Relish Video Producer Ashtyn Butuso shooting Ros Gold-Onwude, Vince Carter and Make-a-Wish participant Bella at a Warriors game.
The Relish doesn’t want to be like other female-targeted sports sites that have come and gone with varying degrees of success in the past. CEO Ashley Wellington-Fahey wants to create a movement — and she has set her sights on original programming to do it.
After a year of bootstrapping, Wellington-Fahey has hired a small team and built the foundation for The Relish, a media platform targeted toward female sports fans with a significant focus on video, which the company pushes heavily through social networks such as Facebook.
This week, she announced a pre-seed funding round co-lead by Precursor Ventures, Halogen Ventures and Slow Ventures. Angel investors include Instagram’s Head of Engineering, James Everingham; former Pandora COO, Sara Clemens; and venture capitalist Tim Fong.
The team’s advisory board includes c-suite and VP-level executives from Twitter, NFL, Bleacher Report, American Express, the San Francisco Giants and Pandora, whose director of engineering, Maira Benjamin, has helped steer The Relish’s tech strategy.
“Maira is a woman in tech and a person of color in tech, so she comes from experience of being a group that’s marginalized in a male-dominated industry — similar to female fans,” Wellington-Fahey told SportTechie this week over the phone. “Her empathy to that really meant something to me.”
Wellington-Fahey, who previously held sales and marketing positions for the Giants, Seattle Mariners and Pandora, said her experience working in sports opened her eyes to the potential market opportunity that she’s now trying to fill with The Relish. As she began to realize how much of the conversation in the sports industry was geared toward men, she bore witness to an overarching theme of stereotyping that often led to the marginalization of female fans.
With more than half of American women identifying themselves as sports fans, Wellington-Fahey said she discovered a missed opportunity to provide media and technology services to engage female fans, just as dozens of sports sites, from ESPN to Bleacher Report, do for men today.
“It’s not like people have completely ignored female fans,” she said. “But it always felt like they were just checking a box. You had people who were accustomed to focusing on one segment of the market — men — and then thinking, ‘OK, how do we engage women?’ as an afterthought.”
Later this year, the San Francisco-based brand says it will roll out “local sports and global technology initiatives,” though Wellington-Fahey wouldn’t elaborate on what those will be, saying the technology products are being built in stealth mode for competitive reasons.
But she acknowledged that content alone isn’t enough to sustain a media startup and hinted that video and other tech products may play a larger role at the company as it scales. She pointed specifically to the business model of Cheddar — the financial news show targeted toward millennials that streams live through Facebook from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange — as something The Relish is striving for. Cheddar has roughly 260,000 followers on Facebook.
“The biggest thing we do today at this stage is our video programming,” said Wellington-Fahey, adding that Relish already has a “huge audience” on Facebook.
Facebook has helped the company connect with female fans in a place where they’re already spending a lot of their time. The social aspect of it enables Relish to not only produce video that they may want to consume, but also interact with them on a personal level — talking with, as opposed to just to, female fans.
“We want female fans to know that we hear them, we understand them, and we’re making their experience better all the time,” she said. “Let’s be creative with how we speak with female fans and offer them an experience they haven’t had before.”
To help her reach this goal, Wellington-Fahey hired a woman named Lisa Raphael, who comes from a background in television. Raphael, a former producer for Katie Couric, currently manages a team of contributing producers for Relish from Bleacher Report and Pac-12 Networks.
