Perhaps the most meaningful branding moment of the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s inaugural season came when Molson sponsored the movement of player nameplates from above the jersey number to below—revealing player names often obscured by their hair and imparting the message that women athletes shouldn’t go unrecognized.

Today, another unveiling gives further identity to PWHL teams, which until now were known only by their primary color and city. The Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Monteal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge and Toronto Sceptres will take the ice when the puck drops on a new season in January. The teams today also released logos, which will show up on jerseys and the ice.

The change represents the young league’s opportunity to respond to fans who clamored for their teams to get their own names and logos as they enthusiastically embraced the new league. It also gives teams better merchandising, engagement and brand power and players a better showcase. The PWHL drew nearly 400,000 fans across its 72 games last season, its first. 

“From day one of our season, the fans told us they wanted names—they truly wanted conventional North American sports team names, and I think it was important to listen to our fans, let them know that we hear them,” Amy Scheer, senior VP of business operations for the PWHL, said in an interview. “It’s an undertaking just to do one team name, but to do six in the timeline that we did, this is a pretty daunting task.”

Due to the league’s lickety-split formation—it was announced in late August of 2023 and dropped the first puck on Jan. 1—the PWHL was unable to establish team names and looks in its first season. Even now, the league and independent creative agency Flower Shop were challenged to meet deadlines—the most urgent of which came from jersey manufacturer Bauer, which needed the time to get jerseys into production in time for the opening faceoff of the 2025 season. That meant the work—choosing names and completing logo designs—needed to be completed by April of this year. 

Also read: How the Flower Shop came to be 

Input from fans

Kanan Bhatt-Shah, brand and growth marketing leader for the PWHL, guided the project on behalf of the league. The former agency executive at Gypsy and Johannes Leonardo said she designed the process around input from fans, players and communities. Bhatt-Shah took hundreds of name suggestions to a discovery phase where they were judged on five criteria, including how well they imparted a pride of place, whether it would resonate with fans and how it would endure over time. They also needed to clear intellectual property hurdles in the U.S. and Canada. 

Team names also need the ability to come to life for fans, Bhatt-Shah added. “This work that we’re all very proud of is very exciting and is a huge milestone for the league, but at the end of the day, it’s going to be our fans and our players who will carry this forward and give it meaning,” Bhatt-Shah said.

Al Merry, co-founder and chief creative officer of Flower Shop, said the agency approached the PWHL project as it would any other, “trying to lean into what we were good at, which was taking a brief, and really trying to be rigorous about every part of the process,” he said. The team relied on experience in sports marketing, and as sports fans and participants. Mark Aronson, chief strategy officer on the project, was a one-time hockey referee, Merry said. Flower Shop execs watched the entire season of PWHL games to gain insights on developing team identities that went into the decision on names and logos.

To Merry, the challenge was coming up with identities that were distinctive and belonged in sports, but were not too temporal; he described the focus as “conceptual rigor” that could last for decades. The Boston Fleet, for example, imbues the city’s maritime history into the unity displayed by Boston’s fans.

The PWHL last week began teasing the announcement, posting “09.09.2024” on social channels along with vague clues as to the names—“Turning up the volume” for New York and “A cold front is rolling in” for Minnesota. The Toronto club posted video of fans making guesses.

Stimulating fan interest online will be one benefit of the new names. Generating merchandise sales is another. The league will have fanwear reflecting the new team names and looks out today, with plans to increase the selection gradually in the coming weeks, said Scheer. A separate jersey reveal is set for November when replicas will go on sale.

The league is looking to retain its brand as “connective tissue” as teams establish their own identities, Bhatt-Shah said.

“When we launched PWHL-Minnesota, PWHL-New York, PWHL-Toronto, it wasn’t the exciting, buzzy name that fans had wanted, but there was equity there that was built up over the season. We saw these very generic names gain traction, and fans really identified with them and with their teams,” Bhatt-Shah said.

This equity will stay with the league as the new team names establish themselves, she added. “We’re really excited for these teams to have these identities and embrace them, and for the fans and the players to take them forward, and from a brand DNA perspective, really ensure that PWHL continues to be represented, and that that warm fuzzy continues to be a part of everything that we do.”