Image: PWHL
When the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) began its inaugural season this past January, each of its six teams were represented solely by a color and city name. But this season, players will hit the ice with custom jerseys, unique logos, and team names to call their own—and fans can sport them, too, with new team jerseys available to purchase online now and in stores Thursday.
The PWHL, which was just founded in summer 2023, is a cross-border league representing teams from Boston, Minnesota, New York City, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. And it’s already heating up. It drew close to 400,000 total fans across 72 games in its first season, and it also set a world record for attendance at a women’s hockey game with over 21,000 attendees. Of course, alongside the first season’s success came an influx of new fans, many of whom were eager to represent their favorite team—and generic merch just wouldn’t cut it.
The league sought to meet that demand, and in less than a year, it developed unique logos, names, and jerseys for all six teams at once. In short, the PWHL pulled off a massive branding feat. The step not only builds out the visual identities of each team’s fanbase, but also helps to usher the league onto the national stage.
Same PWHL, new names
The demand from fans for “traditional team nicknames and identities” was clear after just a few games, according to Kanan Bhatt-Shah, the PWHL’s VP of marketing, so Bhatt-Shah’s team brought on New York City design agency Flower Shop and got to work developing each team’s branding soon after the first pucks hit the ice around the end of January.
They were working on a breakneck timeline. Jersey artwork for the 2025 season was due in early May—meaning that the PWHL and Flower Shop would have just about three months to finalize names, logos, and, finally, jerseys for all six teams.
Team names were the first priority of the PWHL branding initiative. The PWHL and Flower Shop worked together to establish IP-safe names that would have historical ties to each individual city, a chant-able quality, and an element of timelessness.
“These are sports teams that we hope will be around as long as we are, and so they have to be timeless,” says Al Merry, CCO of Flower Shop. “We would look at Ottawa or look at Boston and say, ‘Okay, what is unique to the city and its people, and what is going to resonate now and forever with them and not be a passing fad?’” Features including city architecture, seasons, atmosphere, and history were top considerations.
After much deliberation, the final choices were Boston Fleet, for the city’s maritime past; Minnesota Frost, for its notoriously cold winters; Montreal Victoire, for a history of ice hockey success; New York Sirens, for the city’s singular ambient sound; Ottawa Charge, for the motto “Advance—Ottawa—En Avant”; and Toronto Sceptres, as a reference to the old moniker “Queen City”.
Designing six unique teams
Then came the logo and wordmark designs. To get a true feel for each city, Merry and his team conducted both archival and in-person research. They also saw the teams play in-person to get a feel for the team and its fans.
“I remember going to the Ottawa Public Library in the middle of winter, and we were sitting there surrounded by Margaret Atwood books and the typography that she used—we were searching high and low for pieces of the city, pieces of architecture, pieces of art,” Merry says.
“Where we ended up, in terms of ‘Charge,’ was this electrifying force that was inspired by going to the stadium, being in the arena, and feeling this force reverberating throughout,” he says. Ottowa’s logo—an electrified red and yellow “C”—is based on the energy Merry’s team felt in the stands that night.
He has similar stories for most of the other teams. Boston’s logo, for example, is a stylized serif “B” that mimics an anchor as a callback to Boston’s history as a port city—but the reference to a fleet of ships is also meant to reflect the team’s unique playing style.
“We could see that there was a strength and unity in the squad of players that were taking to the ice,” Merry says. “It was something that kept coming up when we talked to the fans. . . . The fleet being together, this group of ships—or in this case, players coming together—it wasn’t a huge leap”.
Other easter eggs are sprinkled throughout the designs, like a blue hidden “M” in the Montreal Victoire’s logo and a bold, blocky “NY” graphic behind the New York Sirens’ wordmark.
But there is some throughline to the teams’ original looks. To maintain fans’ visual associations with each team, Flower Shop used the color schemes that PWHL had assigned to each city during the inaugural season. ”So many of our fans had bought merch and jerseys in season one, and we wanted to make sure that they felt very much on brand and felt that sense of belonging going into season two, with updated team identities and names,” Bhatt-Shah says.
Jerseys that teams and fans can love
Now fans will have a significantly wider selection of merch to choose from. The PWHL worked with Flower Shop to transfer its designs onto a range of apparel and collectibles for the league’s store, in addition to the finalized official jerseys. Each jersey has the team’s logo on the front and striping details at the hem and cuffs, and comes in an alternate colorway.
“On the one hand, starting from a blank slate allows for much creative freedom, but on the other hand, the lack of history or fan expectations creates a unique challenge,” Merry says. “A jersey is a symbol of pride. Fans have a deep emotional connection to their team’s look, and getting that right requires balance between originality and authenticity”.
It’s a testament to the PWHL’s marketing and players that the league was able to attract such a significant following in its first season without distinctive team branding. Now, though, in an era when professional women’s sports seem to finally be receiving greater visibility, the PWHL branding overhaul represents a major investment in legitimizing the league and building it into something that will continue to grow for years to come.
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Fonte Fast Company
