The NOBULL majority owner chops it up with Boardroom to discuss why the brand is ready for this type of deal now, and how it’ll continue to evolve moving forward.
Performance training and athletic footwear brand NOBULL and the NHL announced a multi-year partnership on Thursday, making the company the league’s official training shoe in the U.S. As part of the deal, NOBULL will provide footwear to players, coaches, and staff for all 32 teams. NOBULL will also have activations at various tentpole events throughout the season, the brand will appear on the league’s social media channels, and it will receive prominent broadcast ad exposure on national ESPN and TNT games.
“For us, NOBULL is this strength training brand to help people get stronger mentally, emotionally, and physically,” Mike Repole, NOBULL’s majority stakeholder, told Boardroom. “And when you think about strong, tough athletes, hockey players are second to none. Hockey players and NOBULL share the same DNA, so this partnership was a natural fit.”
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Repole, who turned Vitamin Water and Body Armor into billion-dollar brands, bought a majority stake no NOBULL two years ago and has been trying to improve and revitalize the brand since. He colorfully described this process over the last two years as fixing the plane while flying it.
“And that’s a very dangerous thing,” Repole said. “You can make some errors on the way. Maybe we could’ve had this NHL partnership a year or two ago, but it’s not something that would’ve worked for us. Now the brand is ready. This is almost like a relaunch of NOBULL 2.0, and we’re really excited about what we have planned for the next three, four, five years.”
While NOBULL was the lead sponsor of the NFL Scouting Combine and CrossFit before Repole’s tenure, he said he’s looking at a couple of other deals he thinks make more sense right now. That could include some kind of partnership with the United Football League, which gave him full autonomy over its business operations after he invested in the outfit earlier this year. The much larger football-related partnership he made at NOBULL was his purchase of Tom Brady‘s Brady Brand and TB12 in January 2024, which he called a natural fit from the start. Now, you can buy TB12 nutritional supplements on the NOBULL website, going hand in hand with the company’s performance-boosting apparel.
The pair now live near each other in Florida and learn lessons from one another as sports carry over into business and vice versa.
“One thing I told Tom was that you can be a pro athlete to a certain time limit, but you can be a business athlete the rest of your life,” Repole said. “We’re both ultra competitive and incredibly driven to win, whether we play ping pong, closest to the pin, or pickleball. He’s helped me more physically and having calm and poise through chaos. And I’ve helped him in business and a little more mentally. We’ve had a great balance.”
Repole considers this NHL partnership the beginning of the next evolution of the NOBULL brand, one he believes has worked out its earlier kinks over the last two years and is now ready to solidify its standing in the footwear world. And based on his record transforming Vitamin Water, Body Armor, TB12, St. John’s men’s basketball, and others, Repole should be taken seriously when he maintains that NOBULL, in Year 3 under his watch, is ready to level up.
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