Jessica Robertson, co-Founder and Chief Content Officer of Togethxr, has led the media and commerce company to amazing results.
Robertson co-founded the brand with four of the world’s greatest athletes: Soccer superstar Alex Morgan, WNBA and Olympic legend Sue Bird, Snowboarder and two-time Olympic Gold Medalist Chloe Kim and Gold Medal swimmer Simone Manuel.
Women make up 44 percent of all participants in sport yet only receive less than 17 percent of sports media coverage. With a focus on rich storytelling, Togethxr is an unapologetic platform where representation and equality is the norm. A place where culture, activism, lifestyle, and sports converge. The result is the fastest-growing women’s sports brand.
Robertson joined SportsJam with Doug Doyle to talk about Togethxr and his career.
Togethxr has more than 3 million community members. That’s a big deal to Jessica Robertson.
“Community for us is important because we wanted to be home for athletes and women’s sports fans to give them a space to go and commune with each other. The appetite for more is really important. They tell us who to be sometimes, where to show up, which stories to tell. What I’ve learned more importantly about the larger women’s sports community as a whole is they’ll show up for you, if you show up for them. They are deeply loyal. It’s a massive space that is uncapped, especially if you compare it to men’s sports. That will truly drive our growth through the years.”
Togethxr is presenting Play It Forward: How Women Are Changing Sports To Change The World from Chronicle Books. The new book features 25 inspirational stories of tenacious women from all corners of the sports universe. It also features a foreword by Alex Morgan and afterword by Sue Bird.
One of the amazing stories in the book focuses on 98-year old Maybelle Blair, one of the few living original members of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Blair was a pitcher with the Peoria Redwings. It’s one of Robertson’s favorite chapters in Play It Forward “She Builds a Legacy: Maybelle Blair Came Out to Play Ball.”
“Maybelle Blair is a force of life. I was lucky enough to meet Maybelle in 2022 at a conference in Southern California. Talk about one of the most charismatic, powerful, tough, hilarious, tells it like it is women you will ever meet. I was starstruck actually. I think her story in particular was really representative of that generation. She’s one of the biggest barrier breakers that exists in this space. I’m so glad the world knows her and is celebrating her now. There’s another layer of her story where she recently came out and talked very openly and vulnerably about not just her experience as an athlete at that time and what it meant for social and gender constructs and the challenges, but now what is means for us in the course of history. It also she talked about what it was like to hide who she was for so long because society wasn’t accepting or wasn’t quite there yet. There was a fear of that. She’s such a pioneer and such an icon. One of the reasons we want to create this collection Play It Forward was to tell stories like hers and cement them on physical record.”
Does Robertson feel equal pay for women is achievable? She stresses we have to change cultural perception of what we mean we say equal pay.
“I think what these athletes are talking about is equitable. I think it’s achievable. I do think this is where culture is actually important as well as conscious investment. After we launched, we started to see brand partners investing in this space, more money coming into the space over the last four years, team evaluations going up, and more leagues and teams being launched. All of that growth is going to drive equity. Now it’s great business. They better these women perform and the more we as a culture appreciate them for their athleticism, achievements and accomplishments, the more money there is to be had across the board. I think we’ll get there, I really do.”
Jessica Robertson grew up in Paducah, Kentucky, playing softball and basketball. While she was surrounded by sports and was greatly inspired by the success of the U.S. women’s national soccer team at the 1996 Olympic games. She’s now an amateur boxer.
Her climb to success has been an impressive one. Her résumé includes being an Assistant Editor at Rolling Stone, to Senior Editor at AOL Music, to Director of Content at MTV, to Executive Editor at The FADER, to Head of Content The Players’ Tribune.
You can SEE Doug Doyle’s SportsJam interview with Jessica Robertson here.
