The business of Jessica Pegula
Jessica Pegula has 14 sponsors, a skincare brand, a podcast and a knack for bringing brands into tennis. Her next business decision: what she wears.
Jessica Pegula has a lot of sponsors, even by the increasingly lucrative standards of a top tennis player.
There are the familiar tennis names: Adidas, which has dressed her since 2021, and Yonex, which makes her rackets. Beyond those, her portfolio stretches across industries: KPMG, Hyatt and IBM, California jewelry brand Gorjana, Vital Proteins, Swiss watchmaker De Bethune, air purifier company Blueair, odor-eliminating brand Azuna and global investment firm Irongrey. Nintendo paid her six figures for a campaign around the Miami Open this year, and another partnership, in a category particularly close to Pegula’s heart, is set to be announced during the US Open.
What’s more notable than the sheer number of logos is how many of those companies had never previously signed a tennis player. Pegula was the first tennis ambassador for KPMG, Hyatt, Gorjana, Vital Proteins, Blueair, Azuna and Irongrey; when the forthcoming US Open deal is announced, the number will rise to eight. At a moment when seemingly every company wants a piece of tennis, Pegula has quietly become something of an entry point into the sport.
It’s a role she’s particularly proud of, and one she hopes can ultimately bring more money into tennis beyond her own sponsorship deals, she tells me. Pegula has already spoken with the WTA about introducing some of her partners to the WTA Finals this year, and several of the brands she helped bring into the sport are reported to be exploring deals with other players.
Her agent, Chris McCormack of GSE Worldwide, sees the broader opportunity, too. “There are all these founding-block sponsors of our tours, but it’s great to have new blood in the sport,” he says.
Pegula has learned that the more she puts into those relationships, the more interested brands become in doing something bigger. “What has been fun the last couple years is building relationships with my sponsors,” she says. “I like to give my time, and you see how thankful they are for that. Then they want to do more with you and invest more in the sport.”
Her current roster isn’t simply the result of an agent identifying brands and presenting her with contracts. Pegula frequently sends ideas the other way, and says McCormack now has a good sense of what will interest her. The criteria have evolved considerably from earlier in her career, when, as she puts it, “you’re just like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m getting paid and I’ll do this.’” These days, she is much more interested in partnerships that bear some relationship to who she actually is.
“I get compliments, honestly, from a lot of players that have said, ‘No, I really love the stuff that you do because it seems like you,’” Pegula says. “‘It’s dogs, it’s video games.’”
Nintendo is perhaps the most obvious example—Pegula is known for her love of video games—but Gorjana has become a particularly good illustration of what she wants a sponsorship to become. The jewelry company has hosted in-store events with her, brought players she’s friends with into those activations and raised money for A Lending Paw, the charity Pegula runs with her husband, Taylor Gahagen, which helps fund the training of service dogs for people with disabilities.
“I love when you can make those connections,” she says. “With Gorjana, they’ve connected tennis, the jewelry and my work with animals, and put real time and effort into doing something different.”
Pegula’s personality also makes a certain degree of authenticity practically necessary. “I’m pretty direct and dry, so you can tell when I’m not exactly vibing with something,” she laughs.
That makes the biggest sponsorship decision on her immediate horizon particularly interesting.
Keep reading for the inside story on Pegula’s upcoming apparel decision, how her sponsorship portfolio is shaping the negotiation, and the reality of running a skincare brand while playing professional tennis.
