In February, Aliyah Boston asked her management team to get her in a room with a tampon startup. By August she owned part of one.

Sequel announced the Indiana Fever center as a co-owner and its newest partner. Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer founded the company, which sells a patented tampon built with spiral panels for better absorption. Sequel has been the Fever's official tampon sponsor since June 2025.

Boston was already using the product before any conversation started. Sequel's team told Forbes they skipped the usual routine of mailing samples and waiting for feedback, because she came to them.

The deal pays her in equity for social posts and marketing campaigns the two sides planned together. Her reasoning was short: "You never know when a brand might sell." A one-time fee closes at the number both sides agreed to. Equity keeps moving after the campaign ends.

This is her second ownership position and her first operating one. She bought a stake in Boston Legacy FC in July 2025, and at Sequel she takes an active role in the business.

More than 70 million unique viewers watched a WNBA game in the first half of the 2026 season, up from under 50 million across all of 2025. Boston has more than 600,000 followers.

To mark the deal, Sequel rebuilt her locker room in the Gainbridge Fieldhouse concourse and gave away 5,000 boxes of product.

Boston does the same work for Sequel that any endorser does. Her payout moves with the company's valuation.

Nneka Ogwumike played 15 seasons of pro basketball. Her 16th pays her in shares.

Ogwumike announced that she will retire from the WNBA at the end of the 2026 season. She was the No. 1 pick in the 2012 draft and won Rookie of the Year that season, then took MVP and a championship in 2016, along with 11 All-Star selections, 8 All-WNBA teams and 7 All-Defensive teams.

She finishes 4th all-time in points and 3rd in rebounds. She has been WNBPA president since 2016 and will stay in the role until the next election. Ogwumike will play in Project B's inaugural season in January.

The league was founded by Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice and former Facebook executive Grady Burnett, and it will run six teams of 11 players in standard 5-on-5 competition, staged as two-week tournament stops including Tokyo and Valencia, where the games run March 12 to 22, 2027. Every player receives an equity stake, with shares vesting against tenure, participation and performance milestones.

Front Office Sports reported that deals start at $2 million a year. The WNBA paid $102,249 per season in 2025 and Unrivaled paid $220,000. Ogwumike was the first player Project B signed, and she named the reason at All-Star Weekend last month: "Being able to say that I'm a partner in this."

She spent 10 years as union president negotiating what WNBA players get paid, and now her next contract is based in owning the product.

Society Management, the Elite World Group agency behind Kendall Jenner, Vittoria Ceretti and Adriana Lima, announced a partnership with Canopy Talent this week. Canopy is a commercial marketing agency representing collegiate and Olympic-sport athletes, with program-wide deals across university athletic departments. The deal gives Society's fashion, beauty and luxury clients a direct line into college rosters.

Canopy will be Society's exclusive on-campus activation partner for fashion, beauty and fragrance. Its roster includes Merritt Beason, Bri Ellis, Chase Sorosky and Reagan Digby. CEO Jack Liechtung built the agency on the argument that student-athletes are undervalued, especially in women's and Olympic sports.

The companies cite the IAB's $44 billion projection for US creator ad spend in 2026 and Goldman Sachs Research's $480 billion global creator economy estimate for 2027. They also put the NIL market at $4 billion by 2027. Opendorse had the total market closer to $2.5 billion for 2025-26, so that $4 billion belongs to Society and Canopy, not to a third party.

Every deal described here pays a fee. Society built its business on campaign rates for models, and that structure now runs through college athletics. The fee covers the athlete's time. The brand keeps the sales.

The athletes worth watching are the ones who ask for a percentage of what they promote or a stake in the brand behind it. Fashion and beauty make that ask easiest to price for athletes, analyzing sales based on the athlete’s contribution.

FLO Unleashed is a 360-degree resistance training system from FLO Technology Inc. in Las Vegas. The product is a belt with a rotating attachment that holds constant resistance on an athlete while they sprint, cut, and change direction. The first working prototype was a hands-free dog leash, which the team rebuilt into a speed and agility harness after seeing what the rotating mechanism did under load.

The company holds 3 utility patents with a design patent pending, which matters in a category where resistance belts and bands have almost no defensibility. Go-to-market is B2B2C: professional and collegiate performance staffs first, where equipment budgets renew annually, then direct-to-consumer with those programs as proof. Chicago Fire FC's Darcy Norman and NBA and NCAA performance staff already appear as users. The consumer product is still on a waitlist.

Performance equipment is one of the few categories where an athlete's daily use is genuine product feedback, and pre-launch is when the equity is cheapest. Hyperice raised $48M in 2020 at a $700M valuation on that model, with athletes on the cap table early. FLO is at the stage right before that.