Justice Haynes is hoping to bring some of his rising star to startup juice brand Loom, as the University of Michigan football player has taken an equity stake in the business as part of a new NIL deal last week.
At 20 years old, Haynes is one of the top college football players in the country and still has two more seasons of eligibility with the Michigan Wolverines, with expectations that he will be a high draft pick for the NFL later down the line.
For Loom, which launched last year billing itself as the “juice of the future,” the deal represents a big bet on a potential future superstar. But founder and CEO Bill Butrymowicz says that the company is eager to work with Haynes “regardless of how far he goes in his football career.”
“After meeting him and really seeing the type of character he had, and how smart and just how personable he was, we felt like this is somebody that we want to see long term with the company,” Butrymowicz said. “We thought that our synergies aligned and we felt like he could be a part of our company’s growth.”
Since the opening up of NIL deals, NCAA college athletes have quickly put their names behind brand endorsements, but equity deals have been more rare – though far from unheard of. In beverage, Slate Milk offered an equity stake to women’s basketball stars the Cavinder Twins.
It’s become a growing trend for early stage brands and young athletic stars to bet on each other, such as Barcode’s partnership with highly hyped NBA player Victor Wembanyama ahead of the French center’s rookie season in 2023. If the player lives up to their promise, and has a long career, it can potentially help a fledgling brand also rise to prominence.
At Loom, Butrymowicz said that’s a mentality he has embraced as a founder. The brand has compiled a group of emerging artists, fashion designers, musicians and athletes it calls “The Luminaries” who help to promote the brand, with the brand in turn working to help boost the profile of these budding influencers.
While he hopes the brand may some day rise to the level where it will be aligning with A-list celebrities, Butrymowicz believes it’s more important at this early stage to find partners on a similar level, rather than attempt to “bastardize the following of some mega star.”
“We’re trying to plant a bunch of seeds with people that we have real, authentic relationships with, who are like minded and share the same morals and share the same values that we do, and watch ourselves all grow together,” he said.
In addition to Haynes, Loom has also partnered with rookie NFL wide receiver Antwane “Juice” Wells, of the New York Giants (Butrymowicz added that Wells’ nickname is an incidental, but welcome coincidence).
Outside of the new partnership, Butrymowicz said Loom is continuing to grow its presence nationwide with a footprint of around 3,000 doors, the majority being up-and-down-the-street accounts but now includes Shop Rite stores, which he said is Loom’s first major retail chain win.
“Showing velocity out of mom and pop accounts and schools and stuff like that is really not what a lot of these buyers are looking for,” he said. “They want something that they can understand, that’s relevant to what it could do in their retail, in their doors. So this being our first chain is really exciting.”
The company is also growing its DSD network, adding trucks in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Texas, Alabama, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Loom is also preparing to relaunch its website and will launch two new flavors – Cherry and Mango – next month as well, Butrymowicz added. The brand also reformulated its whole line to remove erythritol, gums and coloring in order to embrace a cleaner ingredient panel.
“We want to be a culturally relevant brand, and we want to cross categories to where we don’t want to just hang out in the beverage category,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline right now, and the response is overwhelming.”