold out shortly after.
Like many fashion brands, J.Lindeberg is increasingly looking for ways to cross over into the cultural space. Leaders from brands like Levi’s and Old Navy have all told Glossy in recent months that working with athletes, musicians, entertainers and content creators helps keep their brands at the top of consumers’ minds.
“We’re really trying to build this crossover between sport and fashion,” Esser said. “In the next year, we will be doing even more with ambassadors, having them in the front row of our fashion shows or letting them walk in the show, for example.”
The golf apparel market was worth more than $9 billion last year, and J.Lindeberg has seen its revenue growing since 2020, reaching more than $130 million.
Cakes Body co-founder Taylor Capuano on recruiting, tariffs and paying for employees’ childcare
The 3-year-old nipple cover brand Cakes Body has tripled its team in the last year, growing from 10 to 30 people. As co-founders and sisters Taylor Capuano and Casey Sarai are both new mothers, balancing work and life was on their minds.
This week, the founders announced a new policy that will cover childcare expenses for all employees. Since May 1, all Cakes employees can get up to $3,000 per month for childcare costs for their children under six years old, which Capuano and Sarai calculated by averaging childcare costs across the country for two children.
Glossy spoke with Capuano about the new initiative, as well as how she’s growing the brand and how tariffs are affecting the business.
What inspired the new initiative?
“People often talk about investing in their employees, but we wanted to do something more than just, like, a ping pong table in the office. The growth we’ve had is a reflection of two things: an insane amount of focus, mostly driven by Casey [Sarai], and our amazing team. We do not have box checkers, we do not have B-players. Only A-players. If we had a less efficient team, we’d need twice as many people and be less profitable. Our team is why we have grown as well as we have.
Imagine if you have a child, you’re stressed, you’re exhausted, you drop them off at daycare and you have to leave work early to pick them up because you can’t afford the extra two hours. Are you really bringing your best self to work after that? A lot of big companies say things like this are a nice idea, but they can’t afford to do it. We think of it as an investment in our employees.”
Speaking of affording it, how did you manage the finances of offering childcare reimbursement?
“We knew we could afford it, so there wasn’t much discussion. [Cakes Body’s revenue is over $10 million, and the company is profitable.] We looked at the numbers and, as soon as we figured out we could afford to do this, to reimburse at normal childcare rates, it became non-negotiable. We looked at a lot of programs at other companies that do something similar, and the biggest one we found only offered $300 a month. That’s only, like, two days of daycare, so we wanted to do a lot more. We researched average childcare costs across the country. We have people up and down the East Coast, and we have some people in Los Angeles. We came up with a number that would cover the average daycare costs for two kids.”
What has recruiting and growing the team been like recently?
“We’ve had a pretty big influx of resumés, as you can imagine. The state of the world right now is that people can make money in a lot of ways. Entrepreneurship is more accessible than ever. Anyone on our social team could go and make a living doing social on their own because they’re great at it. So, as an employer, we need to create an environment that’s flexible enough to give people the same lifestyle they could have if they were independent. You’re not just competing with other companies, but your competing with entrepreneurship, as well.”
I have to ask, has the tariff chaos affected the business much?
“At the moment, no. We placed a huge order at the end of last year. We stockpiled inventory so we were in a good spot so it didn’t affect us. Now, we’re doing the same thing again, making a big order so we’ll be set for the future. In the short term, it’s been fine. But it’s a reminder to always be de-risking and diversifying.”
News to know
- American Eagle issued a profit warning on Tuesday. AEO was expecting to see a sales decline this quarter in the low single-digit percentages, but now that outlook is looking even worse. Jay Schottenstein, company CEO, said he was “disappointed” that American Eagle’s merchandising strategy hadn’t worked out.
- Both Google and eBay launched new programs this week allowing users to generate 3D videos of products with generative AI. That’s despite the fact that other generative-AI-based marketing efforts have received criticism for their uncanny, sometimes creepy effect.
- Saks Global has had its credit rating downgraded by debt watchdog Standard & Poor, citing the company’s lack of on-hand cash. Saks’s cash flow issues are well known at this point, as the company has struggled to pay vendors on time even as it closed a billion-dollar acquisition of Neiman Marcus.
Inside Glossy’s coverage
How The Clear Cut’s new AI tool is reshaping diamond pricing
US and China tariff truce brings relief, but American brands are skeptical it will hold
Tootsies’s hands-on approach to brand partnerships is translating to big sales per door
