Skin in the Game

Friends of Branded!

Happy Saturday, Happy July 4^th, and I hope you had a great week.

Full disclosure, I’m lifelong New York Knicks fan and yes, I’m still smiling from the title the Knicks brought home to New York after a 53-year draught, but for readers of the H^2 not from New York, don’t close out of this e-mail (yet).

This week’s Top of the Fold is NOT about the Knicks or about New York City (JB, you’re safe).

I've spent the better part of three decades watching capital and culture try to shake hands. Most of the time it's just a photo-op, but every so often you see a real partnership come together, and this summer handed us both in the same news cycle.

Just this week, friend of Branded, Nick Kenner, the CEO and Co-Founder of Just Salad, named Jalen Brunson, the 2026 NBA Champion, Finals MVP, and Captain of the New York Knicks, its first-ever athlete equity partner, and this is Brunson's first restaurant investment. Two first-timers and as we know, you never forget your first-time.

This is not just a handclasp for a commercial moment. The deal was roughly a year and a half in the making, and Mr. Brunson is being embedded in the business: working with the leadership and culinary teams, visiting restaurants, and, in his own words, treating it as more than “putting my name on something.”

Allow me (just for a moment) to show some love to New York. This partnership brings together two New York icons, matched on values, and, not for nothing, attached to a brand that made $195mm in revenues last year, and is profitable, something several of its larger rivals are still working towards (just saying).

But wait, there’s more.

Just two months earlier, L Catterton, the roughly $40bn, LVMH-backed consumer investor, and Patricof Co unveiled CHAMP, (short for CHampion Athlete Managing Partner). The Champ model is the story here with more than 250 elite athletes (including but not limited to Kevin Durant, Tyrese Haliburton, Cooper Flagg, Sophie Cunningham, Mike Trout, Dak Prescott, Livvy Dunne) coming in as co-owners of portfolio companies, not as paid spokespeople. Athletes have reportedly committed better than 10% of a targeted $500mm raise. As Mark Patricof put it, athletes “drive better outcomes when they have skin in the game.”

Same thesis at two altitudes and the signal, the athlete has graduated from billboard to balance sheet. Having sat on both sides of these tables, here's my honest read (please allow me to channel my inner Clint Eastwood and present The Good, The Bad and The Ugly).

The Good

Alignment is the entire ballgame here. An endorser cashes the check and moves on; an owner shows up.

When Brunson walks a Just Salad line, or when Patricof's athletes take equity instead of a fee, incentives finally point the same direction which is to grow enterprise value, not just this quarter's impressions. That's the difference between a spokesperson and a stakeholder, and consumers can smell it (or in the case of restaurants, guests can taste it).

The distribution is real, too. Trust in institutions keeps eroding, but trust in a handful of athletes doesn’t. A credible name compresses years of brand-building into a single season which has the potential to bring awareness, foot traffic, recruiting, and a story the whole team can rally behind. And when the athlete's audience genuinely maps to the brand (for example, a New York champion and a New York salad chain built a mile and a half from the Garden), the fit does the marketing that money simply can't buy.

My Bostonian-boy JB is going to read that last line and flag me for referring to Madison Square Garden as “The Garden,” but I’m going to ask him to direct his questions or issues to Taylor & Travis. 😊

Shifting back to CHAMP’s, this platform’s real contribution is to make the athlete-equity partner relationship repeatable, scalable and institutional. Ad hoc celebrity deals have the potential to be a coin flip, but an institutional platform with a defined activation framework, genuine diligence, and 250 aligned owners turn lightning into a system.

Here’s what I want readers of the Top of the Fold to know, this is a category maturing in real time, and its good news for operators who've watched “influencer” money evaporate.

The Bad

Not every deal is a Brunson deal, and the word “partner” is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting across this space. Plenty of “equity partnerships” are still endorsement deals in a nicer suit: a logo, a cap-table line, and no operating obligation. Equity is the most expensive currency a restaurant owns. Hand it over for a temporary bump and you've been permanently diluted for a moment that has the potential to fade in 72 hours.

Then there's the clock. An athlete's peak marketability and a brand's build rarely run on the same timeline.

What happens when the jersey comes off, the audience ages out, or the next rookie steals the spotlight?

Tie a concept too tightly to one person and you've imported key-person risk straight into your enterprise value, a bet on a single human's performance, health, and headlines.

The Ugly

Reputational contagion is where these deals go from disappointing to damaging. When an athlete's brand craters, an injury, a scandal, a bad trade, a worse tweet (do we still call them “tweets”?), the restaurant wearing their name absorbs the hit. You don't get to un-ring that bell, and you certainly can't un-print the menu.

Uglier still are the deals engineered for the press release rather than the P&L: no vesting, no claw-back, no activation deliverables, no clarity on name, image or likeness (“NIL”) and IP for the day when / if things sour. The “cultural relevance premium” inflates the round, the announcement trends for an afternoon, and same-store sales don't move an inch. Somewhere a founder is explaining to the rest of the cap table why they gave away points for a ribbon-cutting.

The Bottom Line

So, what separates the Just Salads from the vanity plays? Great question.

Structure. The good partnerships, the real partnerships, they vest equity over real tenure and tie it to real deliverables including appearances, content, product input, and the unglamorous work. They build in reverse-vesting and claw-backs so a name that walks away doesn't walk off with the equity. They right-size ownership against cash, nail down NIL and IP rights, and put governance guardrails around a partner who isn't an operator.

Most importantly, they treat the relationship as a build, not a bump.

The headline is the easy part: get an athlete. The value lives in the paperwork and the follow-through, which conveniently, is exactly where we spend our days. The athlete-as-owner era is here (and for avoidance of any doubt, I’m loving the way athletes and hospitality are coming together).

Whether it creates durable value or just a great photo-op comes down to one thing: whether the deal was built to last past the ticker-tape parade (and New York just had one heck-of-a-parade).

For the most quantitatively attentive readers of the H^2, the word “Just” was used 12 times in this article! Cheers to you Mr. Brunson and Just Salad! (now 13 times) 😊

Wishing you a wonderful July 4^th weekend and a Happy 250^th!

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That’s it for today!

See you next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel.

It takes a village!

Jimmy Frischling

Branded Hospitality

[email protected]

235 Park Ave South, 4th Fl | New York, NY 10003

Branded Hospitality is a foodservice growth platform with three integrated business lines—Ventures, Solutions, and Media. We invest in innovative tech and emerging brands, provide expert advisory and capital strategies, and amplify visibility through podcasts, newsletters, social, and events—creating a powerful flywheel that drives growth, brand strength, and lasting success.

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