Interview: Meghan Klingenberg, Professional Footballer & Lifestyle Brand Co-Founder
Amira talks with professional footballer and former US Women’s National Team player Meghan Klingenberg about re—inc, the lifestyle brand she founded with Christen Press, Tobin Heath and Megan Rapinoe. They talk about athletes redefining businesses, making gender-neutral and body-inclusive fashion, and their newest collection, Gamer, which finds connections and empowerment between sports and gaming.
This episode was produced by Ali Lemer. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: After winning the World Cup in 2015, Meghan Klingenberg and the US women’s national team returned to the US to much fanfare. There were ticker tape parades, keys to the city, and White House visits. But as the confetti fell, the women reckoned with their sense of shock. Why should they be shocked at the enthusiasm? Had they become so accustomed to not getting attention as women athletes that it surprised them? Amongst this feeling of possibility for the future of women’s sports also crept in a new feeling: they wanted more, for as much as the celebrations were nice, did it come with pay equity? Did it come with more endorsement deals? Did it come with the publicity and investment in women’s sports that clearly there was an appetite for?
Of course we know this team would go on to sue for pay equity, but there were other ways that Klingenberg and her teammates decided to challenge the status quo. Not content to wait around for the sporting landscape to change, Klingenberg and fellow teammates set out to change it in a myriad of ways. For Klingenberg and teammates Christen Press, Tobin Heath and Megan Rapinoe, one of those ways became re—inc, a lifestyle brand they founded in 2019 to challenge the status quo in business, in fashion, to step into a space as female entrepreneurs and athletes.
As re—inc prepares for its latest collection drop, Gamer, I chat with the Portland Thorns defender about the brand – where it’s been, where it’s going, what we can expect from this latest collection, and what re—inc continues to tell us about challenging the status quo and imagining a new future for women, gender nonconforming and non-binary people in women’s sports and athletics overall. Welcome to Burn It All Down.
Meghan: Thank you! I’m so stoked to be here. I just wanna tell you a quick story, if you don’t mind. So, I don’t know if you know anything about the Portland Thorns but we have one of the most amazing fanbases in the country and before every game I am privileged enough to do a little huddle pump-up speech for the whole team to kind of get going and basically be ready to burn it all down. So, we used a lot of fire imagery as well, you know–
Amira: I love that.
Meghan: To like, build a bonfire so our fans can see when it they're not around. So I was really drawn to your podcast when I heard “Burn It All Down” because I’m like, this is what I’m talking about!
Amira: [laughs] I love that! Absolutely. Every week we have a burn pile and we light on fire the worst things in sports, right? So, we want sports with all the things we love about it, whether that’s teamwork or community or the adrenaline of a game or competition – I love competition. It's whatever we love. What we don’t need is racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia. We don’t need that. So, every week our burn pile…And sometimes it’s like we’re lighting matches that we’ve lit before, and sometimes it’s like a huge bonfire because that week is so trash.
Meghan: Right! Grab a gas can, you know? [laughs]
Amira: Exactly. Light it up! So, of course like I said, what rises from those ashes though are the torchbearers, are the people who are moving that forward, and when I look at the work that y'all are doing with re—inc, that’s something that’s moving society forward, and I feel like that’s what y’all set out to do. Can you tell us a little bit, for people who are less familiar, what was the intention behind starting something like re—inc?
Meghan: Absolutely. I love our origin story, it’s one of my favorite things ever to talk about because it really drives the purpose of our brand and what we do. So, I’ll take you back to 2015 and all four of us were on the World Cup team and we were incredibly blessed to stand on the winners’ podium after beating Japan, and won the World Cup final, and ultimately it’s a culmination of all of the hard work that you’ve done across your career to be able to stand there and cheer and be excited with your friends and your family and the people you really care about and worked hard with. You’re standing there and you're stoked, but you’re also feeling a bit empty. I’m like, why am I feeling so empty? I just did what I set out to do in my life. Essentially it boiled down for me that everybody else was capitalizing off of our hard work and we weren’t, so whether it was sponsorships, sponsors or media rights holders, or FIFA or federations – they were all driving massive amounts of value and revenue from our win, and all we were getting was the measly money that FIFA decides to parse out to women’s players that is like–
Amira: Nothing. [laughs]
Meghan: One twentieth or a hundredth of what the men get!
Amira: Exactly.
Meghan: So, that really bugged me, and I was like, that’s bullshit. Are we allowed to swear on this podcast?
Amira: Absolutely.
Meghan: Okay, that’s bullshit. So, we basically got together, the women’s national team players, and we decided, hey, we gotta do something about this. We went about it in a couple of different ways. One of them was renegotiating our CBA, another one was the lawsuit, and then for Christen and Pinoe and Tobin and I, this was another way. When you start a new company essentially as founders that happen to be women and founders that happen to be some of us queer, it's like we’re doing something that a lot of entrepreneurs aren’t, they're just not like us.
So, we have a different way of going about things and starting things and bringing people in and being inclusive than a lot of other people, and for me that's really important because we wanna be as influential and as powerful as Nike, as Google, as all of these different companies, because when you’re able to be that powerful you’re a tastemaker, you’re a changemaker. You get to set industry standards. You get to promote people that deserve to be promoted. You get to hire people that have different points of views than you and ultimately round out a better world and a better company and create better products. So, I gave you the origin story, but then I also kind of gave you where we wanna go and what we wanna be. I think all of our founders would say different things about what’s important to them about re and what it means to them, but for me that’s why it’s most important.
Amira: Absolutely. One of the things that I like the most about it is how y’all understand it and you say it’s a community first brand, right? And you talk about going against the status quo, especially in terms of body types and gender fluid fashion and opportunities. You know, if you’ve ever gone on their site you’ll even see there’s not a standard size chart, right? There’s this idea that different things fit people different ways and you should find your fit. So I’m wondering if you could speak to the importance of that, especially in my view as we’re looking at streetwear, we’re looking at that and it’s coming at a time where we’re really pushing, thankfully, the binaries and boundaries of sport; and under a time when trans youth particularly in sport are under attack, and their very existence is under attack, and thinking about why it matters, right, to have fluid fashion and the ability to find find your fit and kind of dress and style yourself in ways that aren't always conventional.
Meghan: It does matter. It does matter, and it’s one of the hardest things that we’ve had to take on actually, is sizing, because nobody’s really been good at it and nobody’s been good at gender fluid fashion yet. There’s not this playbook that you can just go to and be like, hey, this is what “small” is gonna look like, this is how “medium” is gonna fit on everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are, everyone has a different body. It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female or anything, you know? It could be any gender, it doesn’t matter. Everybody has a different body type, and so that makes it really difficult. It’s actually one of the hardest things that we’ve had to go about figuring out but it’s also one of the most important things that I think that we can do, because for us – especially me – I’m totally into my tomboy fashion. For me I’m into the androgynous sort of look and I love to look that way because it makes me feel the most comfortable, it makes me feel like me, and so I feel like re is a direct look into, oh, hey, this is made directly for Meghan because this is what she likes.
I’ve never had anything that's been able to fit me. I've shopped in boy's sections at the mall to try and find stuff that I feel comfortable in, like they don’t make jeans my size that I like to wear. So it really is an extension of, hey, there’s nothing really made for people like me or people like us, and so we wanna go about changing that because ultimately fashion is just an outward representation of your inner power, and we want people to be able to show that on the outside, be like, yeah, this is exactly how I feel most comfortable and I love to look dope as hell, but also this is me. So, for us it's like, yeah, getting that sizing right and getting people to feel comfortable in our clothes is one of the most important things for us.
Amira: Absolutely. Can I ask you a hard question?
Meghan: Absolutely.
Amira: I’m so interested in it because it feels like on the production side it is tough to find this and find it in an ethical, conscious way, and then also keep clothes prices in a way that can obviously help the brand but also make it available to people. How does one…And maybe y’all don’t know, maybe we’re all trying to figure this out, but how do we – especially for people who are listening who are building their own brands and their own entities – how do they figure out how to navigate within existing structures that has certain ways of launching products and producing products and whatever, figure out how to trouble the status quo while not being able to reinvent every part of that framework, right? How do we make clothes and also keep them affordable, but also push production side and also make sure we’re ethically getting people…You know, we have merch, and I remember our flamethrowers, our listeners were like, “Who’s putting the merchandise together? Who’s sewing it?” These are important conversations. How do we juggle all of these balls in the air, what things do we drop, and how do we navigate that?
Meghan: This is a really hard question, by the way. [Amira laughs] You said hard question but this is harder than hard! Nah, that’s the tension, isn’t it? There's a tension between doing things that are easy and that just make your business run and then doing things that are going to help the world and make the world better. It's this tension for us that we’re always trying to navigate and it's really hard. It’s really hard to navigate that because we hear back from our customers – who are super loud and we love that, we love how loud they are because it makes it easy for us to make different decisions and move forward in a new way. We hear all the time, like, this is not rad, or this is not rad. And we’re like, okay, we’re hearing you. But there are some points where we just can’t change things right in that moment. So for us it’s like, okay, what can we change now and then how do we go about creating a space for change in the future when we can create a new path.
For us it’s like utilizing all of the things that…You know, we don’t wanna reinvent the wheel because the wheel works and we wanna use the wheel in the best way possible, but also there are some things that are created around the wheel that are unsustainable. So, we wanna change those things. It’s like, okay, how do we keep the easy things and keep moving forward? I think for us it’s creating that space to get better. We're always like, okay, this collection, this is what we could do, and this is what we did, and then we reevaluate right after we are done with that collection, and we’re like, okay, we loved this about it, we did this well, but how can we make this better? How can we make this faster? How can we make this more sustainable? So for us it’s always about being on that marathon but also having these sprints in between.
Amira: Right.
Meghan: Where we're trying to figure out how to run the marathon faster as we go.
Amira: Listen, I’m always here for a sports metaphor. You talked about these collections…I know I saw when you had the Reimagine Your Vote collection that was around voting, but you have a new collection coming out that's very interesting. It's launching on April 6th, right? It’s called Gamer. What is this about?
Meghan: Oh, Gamer is so legit. This is probably my favorite collection that is coming out. It’s incredibly ambitious and I think it’s probably the coolest one that we’ve done because it really makes a statement. So, the ones before have been centered around…Popsicle, and Source was about finding your inner source and using that source energy to find your passion and follow it. But this one is really about burning it down. This one is about smashing the patriarchy and it’s about reimagining what it means to be a feminist and what it means to be a woman in gaming. So, we’re really stoked about it because we’re ballers, we're gamers in soccer, and we feel like this is a total parallel to what we do. As you know, being a female gamer–
Amira: Is hard has hell.
Meghan: Being a gamer that happens to be female, right? Because they’re just gamers, and I’m just a baller, right? They suffer the same inequities that we do, you know, whether it's being underpaid or whether it’s representation within the industry or all of these things where sports is a microcosm of society. That same stuff is happening for gamers, and so we wanted to highlight that and we also wanted to be like, hey, this is also fun. It's fun to burn down things because only after destruction can there be regrowth. Without taking something down you can never hope to grow, and I feel like that personally, I feel like that on a larger scale. So, I’m really really excited about this one because on top of being one of our most poignant messages it's also really fun and has dope colors and themes and it's just…If Source is calm, you know, Gamer is the opposite. It’s like, let's fucking go.
Amira: I love it. No, please, fuck it up! [laughter] And one of the things that I like the most about it is this partnership with Black Girls Code.
Meghan: Yes.
Amira: Can you tell me about how that partnership came to be? And if you don’t know about Black Girls Code, Google, go, now! It’s a really dope organization that should really get everybody’s support. So when I saw that y’all were partnering with Black Girls Code for the release of this collection I was like, ooh! This is synergy. This is really really sick.
Meghan: Yeah, actually in our company we call things that are coincidences synchodestinies. So, this feels like a synchrodestiny for be to be on here and talk about this. But we always partner with a different organization every collection, every launch, because part of our brand is community first, and so we want to give back to our community. So for us, Black Girls Code was immediately…That just makes so much sense for so many reasons. We’re stoked about it because we want to ensure that people of color and women and people on the queer spectrum are more represented in these industries where white men, white cisgender straight men tend to dominate and create things that we all use, but forget to think about the people that are different. So for us this made total sense to give back because it’s completely on brand. It’s also completely in line with being a game girl and being a gamer. So for us we were like, okay, we’re always looking for organizations that we can partner with and give back to part of the community, but this one just felt a bit like a synchrodestiny of sorts.
Amira: Absolutely. So, as we wrap up here, one of the things that we always talk about is the idea of more than an athlete, right? I think we’ve talked about it in many different ways, whether it’s Renee Montgomery now being an owner of a team, we’ve talked about–
Meghan: That’s so…I was freaking out.
Amira: I know. It’s the best story arc. You know, people moving into the broadcast booth, AJ Andrews who’s a good friend of this show is always in front of the camera hosting something now. And we talk about the business side a little bit less, right? Partially because many people who listen to this show and my co-hosts, we’re also smashing capitalism within things, but it’s where we live, and thinking about what business ventures look like within these systems that are community first like the work that y’all are doing with re, and thinking about what it means to look at athletes moving into the business side to take up space there, and like you said, that origin story of coming back in 2015 and watching everybody else profit, right? My first is on its way out, it’s called Can’t Eat a Medal, right? It’s echoing the ideas that Black women athletes have said for so long, historically – “Can’t eat a medal.”
Althea Gibson was like, “They call me queen of the court, but you can’t eat a crown.” So, figuring out how you take your expertise on and off the pitch and put it into the business side and into these ventures seems to be also kind of writing a playbook and a blueprint for people thinking about what “more than an athlete” means for them. So, if you’re talking to up and coming folks who are trying to figure out how to take their athletic careers to new ventures and new levels, what advice would you give them? What would you say for people looking to be multifaceted?
Meghan: I would just say, first of all, I think it's a little scary – and not scary in a fearful way, scary in a cool way, like, just imagine all of the badass women who absolutely kick ass in sports taking their talents, their work ethic, their teamwork, their brilliance, their everything over into the business world, and taking that same exact fire that they have and passion in their sport and then applying it into whatever they are doing now, whether that's coding or whether that's being a CEO or whether that's whatever else. So, for me I guess my biggest advice would be: be you within that new world. Be you, because nobody’s better at being you than you. You got to where you were because of all the things that you did in basketball, in soccer, in your sport, right? Then all you have to do is just apply those same principles over in business. Obviously it’s gonna be different, you have to learn new tools, but you can still use your resilience, you can still use your hard work, your teamwork. You can still use your humility, your ability to solve problems, your ability to communicate clearly. All of those things are directly applicable to the business world. So, be you within that world and don’t be afraid to show up because maybe you're not gonna be as good at the beginning in business as you were at soccer or whatever sport you played, but it doesn’t matter how good you were when you were 6, you know?
Amira: Right. Playing bumblebee soccer, chasing after a ball.
Meghan: Right! It’s the journey, you know? Enjoy the journey.
Amira: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I thank you so much for coming on Burn It All Down and telling us about this. I'm really excited to think about the parallels between sports and gaming. We’ve talked about this, especially because all of us need to really consider esports more, just because they're growing. I mean, when we talk about what the pandemic did and did not do, but lemme tell you – what grew in the pandemic was esports. And these spaces, especially gaming spaces, are far from equitable and safe for everybody right now, and so working with organizations like Black Girls Code and the partnership that y’all have with re, this is a really big deal to talk about. These same conversations we have over on the athletic side, on the sports side that we have here at BIAD, etc, and how we can find synergies and parallels to these other industries, and you guys are standing in the breach between those with this next collection, so it's very exciting. So, where can people find more information and when can people be on the lookout for the drop of Gamer?
Meghan: Yes, I think you mentioned earlier that April 6th is the drop, so please check it out. We’re always loving when people, whether they buy it or not, just come take a look and give us feedback and participate. We love that. Ultimately if you wanna be a part of this brand, we never turn anybody away. Everybody’s invited as long as you're gonna be openminded and cool with everybody else that's there too. For us, membership has been a really awesome way to connect with our community, so if maybe Gamer isn't for you other things will be, and I know that our community is there waiting to give you a virtual hug and wrap you up and just invite you into the inner circle because we’re stoked to connected.
Amira: And the website is re-website.com.
Meghan: Yes, yes.
Amira: So, yeah, go on re-website.com and there you’ll find now only the merchandise, the facts, information, but you'll find that membership page right there, which is called “a practice space for social change,” and it encompasses a lot about what you, Meghan, are talking about here. You can see a lot more of the brand there. I think it’s a really dope site to explore, so go on over there, check it out. I can’t thank you enough again, Meghan, for coming on Burn It All Down. Look forward to future conversations and partnerships, and you have a great day.
Meghan: Thank you, Amira! This has been awesome.