The partner slate
The most obvious way to ride the Knicks wave is as an official sponsor. This provides a direct line to the team, and a way to show up in the stadium in a way that other brands don’t have access to.
Kith founder Ronnie Fieg bet early on his hometown team’s merch. Fieg’s first collection for the team, the Kith x Nike x Knicks collection, launched in 2020. “That was before the Knicks were a great team, or winning, I should say,” Fieg. In 2022, Fieg became the first-ever creative director of the Knicks, developing in-house products for the team and overseeing court design, yearly city edition uniforms, a permanent store within the Garden, a Giorgio Armani collab, and playoff capsules that drop with each round.
“My goal, and I think [MSG Sports Corp CEO James L.] Dolan’s goal, is for the Knicks to become a global brand,” says Fieg.
Fieg designed this year’s playoff collection before the season even began. “I just have faith in my team,” Fieg says. “I’m willing to take on that risk, because that’s my little bit of contribution to align the stars and make sure that we make the playoffs.” There will be a special merch drop if the team wins the finals, Fieg teases.
There’s opportunity beyond the official Knicks merch. Lifestyle brand New York or Nowhere started out as co-founder Liz Eswein’s @newyorkcity Instagram account, before expanding to DTC merchandise that’s recognizable on the streets of the city for its “NYON” logo, and finally, a partnership with the Knicks. The brand has built a business upon high-visibility collaborations, partnering with the Mets, the Yankees, NY Liberty, and Saturday Night Live, amongst others. Now, they’re anticipating seven-figure sales for their Knicks Finals collection, according to CEO and co-founder Quincy Moore. And, during the playoff period, one in two purchases at their store was a NYON x Knicks product, with overall store sales up 50% in the same timeframe. Just last week, they sold “thousands” of their most popular style, a Knicks Motto T-Shirt which they reimagined for this capsule as “The Finals or Nowhere”.
NYON’s Lafayette Street store is known for its long lines. But, according to Moore, the demand from Knicks fans has caused the line to grow noticeably longer over the last six weeks. Additionally, he adds that this is their biggest collection to date in terms of production volume and overall quantity, and keeping up with demand for Knicks product in general has been “a wonderful challenge”.
Female focus
Laney Crowell, the founder of Saie, attended a Knicks game in December 2024 and was “enthralled” by how captivated the fans were, especially in a time where people’s attention spans are so fragmented, she says. The biggest white space she observed, though, was the female cohort in attendance. “I noticed how many women were at the game, and there was not a single brand speaking to women in the audience,” says Crowell.
Crowell started conversations almost immediately, and signed as an official partner before the 2025-26 season began. She quickly baked the Saie brand into all aspects of the female-facing Knicks economy, from procuring courtside seats for reality TV’s Nader sisters, sourcing vintage Knicks jackets for influencer gifting, and MSG suite gifting (“Fifty percent of people in the suites are women, and almost everybody was tagging [the brand],” she says). Saie hosts makeup classes for the Knicks City Dancers, and named its setting spray, City Set, after the squad. A quick scroll through many of the dancers’ Instagram and ShopMy profiles will surface Saie products and affiliate links.
