The Professional Women’s Hockey League, or PWHL, played its first season earlier this year in front of more than 450,000 fans, setting several attendance records for women’s hockey along the way. There was just one thing missing from the season: None of the teams had official names.
Instead, the teams simply went by the names of their home cities of Boston, Minnesota, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto. Kanan Bhatt-Shah, the league’s VP of brand and marketing, said fans were asking for their teams to be officially named from day one, but the league didn’t want to rush the process.
Finally, about three months after the inaugural championship game, the league rolled out new names, logos, and branding for its teams last month: the Toronto Sceptres, Montréal Victoire, Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Ottawa Charge, and New York Sirens. The process was involved, complete with market research, spreadsheets, and plenty of criteria, but Bhatt-Shah said it was worth the wait.
“It was very, very important for us to ensure that…this team name, really an identity, inspired a pride of place for [fans], and they felt a connection to it,” Bhatt-Shah told Marketing Brew. “It was always really important to ensure that local relevance was not lost or compromised in the approach.”
Fan-forward
The PWHL had much to consider while working on team branding, not the least of which was finding names that could be trademarked, Bhatt-Shah said. Beyond that, there were four major criteria to meet on the creative front: The team identities had to resonate with fans and inspire a sense of pride in the team’s hometown, and they had to be able to come to life visually and in the arena experience.
Each of the team names are also supposed to feel “strong and powerful,” she said. Al Merry, co-founder and CCO of Flower Shop, the agency the PWHL tapped for the project, said fans often expressed that they didn’t want their teams to “sound like a women’s team,” but a hockey team. Because of that, that’s something the creative team “really aspired to,” he said.
The league kept suggestions of team names organized in a spreadsheet, and fan input also played a significant role in the overall branding of the teams, Bhatt-Shah said. When PWHL games streamed on YouTube, fans would often toss around name ideas in the chat, she said, which the league kept an eye on.
“A great name can come from anywhere,” Bhatt-Shah said. “We were blown away by the YouTube chat pretty early on.”
Say my name
The Toronto Sceptres were inspired by the city’s famous Queen Street thoroughfare, as well as “the spirit of the city, this diverse energy and sense of authority and power,” Merry said, which is conveyed in the branding through the scepter that runs up the middle of the team’s logo. The image evokes “royalty and strength,” Merry said, while its blue and yellow colors offer some warmth.
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The Montréal Victoire’s branding is all about alluding to a “sense of victory,” Merry said. The wing shape in the logo, which also includes the letter “M,” is a nod to the goddess of victory, and the logo as a whole is meant to feel timeless, unique, and elegant, he said. The logo also features a fleur-de-lis, acknowledging the city’s French heritage.
The Boston Fleet’s identity came together fairly naturally during the season thanks to a strong sense of unity within the team and the city, Merry said; “It’s Boston versus the rest of the world.” The imagery of a fleet evokes togetherness, power, and strength, and hits on the city’s maritime history. The team font is bold and strong, or as Merry put it, “felt, like, absolutely Boston.”
For the Minnesota Frost, the inaugural season champs, the creative team wanted to capture the state’s love of hockey and cold weather, Merry said, with the name, font, and logo resembling sharp-edged icicles.
The Ottawa Charge has a double meaning: The city’s official motto is “Advance-Ottawa-En Avant,” and “advance” means to move (or charge) forward. Plus, Ottawa was built on the lumber trade, and “charge” is also a term for a stack of lumber.
As for the New York Sirens, they speak—or shriek—for themselves. The team name was inspired by the sound of the hockey goal horn and also the “noise and energy of New York,” he said. The logo features a striking and dense font that Merry said is designed to look like it’s reverberating.
With the new identities, Bhatt-Shah said the league isn’t abandoning the original team identities based on their cities. The teams’ primary colors were kept intact for that reason, she said, which will allow fans to keep wearing original merch. Jerseys with the new branding will be introduced closer to the start of the upcoming season, but Bhatt-Shah said she hopes people will keep their old gear to indicate they’re OG fans as the league progresses.
“There’s magic in the mixing and comingling of those two things,” she said. “It’s part of who we are, and it’s part of how this league was born.”