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The 2025 WNBA season is upon us, and its already making waves. From Caitlin Clark draining logo threes to Paige Bueckers debuting for the Dallas Wings, and the Golden State Valkyries hitting the court for the first time, pre-season coverage has been electric. For those of us whove spent years advocating for womens sports, the buzz surrounding this season isnt just exciting, its a powerful reflection of the leagues progress and promise. Rising viewership. New sponsorships. Sold-out arenas. Long-overdue increases in minimum salaries making their way into collective bargaining agreements. These are signs that the tide is turning. But lets not mistake momentum for a final destination. The truth is, were still playing catch-up inside systems that were never built with equity in mind. Earlier this year, I sat on a panel during NBA All-Star Weekend titled, Its Not Womens Sports, Its Sports, Stupid. I loved the sentiment of this framing. If youre into professional sports, it doesn’t matter whether you’re watching men or women playthe competition has the same power to captivate and inspire. It’s why some of us dare to dream of a future where the label “women’s sports” is no longer needed. But while we may aspire to treat all sports equally, pretending the playing field is already level overlooks decades of systemic inequity built into the longer-running, more prominent sports structures. Build equity into the foundation Take the WNBA. While the league continues to break new ground, it operates within a framework borrowed from a time before it existed. Revenue sharing, salary caps, travel accommodations, facilities, and even All-Star Game bonusesnone were designed with parity in mind. Even the most groundbreaking updates to collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) represent incremental fixes within outdated architecture. A stark example: The NBAs salary cap is orders of magnitude higher than the WNBAs, despite surging fan engagement with the womens game. These legacy constraints hamper growth, no matter how bold the vision. But what if it didnt have to be this way? At Parity, we work with a community of 1,100+ professional women athletes across 85 sports, from alpine skiing to American football, wheelchair basketball to windsurfing. From our broad vantage point we see what happens when emerging sports properties reimagine structures, athlete resources, and rewards to build equity into the foundation from day one. Consider Grand Slam Track. Born from the minds of Olympians, it offers equal prize money and visibility for men and women in every meet. Or CrossFit Games, which has featured equal prize money since its earliest days. Premier Rugby Sevens goes even further, with mens and womens teams competing for the same club, their scores aggregated to decide the championship, and all athletes paid equally. Then theres TST (The Soccer Tournament), where both mens and womens brackets offer a $1 million winner-take-all prize. When the womens tournament launched, organizers didnt scale the prize downthey matched it. These arent just feel-good stories. Theyre working models. Transparency as a baseline Many up-and-coming leagues didnt inherit inequity; they sidestepped it. They launched with transparent pay, athlete revenue shares, integrated maternity leave policies, and athlete ownership stakes. Sponsorship and content rights are structured to empower players, not just teams. Media distribution is increasingly direct-to-consumer, giving fans deeper access and athletes greater control. And guess what? Brands are noticing. These properties are fast becoming hidden gems of sports marketing, attracting culturally relevant sponsors and a younger, values-driven fan base hungry for authenticity. Now imagine if all sports leagues had started this way. Picture revenue-sharing models that prioritize athletes. Governance that centers the athlete voice. Pay transparency as a baseline. Media rights split equitably. Built-in support for mental health, parenting, and career transition. Fan experiences designed for an inclusive, digitally native audience. This isnt wishful thinking. Its a blueprint for sustainable growth. The opportunity is clear For brands and media companies, the opportunity is clear. The next generation of sports fans is demanding more than entertainment. They want alignment with their values. They want to invest in systems that elevate, not exclude. The organizations that recognize this shift and act now will be the ones who define the future of sports marketing. Of course, we should celebrate the WNBA and NWSL for pushing forward. Their recent CBAs matter. And yes, tennis has made strides too, with equal prize money at Grand Slams, even as disparities persist in smaller tournaments. But we cant limit our ambitions to what can be retrofitted into the past. The real question is: What could we create if we built it right from the start? Lets stop thinking about womens sports as the undercard. Lets stop asking athletes to work twice as hard for half as much. Instead, lets imagineand builda future where equity isnt an afterthought. Its the foundation. To the investors, brands, and media companies: The future of sports wont wait. The blueprint is here. The audience is ready. The question is, are you bold enough to build it? Leela Srinivasan is CEO of Parity.
Category:
E-Commerce
Since its last major redesign in 2022, Airbnb has been all about the destination: staying in homes so unique or glamorousfrom McMansions with amazing pools to surrealist homes in a shoethat they might be worth a trip unto itself. But starting today, Airbnb is expanding its purview beyond homes . . . again. Its launching a new product called Airbnb Services, and redoubling on Airbnb Experiences (first launched in 2016). [Photo: Damien Maloney/courtesy Airbnb] What is Airbnb Services? Services considers everything that you might want to accompany that home youre renting. Photography. A manicure. A massage or spa treatment. A personal trainer. A private chef or fully catered experience. Its basically everything you could imagine around a wedding, weekend get-together with friends, or even a corporate retreat. Meanwhile, Experiences falls under the greater umbrella of stuff for tourists. These outings hosted by locals include walking tours of local landmarks, cooking classes, and shopping experiences. (They can also include something Airbnb is dubbing Airbnb Originals, which are higher-profile events like getting glammed up with Sabrina Carpenter for a day.) [Photo: Karla Ximena Ceron/courtesy Airbnb] Redesigning an app to do more stuff To offer these new features, Services and Experiences will both get their own tab right on top of the app, alongside Homes. For anyone who has booked a home on Airbnb, the biggest update will be a complete trip timeline that includes both your rental and anything else youve signed up to do. (Airbnb also intends to sell you on services and experiences after youve booked a place to stay.) Summarized, these updates might seem pretty smalland in line with Airbnbs own experimentation for the past decade. The company has hit a mature era of its business, growing 6% year over year. Rental prices have been flat for Airbnb recently, but a bright spot pushing those earnings has been Experiences. By pushing Experiences to a more front-and-center position in the app, and accompanying them with Services, Airbnb is pushing the pedal down on all the stuff they can make money on thats not housing. And in doing so, it becomes as much an event planner as a vacation tool, arguably capable of upping what it can charge by tenfold. Consider that the average vacation costs Americans about $2,800, but the average wedding costs Americans $33,000. Before this update, it would have been inconceivable to book a wedding (complete with hair, food, and entertainment) on Airbnb. After this update, it seems downright simple. Time will tell how deeply Airbnb can seep into our major events and, in turn, the deepest crevices of our wallets. But with a few tweaks to its existing formula, Airbnb is banking on being a lot more than another vacation app.
Category:
E-Commerce
Everyone has their individual bad memories of the pandemic, but one collective nightmare of the early days of that miserable period is the struggle to find toilet paper at your local store. Now, tariffs are bringing concerns about a toilet paper shortage back to the forefront. Suzano SA is the world’s largest exporter of pulp, the raw material used for making products like toilet paper. And the company tells Bloomberg it has seen shipments decline from Brazil to the U.S. due to tariffs, and worries that the shipping disruptions could get worse. It is, to be clear, much too early to know what the impact of pulp shipping disruptions will be. The company said shipments were down 20% in April and that stores, at present, are well stocked. But tariffs could result in higher prices for consumers, which could lead to a rush by some people to stock up. A similar scenario happened last October when a strike by dockworkers on the East Coast sent shoppers flocking to stores, emptying shelves of necessities, including toilet paper. Toilet paper and paper towels are largely produced in the U.S. (just 10% of the countrys toilet paper is imported). But the pulp used to make them is imported from countries like Brazil and Canada (which sends northern bleached softwood kraft pulp our way). It doesn’t take an actual shortage to empty store shelves. Just growing talk of one can cause short-term disruptions to the supply chain. Put another way: Theres a snowball effect. If a small number of people panic-shop, that drives others to do so as well. So if shoppers notice there is less toilet paper on the shelves than usual, they’re more likely to stock up just in case, due to recent talk of empty ports and looming product shortages. Suzano is still shipping products to the U.S.but not only is it shipping less; it’s charging more. The company says it is passing on the cost of tariffs to U.S. buyers, which could be part of the reason for the smaller orders. “Since customers are still struggling to forecast how tariffs can affect their production plants, either directly or indirectly, both pulp buyers and sellers are on a price discovery mode as we speak,” Leo Grimaldi, executive vice president at Suzano, said on a recent call with analysts. “There is not clarity yet of what is this price point needed for a full establishment of market confidence and dynamics.” Like the dockworkers’ strike last year, the trade war was something that was clearly telegraphed by the White House. That gave manufacturers like Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific time to stockpile pulp in order to keep retail prices level. Should a herd mentality lead to product shortages, however, that could lead to store managers putting buying limits on popular items. (The danger is that by limiting what you can buy, it could drive people who were not planning on buying any to join in on the hoarding.) Americans certainly love their toilet paper (which is somewhat ironic, as it didn’t become a household staple until the 1940s). At the start of the pandemic, when panic-buying was in full effect, Americans spent $1.4 billion on toilet paper over a four-week period in March and April of 2020, according to retail sales tracker IRI. That was a 102% increase from the same period a year before, which led to a widespread toilet paper shortage. We’re not alone. After the pandemic got underway, armed robbers in Hong Kong held up a supermarket. They weren’t interested in the cash registers. They did, however, take 600 rolls of toilet paper.
Category:
E-Commerce
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