Two months ago, Kate Weinberg, a Bay area graphics designer, went down an Olympics merch rabbit hole. A skier herself, she followed Olympic sports religiously and wanted to know: What kind of innovative designs are people selling leading up to the biggest sporting event of the year?
What she found shocked her.
There were basic Olympic ring designs on T-shirts and sweatshirts, but she couldn't find anything else. The Olympics have plenty of visually stunning images, with athletes flipping, diving, swimming and more. But there was no merch to showcase how dynamic the events are.
"I saw so much more potential," Weinberg, 24, says.
So Weinberg, who as of July 25 has nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram -- where she shows people how she comes up with logos and designs -- decided to pick one Olympic sport each day and design merch for that sport.
"A lot of my work is very illustrated, and I know people love to watch the process of it and the visual buildup like, where is this going? What's it gonna look like in the end?" Weinberg says.
She started with swimming by using the lines of an Olympic pool to create an abstract design. The entire process -- from designing to recording herself to editing the videos to posting -- took eight hours each time, but she loved it.
She went viral on her very next video. Weinberg dove in on fencing the next day. In addition to showing the world how she made the designs, she picked an image from two fencers in action, one lunging with their epee to attack, while the other stepped back in defense. It's an image, but you can almost see the movement of the athletes as they fence. The video collected 1.8 million views in a day.
Olympic athletes began commenting on her videos, asking her to design merch for their sport. Stanford rower Célia Dupré, who is representing Switzerland in Paris, commented, "Rowing, please! Actually headed to the Olympics in the sport."
"I feel like that's the exciting part and payoff -- how much it resonates with the Olympians," she says. "[That means] I'm doing something right and I'm representing it in the right way."
Weinberg has a funky approach to her designs. For rowing -- one of the oldest sports at the Olympics -- she went with a retro vibe by using an "old newspaper collage type design." She also gives out quick facts about the Olympic sport she's designing. "Rowers use an estimated 86 percent of their muscles when they're competing," she announced as she sketched the design. Her videos typically garnered more than 300,000 views within a few hours.
Soon, it became hard to keep track of the comments. So, she started leaving prompts in the videos: "the comment with the most likes will be the sport I design next," she announced. Then, she said, "The comment needs to be left by an Olympian."
Olympic champions began entering the chat. Tokyo Olympics wrestling gold medalist Yui Suzaki from Japan voted for her sport, and Weinberg ended up making a design that focused on two female wrestlers, one of whom was USA Olympic bronze medalist Sarah Hildebrandt, who was happy to see herself represented in the design. Girls wrestling is one of the the fastest growing high school sports in the United States, and she wanted to showcase strength through women athletes, she said.
Brands like Adidas responded to her videos, asking to make designs for skateboarding, also commenting, "Did we find our new favorite designer?" when she dropped her skateboarding designs.
Weinberg, who started this project for fun, soon began speaking with manufacturers to see if she could launch a website in time for athletes to order merch before they leave for Paris, and for people to wear their favorite merch when they watch the Olympics. She reached out to the International Olympic Committee requesting approval for her to use the Olympics rings in her merch. But that request was rejected. Still, she is allowed to sell merch with her original designs.
She's currently working on a website, which will go live on July 26, the day of the Opening Ceremony.
This Olympics merch journey started because she found the space woefully in need of change, and she wanted brands -- and the Olympic Committee -- to recognize the demand for fresh and funky designs.
To her, that mission has been accomplished.
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