Lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret yesterday launched their take on NFL merchandise with a brand new collection from their PINK range.

The partnership sees two very different brands come together to provide the NFL‘s female audience base with some cute apparel, bringing new customers to the VS PINK brand, and introducing NFL colours into the wardrobes of PINK customers all over the U.S. Everybody wins.

Forever a fan of the VS PINK range, and always on the look-out for cute girlified NFL wear, this was pretty exciting news for my Wednesday morning.

It turns out that two of the lovely VS Angels premiered a couple of pieces back in April, providing some welcome entertainment for the players and entourages in attendance at the NFL Draft at Radio City in New York. And yesterday, the full collection launched online and in store.

The VS deal covers 13 teams from the NFL: Denver Broncos, Chicago Bears, Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Vikings, New England Patriots, New York Giants, New York Jets, Oakland Raiders, Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers, San Diego Chargers, Washington Redskins and Carolina Panthers.

The PINK brand has always had a huge presence in the social media space, with very active Twitter and Facebook portals, and they maximised the use of this in building buzz for the collection’s launch. On Tuesday, the day before the big launch, in Draft-like fashion each team that had been chosen as part of the range was unveiled gradually over the course of the day between 9am and 9pm, and announced with an image on the Facebook page. Each of the 13 images generated thousands of ‘like’s and hundreds of comments in a matter of hours.

As always, the brand is pretty difficult to purchase in the U.K. and I should imagine it is unlikely that the NFL collection will reach the few concessions that do retail over here. A shame, given the hard work that the NFL is doing to develop and grow its international fan-base. In recent years,VS has been able to offer international shipping (starting at $30 for UK customers) but you’re better off hitting up your U.S. buddies to do a bit of personal shopping on your behalf.

Though sadly, not one of our adopted NFL ‘home’ teams over here have had their franchise picked up. For the past 3 years, the big NFL party has come to London town in October offering us a regular season game at Wembley; this year is no different with the San Francisco 49ers generously offering us one of their home fixtures as they take on the Denver Broncos on October 31st. While VS PINK has developed the Broncos’ colours into their range, the 49ers were not included. Neither were the Dolphins, the Saints or the Bucs.

That aside, I was still first in line for a browse. Game on.

Supermodels Behati Prinsloo and Candice Swanepoel stopped by the NFL Draft back in April to walk the red carpet and preview the new collection (thejetsetgirls.com)

By Lucie Bartlett on August 5th, 2010

Tags: American football, Brand marketing, Digital marketing, Fashion, NFL, Social Media, Sport

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