Opening The Sports Bra on April 1, 2022, felt like a fated decision for founder Jenny Nguyen. It was the same date as the 2018 NCAA women’s basketball championship game. When Notre Dame won on a last-second three-pointer, Nguyen remembers tossing her cap across the bar in excitement. It was the greatest game she’d ever watched. But she realized she and her friends were the only ones in the bar watching it, and they were huddled around the smallest TV, without the sound on.
“I was frustrated at the situation, but I was more frustrated at myself,” Nguyen said. “I hadn’t realized that we’d watched this entire amazing game with no sound on because I had become so accustomed to watching women’s sports as a second-class citizen, not in its full glory. I blurted out, ‘The only way we’re ever going to watch a women’s game in its full glory is if we had our own place!’”
The Sports Bra broke ground — and records
Over the next few years, a dream turned into plans on paper. The Sports Bra started as the first dedicated bar where anyone could watch women’s sports. Like any owner starting their first business, Nguyen was excited and nervous. “I thought it would be a nice, full-circle moment to open on the first,” she said. “But my second plan was that it was April Fools. If anything fell through the cracks or I wasn’t ready, I could be like, ‘April Fools! We’re not opening on the first.’”
Fortunately, there was nothing to worry about. The grand opening was a hit. Thousands of people came to celebrate. “We probably had 300 people in here at a time, standing literally shoulder-to-shoulder,” Nguyen recalled. Around 3 a.m. — after final drinks were poured and the chaos subsided — she embraced a quiet moment of reflection as she counted out tips for the first time. “I think those moments are really brief and rare, but you think about how you got here, how the space came to be, and what’s for the future. Nobody knows, right?” she said.
But for weeks after opening, The Sports Bra stayed busy. According to Nguyen, people visited from all over and often became emotional after stepping inside the bar. “Former athletes would come in here and they would say that they’ve never felt so validated by a space. There were women in their seventies who had heard about The Bra. They lived all over the country, in different places.” Quickly, the story of The Sports Bra made news headlines. And in just eight months of being open, the business generated nearly $1 million in revenue.
To keep up with the demand, The Sports Bra switched to Square
Nguyen started with the point-of-sale system her credit union offered. But she quickly realized that The Sports Bra needed a payments partner that could handle the amount of business they had coming through the door. “We saw probably three to five thousand people in three days. We absolutely crashed the system the entire weekend,” she explained. “Hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of transactions crashed, and we had already established the system, so we were kind of stuck with it.”
Not only did the point of sale fail to handle all of The Sports Bra’s orders, but it was unfamiliar to most of the staff, which made training an added chore. Nguyen had to pivot. So she made a simple yet critical decision. She asked her team which payment solution they wanted to use. Her staff gave her a recommendation — Square. “It was going to be a much easier transition, and it has a lot more reporting and all the kinds of stuff that is a lot more convenient for restaurants, and it was able to handle the business that we do here in our small location,” Nguyen said.
Today, The Sports Bra runs with three Square Point of Sale stations, plus two handheld Square Terminals. Both help to the team keep orders flowing during busy game days and other events.
“One amazing thing is we had a Pride Block Party where we closed off this whole street and took over everything, and that’s where we used the handhelds,” explained Nguyen. “We were able to bring the handhelds out there and everything was still connected onto our systems, and there’s a lot of flexibility in there. We also do pop-ups where we’ll sell merch or we’ll bring a cooler full of cider or something, and we’re able to bring the handhelds with us and still be tied into the system here.”
Expanding as women’s sports explodes
The Sports Bra is making headlines once again for Nguyen’s plans to expand the business across the United States via a franchise model. For Nguyen, it’s not about growing as quickly as possible, but more about selecting the right partners. “Maintaining our integrity, our mission, and our values through expansion is absolutely critical,” she stated. “I’d love in the next year to have three or four spots either signed and built out, or open by the end of 2025. That feels like something me and my team can handle in a really authentic way.” When it comes to exact locations, Nguyen sees a lot of opportunity. “I would lean much more towards finding the right people than the exact right city because honestly, there are a lot of cities that can use a space like this,” she said.
The timing is perfect because women’s sports are no longer relegated to small TVs in the corner of crowded bars. In 2023, the University of Iowa’s point guard Caitlin Clark contributed to record-breaking viewership rates. The WNBA just experienced its most-watched season in 21 years. And Deloitte predicts that women’s sports will generate over $1 billion in revenue in 2024, a 300% increase from the industry’s evaluation in 2021.
It’s a vastly different era from the early days of the business. “It wasn’t that women weren’t playing sports; it was just that nobody was playing it on TV,” Nguyen said. “From 2022 to now, the media and content have been explosive, which is amazing. We sometimes feel like we don’t have enough TVs.”
The boom in media attention has powered The Sports Bra’s mission. According to Nguyen, “Showing these kinds of underrepresented sports on TV is really impactful, especially for the young ones. There’s another statistic, where at the age of 13 to 16 years old, girls drop out of sports at 50% higher rates than boys. And the main reason is because they don’t see a future for themselves in sports. And a lot of that has to do with what’s being portrayed,” said Nguyen.
Growing into a franchise with flexible technology
Supporting women and the local community isn’t just a catchy motto, it’s a massive part of the business’s DNA. The Sports Bra features 21 taps, all owned, operated, or made by a woman in the brew house. They sourced their tables from a local nonprofit, Girls Build. So when Nguyen first considered franchising the business, the opportunity to allow other cities to create a similar space resonated.
“This is the opportunity to give my dream, package it up in a way that is somewhat doable for them, hand it over, and then help them to create their own dream of being a business owner or creating their own community by using something that has already been kind of vetted a little bit, and then making it their own,” said Nguyen.
Just as the business counts on reliable restaurant technology to handle high order counts at their Portland location, flexibility will be incredibly important to successful growth.
“With the expansion, there is another added piece of unpredictability. I think Square is the perfect platform to help build out our back end as we’re adding more details and more reporting capabilities, and all of these are just different aspects built into Square. Its ability to work with other apps, too, is critical as we expand our merch program,” added Nguyen.
