Ex-Levi’s President Jennifer Sey Launches XX-XY Athletics To Protect Women’s Sports

It’s ironic that on this Ladies’s Historical past Month the federal government is poised to show again an historic milestone in girls’s historical past: Title IX that prohibited discrimination based mostly on intercourse in federally-funded teaching programs and actions.

The Department of Education is proposing a change to the rule to increase Title IX safety to transgender athletes, permitting organic males who determine as feminine to compete in lady’s and ladies’s sports activities.

Defending girls in sports activities is a trigger that Jennifer Sey, the outspoken ex-Levi’s international model president and named twice to Forbes’ Most Influential CMO record, cares passionately about.

So it’s no shock that she’s placing her cash the place her mouth is by launching an athletic clothes model XX-XY Athletics to assist defend girls and ladies from being pressured to compete and share locker rooms with transgender athletes, a place {that a} huge 69% majority of Individuals assist, based on a Gallup survey.

“All through my life I’ve risked my status, job and social standing to face up for youngsters, girls and free speech. XX-XY Athletics is the fruits of all the things I’ve ever performed in my life,” Sey mentioned in a press release.

“World class manufacturers inform the tradition. Proper now, there aren’t any manufacturers that give customers the chance to weigh in on this topic. We’re totally dedicated to our mission of talking fact and standing up for girls’s sports activities,” she continued.

Supporting The Trigger

Sey has recruited a world class crew of ladies’s and free speech advocates to assist XX-XY Athletics come from behind to win within the $158 billion athleticwear market that’s anticipated to advance 7% CAGR by means of 2027, based on McKinsey.

Former College of Pennsylvania swimmers Riley Gaines and teammate Paula Scanlan have joined the trigger. Each athletes have been outspoken to maintain girls’s sports activities pure in testimony earlier than Congress and Gaines has taken the lead in a class action lawsuit filed in opposition to the NCAA and the College of Georgia opposing their transgender insurance policies.

Additionally on the XX-XY crew are:

• Chloe Cole, who spoke on Capital Hill in regards to the hurt “gender-affirming” care does to youngsters, herself included.
• Dr. Tabia Lee, who claimed in a lawsuit in opposition to her former employer that she was fired from her tenured school place by not adhering to the school’s critical-theory based mostly “race and gender ideologies.” Relatively, she taught Dr. Martin Luther King’s philosophy that individuals ought to be judged by the content material of their character, not the colour of their pores and skin.
• Adam Coleman, writer of Black Sufferer to Black Victor, founding father of Fallacious Converse Publishing, Substack blogger and contributor to New York Publish, Newsweek, The Federalist and others, the place he advocates totally free speech and serving to “individuals who really feel unvoiced to be heard.”

Sey shared with me: “They’re all people who consider in free expression and who categorical themselves courageously. Distinct from some manufacturers within the so-called ‘parallel’ or ‘freedom’ financial system, we wish XX-XY to be a part of the common financial system. We aren’t explicitly anti-woke, however pro-truth.

“In contrast to one in all our Supreme Courtroom justices, I do not should be a biologist to know that women and girls have completely different bodily talents than boys and males. We simply must maintain girls’s sports activities feminine. It’s that straightforward,” she continued.

Unintended Entrepreneur

Sey joined Levi’s in 1999 as senior advertising supervisor, following a number of years working in promoting with Banana Republic and Foote Cone and Belding after school. She rose by means of the ranks at Levi’s reaching the place of CMO international manufacturers in 2016, then was promoted to international model president in 2020.

Throughout her tenure on the senior govt crew, Levi’s revenues superior from $4.6 billion in 2016 to $5.8 billion and there was even discuss of her changing CEO Chip Bergh upon his retirement.

Having devoted some 23 years to Levi’s, she cherished the corporate and the model. It was her joyful place, then Covid hit.

After months of seeing the detrimental impression on youngsters from college closures and mounting scientific proof that Covid posed little risk to children, she spoke out as a mom of 4 in opposition to the native California insurance policies and took her message nationwide on Fox New’s “Ingraham Angle,” which Sey described because the “kiss of dying.”

In that interview, her place at Levi’s was by no means talked about, however regardless of, it induced a right away again lash. “The suggestions was, ‘We’ve got no situation with something you mentioned; we’ve a difficulty with the truth that you mentioned it to her,” Sey defined.

Levi’s grew to become her joyful place not and she or he resigned in March 2022. She documented her rise and fall at Levi’s in her guide, Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice.

Sey’s outspoken advocacy for youngsters throughout Covid was nothing new for her. As a 1986 USA Gymnastics Champion, she spoke out in regards to the cruelty inflicted on younger ladies within the sport in her first guide, Chalked Up, and produced the 2020 documentary movie, Athlete A, which gained an Emmy exposing the crimes of Larry Nassar and broader abuses within the Olympic motion.

With all that behind her and her stellar enterprise monitor file with Levi’s, Sey figured she’d don’t have any drawback discovering a brand new job, however that didn’t occur.

“I anticipated sooner or later I’d go to work for a longtime group,” she shared. “I by no means wished to do something however work for a fantastic model and nice firm and depart that model and enterprise higher than when I discovered it. I by no means wished essentially to be a founder.”

However that’s the place she’s landed. “This concept has been scratching in my mind for some time and it appears to be the fruits of all the things I’ve performed in my life. The thought is to carry collectively my athletic background, sturdy enterprise expertise creating and strengthening manufacturers to create one thing that’s really my very own.”

At age 55, Sey is turning into a corporateneur, one who takes their abilities and abilities honed in company America into an entrepreneurial enterprise. Now she’s going to actually be examined.

Having A Trigger Isn’t Sufficient

As passionately as Sey and her supporting crew really feel about XX-XY Athletics mission, that gained’t be sufficient for the corporate to go up in opposition to the athleticwear champions. However Sey isn’t naïve and is aware of what it takes to get a model off the bottom, beginning with nice product.

“Our product is each distinctive and related. If we are able to create actually elevated, highly effective advertising content material, we are able to carry folks alongside,” she mentioned.

At the moment the corporate launches its first cotton assortment of shirts and graphic tees, together with joggers and fleece hoodies, described as informal put on. From the beginning, XX-XY will supply clothes for each women and men.

In June a second assortment of activewear in efficiency fabrication will drop, with one other drop deliberate for vacation in late October, which she says may have “somewhat little bit of sparkle and extra luxurious fabrications.”

Costs are consistent with different premium manufacturers. For instance, t-shirts will promote within the $40 vary and leggings round $100. Direct-to-consumer e-commerce is the corporate’s path to market, but she isn’t ruling out wholesale utterly.

However she is aware of the wholesale recreation and the hurdles it might carry, so it’s not a part of the plan, although if the XX-XY message catches on, I may foresee many impartial specialty outlets come knocking on the door to assist women and girls battle to avoid wasting their sports activities.

“I regarded round in any respect the athletic manufacturers within the market and so they make a lot ado about celebrating girls, however not one has mentioned ‘We have to defend girls’s sports activities,’” Sey noticed.

“Not a single model is doing it. We’re going to make world-class, best-in-class athletic attire for men and women. And we’re staking a declare round defending girls’s sports activities. We consider it’ll resonate with males as nicely who’re invested in defending their daughters,” she continued.

Manufacturers’ Cultural Connection

Sey believes that manufacturers have a task to play in tradition, even a duty to take action. “Manufacturers are a software of tradition, and so they affect and inform concepts in the identical approach movie, artwork and music do. Simply have a look at how Nike
NKE
influenced operating tradition,” she mentioned.

“Manufacturers have the chance to not simply observe tradition, however to guide it and inform it as nicely. And I really feel nearly everyone already agrees with us, however they’re afraid to say it. So if we are able to make it acceptable and funky to face up and say a real factor that’s so apparent, then that’s what I need to do,” she continued.

Sey and her crew consider they’re combating a righteous trigger to guard girls in sports activities and the advances they’ve made since Title IX was handed in 1972.

Earlier than the regulation, the ratio of women’ to boys’ participation in highschool sports activities rose from lower than 10% in 1971 to over 40% in 2023, based on the National Federation of State High School Associations. Title XI unlocked comparable alternatives for girls in collegiate sports, rising from 15% feminine participation earlier than to 44% p.c right this moment.

“When ladies compete in sports activities, they’re much less depressed, have a greater physique and self picture, are much less prone to get pregnant in highschool, extra prone to go to varsity and have an extended life expectancy,” she noticed.

“I hate placing us within the conservative class, as a result of this has nothing to do with proper or left; it’s simply biology,” she concluded.