It might surprise you to hear that, almost a decade ago, Tom Brady was already starting to think about retirement. He was around 35 then, and already a three-time Super Bowl champ. People liked to tell him he wouldn’t make it to 40 playing football.
“I thought I could, and I wanted to,” he says now, sounding at 44 a lot less smug than he might be considering that he’s nabbed a whopping four more Lombardi trophies in the last nine years. “But I also was like, you know what, you’re right, it’s not going to go on forever. I’d watched a lot of athletes’ careers end, and they don’t have anything enjoyable they can get into, and then there’s too much free time on their hands. I was like, that’s not gonna be me. I’m gonna do really cool things in my second career.”
It was then that he first started germinating an idea that would come to be his own apparel line: BRADY brand, whose first collection of clothes was released today. As far as second acts go, it’s ambitious, not least because naming a line of “performance products” — as Brady calls them — by your last name will inevitably draw comparisons to the Jordan brand. Of course, that ambition is at least partly the point, according to Jens Grede, the brand’s CEO and co-founder.
“I remember saying to him that there is no reason why you wouldn't build the Jordan of football, so to speak,” says Grede, who co-founded the denim company Frame, before helping an aspiring fashion entrepreneur named Kim Kardashian launch Skims. The question to answer was simple: “What does that look like in a modern context?”
What it looks like is a set of clothes influenced both by the same elegant aesthetic Brady has cultivated over the course of his career — nailing looks across UGG commercials, Met Gala red carpets, and pregame NFL tunnels — and our hybrid pandemic moment. Public School co-founder Dao-Yi Chow, whom Brady enlisted as designer, calls the vibe “active lifestyle with a tailored sensibility.” It seems Brady has brought the same level of elevation he’s cultivated on the football field to his line: the sportswear looks have a dash of menswear; the everyday basics are designed to allow for greater (to use a word I kept hearing repeated) performance.
“It was super important when we first started developing the brand that it was fabric-led and textile-led, and making sure we were looking at innovations that really enhance performance,” says Chow, when I ask what BRADY is providing that’s not already in a saturated market flooded with dominant players like Nike and Lululemon. “But more than that, it was coming at it with a particular point of view. My background has been mostly fashion-based, and that combination of bringing in a really strong idea for this really strong sleek silhouette, a distinct point of view and fit, married with this idea of innovation and performance. That's really our point of differentiation.”
As if to drive the point home, the first drop of clothes falls into two categories: TRAIN and LIVE. Unsurprisingly, if LIVE is filled with items for everyday living — bombers, vests, structured pants, and sweaters — TRAIN is loaded with breathable tees, mesh shorts, sweats, socks, and running tanks. The clothes come largely in soft, earth tones, and feature items you might see Brady wearing on the field, or shuttling to and from it. (Brady laughs when I ask if we might see any Bill Belichick-inspired sleeveless hoodies coming down the performance pipeline. “I’m sure guys can cut ‘em if they want, but they won’t be designed that way, necessarily.”) In providing you with a fully stocked wardrobe with innovation and engineering to help you achieve peak performance both in life and in sport, it seems the real idea behind BRADY is to eliminate the distinction entirely. In that way, BRADY is an extension of the quarterback’s efforts, with his TB12 training method, to let the masses in on his secrets.
“I really wanted to do a full, lifestyle brand,” Brady says. “In my life, it’s football in the morning, and I train. But then I’m home and I do family things: I go play basketball with my kids outside; go for a walk; then you’re chilling out at dinner. I wanted to have enough where you could go between different parts of the collection and put things on and they’d feel really comfortable, look good, fit good, and they would fit for whatever occasion you’re heading off to.” While performance is the point, the team wanted to make sure that the technical aspects didn’t go so far that they overshadowed the entire point of wearing clothes: to feel good. “Even though they have a ton of innovation and performance, we are very cognisant of making sure that [the clothes] have a natural touch — an actual, rich touch. So you really try to combine [the technical and the natural] where you’re not picking up an item and feeling, ‘Oh, this is purely synthetic,’” says Chow, who, as a long distance runner says he’s partial to the running gear, but also the Utility Pant (part of another fabric franchise called Durable Comfort) that he says he hasn’t taken off in four months. “People make fun of me, like, Yo, don’t you have another pair of pants?”
Brady imagines the looks in BRADY being a big part of his wardrobe, especially when he retires. “In football, I’ve had a uniform for so long, I don’t have to think about it much — it’s casual clothes to work and then my football gear,” he says. “When I’m done playing, I won’t have that aspect. What I put on in the morning will be what I wear for most of the day.” Part of the reason Brady wanted to launch the line was because it allows him to tap into a creative side that’s found an outlet in home design and watches. But another reason was simply because — much like Grede says Kardashian wanted to do with Skims, to great success — he thought he was the best person to fill his own closet. “I wanted to build this for myself,” says Brady. “That was the thought: How do I build something that really works for me, throughout all the different aspects of my life?”
It’s that authenticity that BRADY is counting on, as a business model. You can trace Jordan brand’s mega success, of course, back to the original idea that, if you wore the shoes MJ wore, you, too, could Be Like Mike. Wearing BRADY won’t help you nail an 18-yard out — but who doesn’t want to work out in clothes co-signed by the greatest quarterback of all time?
The company hopes that desire will outweigh any unkind feelings held by fans of the teams that Brady has spent two decades beating. “You might not like Tom because, you know, you’re a Jets fan,” says Grede. “I get it, but as a friend of mine once said, ‘I hate Tom Brady, but I respect the hell out of Tom Brady.’ I believe that when you wear some of the brands you love, you're not wearing just the shirt, you're wearing what that represents and what they've done for the past 20 years or 30 years.”
For his part, Brady feels like he’s already accomplished what he set out to when this idea first hatched long ago. “It’s just gonna improve,” says the quarterback who seems to only get stronger with age. “We’re going to get better over time.”
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