In the spring of 2025, the women’s sportswear seller Title Nine found itself under the gun. President Donald Trump had just imposed a raft of tariffs on goods imported from China and, it seemed, pretty much everywhere else. The United States was launching a trade war, and any business with an overseas supply chain was caught in the crossfire.
“When you’re looking at 145% increases, it was going to have a significant impact on our business,” said Molly Hanks, the company’s merchandising manager. “It was very unsettling and stressful.”
Title Nine does more than $100 million in business per year, selling sportswear aimed at athletic women who want outdoor gear that’s as functional as it is stylish. In winter, among other things, this means stocking high-performance ski sweaters, but chic ones that, you know, don’t look like they came off a schmaltzy Christmas movie’s costume rack.
And some of Title Nine’s coolest sweaters are sourced from a company called Krimson Klover, which works with a network of knitting factories in China. As the time came in spring to make the early orders, Hanks said the new tariffs threatened to become a multimillion-dollar problem for Title Nine.
“For those styles made in China,” Hanks said, “the math was upside down.”
But that’s when the CEO of Krimson Klover, Rhonda Swenson, stepped in to help. “She was like, ‘Wow, this really sucks. Let’s see if we can all take a little bit of the burden,’” Hanks said.
Hanks said Swenson flexed her long-standing relationship with the Chinese factories, pushed hard, and got the manufacturers to agree to absorb half the cost of the tariffs. And the remaining half?
Swenson split the rest of the tariff bill with Title Nine. “She saved a whole category for our winter business,” Hanks said. “She did some amazing negotiation.”
If it sounds extraordinary for a vendor in a down market to shoulder extra work and costs to help out a customer, that’s because these two companies aren’t ordinary. They operate inside something of a business village. They’re members of a close-knit community of women-owned brands making their way in an outdoor sports industry long dominated by men.
These women-owned businesses tend to be minnows among bigger fish and, as a matter of principle, mutually supportive. Kinship economies like these exist all over, whether the small businesses are looking to support companies that share mutual geography, cultural background, values, or faith. And, as Title Nine’s tariff episode demonstrates, this principled, mutual support can help boost profits, too.
Title Nine takes its name from the landmark U.S. civil rights law which helped ensure equal opportunity for women in college sports. The CEO, Missy Park, is a former college athlete who started the company in 1989, working solo out of a Berkeley garage, growing sales and staff steadily until today when the headcount stands at 150 employees. From the very beginning, Park built the company to make better gear for women athletes, but also made it her mission to support women-owned and women-run businesses. One of Title Nine’s core goals is to help this village grow. From the clothes in the catalog, to the food in the company fridge, to the landscaping outside headquarters, the company says it works with women-owned suppliers and contractors whenever possible.
“Real business change happens when women step up and into risk-taking ownership roles,” Park told Fortune in an email. “We get change by being and supporting the change we seek.”
Title Nine sponsors a yearly pitch-fest contest for women looking to break into the sportswear industry and gives winners placement in its catalogs and sales rep support to help launch them into the wider market. These practices are a matter of mission, but they’ve also turned out to be very helpful to Title Nine. Younger, digitally savvy founders of partner companies have helped boost Title Nine’s presence on social media platforms and, as a consequence, significantly boost the brand’s reach online.
“We’ve not always been the best at social media,” said Title Nine’s community manager Lisa Gilliland. “We work with these younger women-owned brands and they’re doing reels and they’re boosting our followers and driving them to our site.”
According to data the company shared with Fortune, social media posts in which Title Nine featured or collaborated with these women-owned brands saw 29% more shares, 68% higher engagement, 66% more likes and 123% more comments than the company’s normal posts.
The number of women-owned brands that Title Nine offers has been growing 10% per year for the most recent years the company shared data, and currently, the company said women-owned brands account for 78% of its total revenue.
“It’s that rising tide that lifts all ships,” Gilliland said.
Just ask Cassie Abel. She founded a small women’s outdoor apparel company called Wild Rye, known for its mountain biking shorts, especially a “beautifully designed short that’s still technical as hell” that’s become a favorite among gear reviewers at Outside magazine. Today the company has 11 employees, and Abel says it’s on track to do $5.6 million in business this year.
Abel’s company got an early boost when Abel won Title Nine’s pitch-fest in 2019. That meant marketing support, placement in the Title Nine catalog, and a purchase order. Wild Rye had only been up and running a few years at this point, Abel said, and was doing about $200,000 per year in sales. Abel was running it essentially alone, but she’d bet big on growth and, instead of taking a salary as CEO, she plowed the company’s cash into more inventory for big retail partners.
“I was still running a PR marketing firm to pay my bills,” Abel said. “I hadn’t paid myself a dime.”
Then the pandemic hit. The global economy seized up. Emails started pouring in from her biggest retail buyers, canceling or delaying their purchase orders. “ And I’m sitting there like, I don’t have the cash to get through this,” Abel said. “I have to pay my factory bills.”
Then came an email from her second-biggest customer, Title Nine. “It was like, we are having to make some tough decisions, but we are going to protect our small female-founded brands,” Abel said. “We understand what a tough position you are in. We believe in you. We will protect our purchase orders with you as much as we possibly can. So they did just that.”
For Abel, the support couldn’t have come at a more critical moment—professionally or personally. Her mother had just been hospitalized with COVID. Her father was recovering from a heart attack. And she’d just brought home a 2-month-old baby who’d been born premature. If Title Nine hadn’t come through, she said, “It would’ve been catastrophic.”
Three days after the shorts went up for sale on the Title Nine site, Abel got an email from the CEO, Missy Park. Title Nine had sold more Wild Rye shorts in three days than they had in entire seasons. They wanted to order more.
“The title of the email was ‘Holy Shorts!’“ Abel said. “So not only was it good for us…but they protected our purchase orders and it ended up being very good for their business as well.”
If Title Nine holds a lesson for other small-business owners, people at the company say stories like these are the heart of it. Whether it’s a community based on shared belief, or geography or culture—find your kinship economy. By supporting it, you’ll be supporting yourself.
“Today shoppers are looking to support brands that have an initiative that’s meaningful,” Gilliland said. “Find that angle, and lean into that.”
