Kristin Juszczyk spent years supporting her husband Kyle Juszczyk through his NFL career with the San Francisco 49ers. In her free time, Juszczyk would make fan apparel as a hobby, sewing stylish puffer jackets for cold NFL stadiums.
Over the past two years, Juszczyk has turned that hobby into a career of her own. After going viral multiple times for her own jackets and vests and ones she made for fellow NFL partners like Simone Biles
and Taylor Swift, she convinced
Emma Grede, the Skims and Good American exec, to help her turn it into a true business. She’s now the founder of the brand Off Season, which launched in early 2025.
“Now I have no off season,” Juszczyk says. “It’s such a joy to be able to wake up every day and to have a team of my own too. I’ve always kind of been envious of my husband, being able to be a part of a team, because I always grew up being on a team. Now my Off Season team is like a team of our own.”
Off Season has been experimenting to find out answers to questions around the ongoing convergence of sports and fashion. Does the fashion-minded sports fan shop this kind of apparel year-round, or just with her team’s season? (“We’re still testing that out,” she says.) What’s the right price point for apparel with team logos on it? (Off Season is more of a fashion brand that typical sports merch, and pieces often run above $100.) How do you manage unpredictable demand that will be based on whether a team is winning or not? (Off Season quickly sold out of most Knicks styles during their championship run.) What’s the identity of a brand that’s all about other brands—in this case sports teams?
“When you start a brand that is all about collaborations, it’s important to have your own brand identity as well, or else you can kind of get lost in it,” she says. For that reason, Off Season debuted its first collection with its own branding a few weeks ago. These drops can help fill the gaps between big sports moments, too.
So far, the brand carries apparel for teams in the NBA, NFL, WNBA, and for F1. It’s about to drop a new collection
for the MLB—its first in baseball.
For Juszczyk, 32, becoming a founder has changed her life completely. “I’m not coming in as a business mastermind,” she says. Grede has helped with that. “She’s been able to teach me so much.” Sports apparel is complicated for any new founder, though—there are endless licensing agreements. “Having the honor to be able to represent these teams and these leagues—it comes with a heavy responsibility,” she says, “being very detail-oriented, making sure that every team, every league feels well represented.”
But Juszczyk has trusted her own gut too. She pushed to sell a corset top, guided by what she saw young women wearing in their regular lives, not just to games. “I had to fight tooth and nail to get that corset out there. Everyone was like, ‘No one’s gonna wear a corset to a football game or to a sports game.’ And it was the first product to sell out.”
The brand is trying to tap into sports’ biggest advantage over every other form of entertainment: community. “You get to like tune out everything in your life and just focus on a live event,” she says. “That’s just like the feeling that I’m always trying to encompass at Off Season.”
Emma Hinchliffeemma.hinchliffe@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
