Skip NavigationJenny Nguyen is the founder and owner of The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon.Source: The Sports Bra
As the 2026 WNBA Playoffs roar through its semifinal round, one thing is abundantly clear: Women’s sports are on fire.
Beyond record viewership totals, the business of women’s sports has been on a tear. Nike’s launch of Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark’s first-ever signature sneaker — the Caitlin 1 — nearly sold out in less than two hours. Meanwhile, advertising spending on women’s sports has grown by 120% since 2022, Nielsen reports, and women’s sports are projected to generate roughly $3 billion in global revenue in 2026, triple that of two years ago, according to Deloitte.
Few entrepreneurs have taken advantage of the increased nationwide interest in women’s sports quite like Jenny Nguyen, the owner of The Sports Bra, a Portland, Oregon-based sports bar, which only plays women’s sports.
Nguyen, 46, put up her life savings — about $27,000 — to open her dream business in April 2022, CNBC Make It reported in April 2023. Despite its niche premise, the bar promptly brought in nearly $1 million in revenue and achieved profitability in its first eight months. It has brought in more than $1 million annually since then, Nguyen now says.
With the continuing rise of Americans’ interest in — and willingness to spend on — women’s sports, Nguyen decided to launch a crowdfunding effort on May 18 aimed at expanding The Sports Bra into a national franchise. Her goal was twofold. First: Open a larger location in Portland to accommodate more customers and host events for additional revenue. Second: Open up to roughly 40 franchise locations across the country, each modeled after the bigger Portland location, by 2030.
The campaign raised nearly $1.24 million from more than 1,400 people in roughly two months, reflecting the current financial heft of women’s sports and its fans: Nearly half of new investors on Republic, the platform Nguyen used, chose to give the campaign’s minimum investment of $250.
“The ability for the general public to buy into what we’re doing and be a part of the women’s sports movement is really, really exciting,” says Nguyen.
Amid the excitement, Nguyen is navigating a tightrope. She’s trying to grow The Sports Bra quickly enough to successfully leverage its popularity — without overextending her still-budding business, which could risk the brand she’s put everything into building.
‘I had no idea’ if The Sports Bra would succeed
Initially, Nguyen wasn’t sure her idea of a bar playing only women’s sports would work at all.
The lifelong basketball fan and trained chef was inspired by what she now calls a “pretty universal” experience: struggling to find a women’s sporting event, in her case the 2018 NCAA women’s basketball championship game, on the televisions at sports bars. She came up with The Sports Bra’s name years before actually attempting to launch the business, she told CNBC Make It in April 2023.
“It was catchy. I thought it was hilarious,” said Nguyen.
Social justice movements during the Covid-19 pandemic, most notably the #MeToo movement and protests following the murder of George Floyd, led her to take her idea more seriously, she said. The Sports Bra, she reasoned at the time, could be a place where people like herself — who had felt excluded from traditional sports establishments — would feel like they belonged.
“Me, personally, I thought the idea was brilliant and that [it was] what the world needs,” Nguyen said. “But I had no idea that the world would want it. I just wanted to give it a shot.”
A ‘moonshot’ goal: 40 locations in four years
While The Sports Bra was initially an outlier, much has changed since. Front Office Sports, a sports business news website, pegged the number of women’s sports-focused bars in the U.S. at 27, noting that the total quadrupled in 2025 alone.
The growing number of bars for women’s sports comes against the backdrop of a decrease in American discretionary spending. In 2025, 37% of Americans reported eating out less often, according to market researcher YouGov’s 2025 U.S. Dining Out Report, while bars especially have seen alcohol sales stagnate as a result of more Americans cutting back on drinking.
In a sense, sports bars are particularly vulnerable, as they typically need to pay for commercial licensing fees — required to display major sporting events, they can range from $1,100 to more than $300,000 annually depending on the establishment’s legal occupancy limit — that many other bars don’t need to pay.
The Sports Bra itself isn’t immune. Its revenue dipped 18% year-over-year to $1.02 million in 2025, according to a financial disclosure filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Aug. 6. And Nguyen’s establishment hasn’t had a profitable year since 2024, when in April it announced its franchising plans as part of an investment partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s 776 Foundation.
Nguyen now says that steadily increasing merchandise sales and an ever-growing roster of high-profile business partners, from the WNBA to Nike, make her confident in the staying power of her brand. Plus, she’s been reinvesting in the business, as the company builds out a team to oversee franchising and expansion, says Nguyen. Traditionally, that investment starts to pay off once new locations open and start producing revenue of their own. The Sports Bra has lined up franchisees in five cities so far — Boston, Las Vegas, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Portland, Maine — with plans for the St. Louis location to open by the end of October.
Nguyen projects generating $75 million in annual revenue across 40 locations in four years. She’s quick to point out that’s a best-case scenario, calling it a “moonshot” figure based on the $25,000 in annual revenue that the original Portland location brings in per seat. That location seats up to 40 people, whereas the larger venues in Portland and across the country will hold more than twice as many customers, she says.
To hit her revenue goal within four years, Nguyen understands that a lot has to go right, starting with the rollout of the first five franchise locations.
“Everybody’s watching, and if [the first five] don’t launch well, then we can kind of kiss the 40 [locations] in four years goodbye,” she says.
The dangers of rapid expansion: ‘It’s critical that we nail it’
Interest from sports fans helped turn The Sports Bra into something of a national brand, attracting a range of visitors and investors ranging from Ohanian to Renee Montgomery, a former WNBA player who is co-owner of the league’s Atlanta Dream. It also opened the door for increased competition, one of the many obstacles that Nguyen acknowledges could derail her ambitious growth plans.
The Sports Bra’s first five franchise locations have all experienced delays in opening, Nguyen says, from permitting issues to procuring kitchen equipment and extended construction timelines. Those delays mean a longer wait for additional revenue streams to turn on, as business costs for small businesses nationwide increase due to inflation, tariffs and ongoing global conflicts.
Franchising often comes with other pitfalls, too — especially when done rapidly, and at great scale. A standalone business’ popularity can be difficult to recreate in multiple new locations, especially if the parent company doesn’t have enough infrastructure or trained staff to maintain consistency and quality. With enough shuttered franchises or damage to the overall brand, premature franchise scaling can bring down an entire business.
For The Sports Bra especially, an immediate franchise flop from an industry standard-bearer could do more than just derail Nguyen’s expansion plans. It could raise questions about the broader viability nationwide of business models revolving only around women’s sports and their fans.
“It’s critical that we nail it,” says Nguyen, adding that successful franchising often stems from the franchisee selection process. “When we choose our franchise owners … it is based on their love of our mission, values, and purpose of the Bra. If that’s not there, this is not going to work out.”
Her expansion goal is so audacious — 40 locations in four years — partially because she doesn’t want to be too passive and let this moment of opportunity slip away, she says. And while she’s broadly supportive of growing community around businesses that support women’s sports, she’s competitive enough to want The Sports Bra to step into any new market and quickly differentiate itself enough to become the dominant player, she says.
In short, she wants to win.
“I will never take it lightly that we were, kind of, first to market, and that folks continue to look up to The Sports Bra,” Nguyen says. “How do we continue to set the bar really high, and then have [competitors] level it up, and then us try to do the same, back and forth, back and forth? I’m wicked into that.”
VIDEO08:17I left the U.S. for the Caribbean—here’s how much it costsLife
