August 27, 2026
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Is the Carhartt / NFL Partnership an Easy Win for Both Parties?
Carhartt is partnering with the NFL, and more specifically the Buffalo Bills, in a new marketing campaign that marries the brand’s blue-collar roots with a growing field of sports advertising, as Modern Retail’s Melissa Daniels outlined.
“The 135-year-old workwear brand is tapping into NFL season with the latest installment of its ‘Made Possible’ campaign. The 30-second spot highlights the construction workers and tradespeople who worked on Highmark Stadium, the new home of the Buffalo Bills that opened ahead of the 2026 season,” Daniels said, pivoting to quote Carhartt VP of marketing and creative Norma Delaney on the natural fit of the campaign.
“We have a lot of authenticity because we’ve just been very focused on our consumer and what their needs are. And as long as we’re always coming back to that, it leads to really interesting marketing efforts because we’re starting the conversation about work that is happening all around us,” Delaney said. Given that Highmark Stadium is the sole new home for an NFL team this year, it seemed a natural fit for the spot.
Carhartt hops aboard a bandwagon fully loaded with other brands fully invested in sports advertising, including Ipsy, Left on Friday, Bud Light, Abercrombie & Fitch, Disney, Champion, and more. And as Daniels underscored, Carhartt itself has experienced a booming interest beyond its traditional tradesperson customer in recent years, attracting a significantly broader audience than in times past. Sister company Carhartt WIP is pushing boundaries with streetwear-inspired fashions, while sub-brand Wylie Welling brings things full circle via the promotion and sale of recycled/upcycled Carhartt products.
But despite inroads being made with a wider consumer base, Delaney was keen to emphasize that Carhartt was serious about sticking to its core values (and value proposition), ensuring that its products are “site-worthy” and rugged enough to last, despite the stresses that trades workers put their clothing through.
“It would be easy to follow a trend and go in that direction, but that’s not why we’re Carhartt,” Delaney concluded.
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Discussion Questions
Does the partnership between Carhartt and the NFL have natural synergy, in your opinion? What do you think of the ad campaign itself?
Are there any ways you can think of to further leverage this partnership in terms of product offerings or marketing efforts? Are there any missed opportunities being overlooked?
Do you believe sports advertising more broadly is more of a trend, or is it here to stay in the booming capacity it currently is exhibiting? What headwinds could appear?
Poll
This partnership makes tremendous sense—it is on-brand for both parties. The ad campaign isn’t entirely brilliant but the connection with the people for whom the partnership will be influential is clear. So, publicly it’s all an excellent start.
Is this an easy win? That’s a far, far harder question. The life and death of partnerships is in the details. What costs will Carhartt incur for the deal? what restrictions might the NFL impose? How well will the organizations work together and coordinate? etc. etc. etc.
I hope it works. Partly I have fond memories for how NFL Sunday Ticket turned DirecTV, into a superstar when they were struggling to gain traction among general consumers as opposed to tech enthusiasts. Based on the research my group had done for DirecTV, it was a brilliant move and that was immediately evident in their results.
But will it work? Only time will tell.
Before answering this my main concern was “can I overcome my distaste for the extortion racket that pro-sports (stadium construction) has become to objectively critique what would seem to be a natural ad campain?” Fortunately – or is it unfortunately? – the answer was “yes”…but that’s because I saw little here to like: the longer spot had absolutely no energy – and barely any reference(s) to Carhartt – and while the shorter spot was a little better, on both counts, it isn’t enough.
I’ll rate this a fumble.
This is another winning example in how brands can stay authentic to themselves while sill creating new growth upside with low risk. Just this week Disney launched a merchandising partnership with the NFL, where selected animated movie characters were each assigned to NFL franchises (eg: Baloo the Bear from Jungle Book placed on Chicago Bears clothing). This kind of creativity makes for easy fan crossover, opening new markets and sales. Since Carhartt solidly resides in the working class space, it will naturally align with passionate NFL fans, city by city.
I like the partnership between Carhartt and the NFL. It makes sense to me. The commercials? Not so much.
The 30-second spot shows workers building the Bills’ stadium, but it doesn’t tell us much about Carhartt. In the longer version, the only thing that really makes the brand stand out is the color of the hat worn by the man in the vest.
I know Carhartt is adding new colors, but I’d lean much harder into Carhartt Brown so viewers instantly make the connection between the brand and the workwear.
The creative just isn’t doing enough to make the most of the partnership. And that feels like a missed opportunity.
Is 2+ minutes even a “spot”….I know of TV series that lasted less time than that !!
Carhartt partnering and collaborating with the NFL is a marraige made in heaven. What a great alignment of brands and demographics. But the ads feel severely subtle in making that point. Maybe Carhartt just wanted to experience some kind of halo effect from tacking their logo on to the end of a football conversation, but that was some reeeaaallly subtle stuff.
This partnership just makes sense. What I like is that Carhartt hasn’t abandoned its core customer to chase the huge NFL audience instead, it has found a way to bring that customer into the story. Outstanding!
Celebrating the tradespeople who actually built the stadium feels authentic, relevant and completely aligned with what Carhartt stands for. That’s the sweet spot for brand partnerships: don’t borrow someone else’s relevance; find the genuine connection between their world and yours.
There’s also huge potential to bring this to life beyond advertising too, through limited collections, stadium activations and celebrating the people behind the scenes who make game day possible. Love this!
Great partnership—the intersection of Carhartt and NFL fans is huge. I love the idea of connecting an elite player like James Cook with the blue-collar ethos, it’s brilliant. The execution of the ads… as already mentioned here, not as strong. There’s just not enough mentions of the brand IMHO.
But next year, there’s a new stadium opening in Nashville, and the Titans have a similar blue-collar appeal; lessons learned this year can feed creative and planning for something similar next year. The concept is really strong.
The NFL keeps growing the game by making the circle bigger.
Like retail, the sports industry takes an ecosystem. Carhartt’s partnership with the NFL pulls the camera back from the field and Bills Mafia ticketholders to the hardworking people who built that stunning new venue.
Celebrating stakeholders who normally remain behind the scenes will deepen the NFL’s brand trust among Carhartt customers and their communities.
I think this is conceptually clever as it’s focusing on the labor that helps make sport happen rather than on the sport itself – and that speaks directly to the Carhartt customer. However, I think the execution is, at best, fair – and that’s being generous. The ad itself is not very compelling and it doesn’t have all that much emotional resonance; it also needs the viewer to join the dots on things like product quality and durability, which are important parts of the Carhartt message. Meh!
Carhartt is hardly the first work brand to court a wider audience. Levi’s, Timberland, and Dickies all made the same journey. The ones that survived kept their functional product genuinely credible while letting the lifestyle extensions run in a separate lane. Carhartt WIP does exactly that, and it works. So brand drift isn’t the real risk here. The NFL partnership is the moment the drift becomes visible to the core customer, because the NFL is about watching, not working. Honoring the tradespeople who built Highmark Stadium is a credible premise. Borrowing the stadium’s glow is something else entirely. The creative needs to hold that line. Right now, it doesn’t.
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This partnership makes tremendous sense—it is on-brand for both parties. The ad campaign isn’t entirely brilliant but the connection with the people for whom the partnership will be influential is clear. So, publicly it’s all an excellent start.
Is this an easy win? That’s a far, far harder question. The life and death of partnerships is in the details. What costs will Carhartt incur for the deal? what restrictions might the NFL impose? How well will the organizations work together and coordinate? etc. etc. etc.
I hope it works. Partly I have fond memories for how NFL Sunday Ticket turned DirecTV, into a superstar when they were struggling to gain traction among general consumers as opposed to tech enthusiasts. Based on the research my group had done for DirecTV, it was a brilliant move and that was immediately evident in their results.
But will it work? Only time will tell.
Before answering this my main concern was “can I overcome my distaste for the extortion racket that pro-sports (stadium construction) has become to objectively critique what would seem to be a natural ad campain?” Fortunately – or is it unfortunately? – the answer was “yes”…but that’s because I saw little here to like: the longer spot had absolutely no energy – and barely any reference(s) to Carhartt – and while the shorter spot was a little better, on both counts, it isn’t enough.
I’ll rate this a fumble.
This is another winning example in how brands can stay authentic to themselves while sill creating new growth upside with low risk. Just this week Disney launched a merchandising partnership with the NFL, where selected animated movie characters were each assigned to NFL franchises (eg: Baloo the Bear from Jungle Book placed on Chicago Bears clothing). This kind of creativity makes for easy fan crossover, opening new markets and sales. Since Carhartt solidly resides in the working class space, it will naturally align with passionate NFL fans, city by city.
I like the partnership between Carhartt and the NFL. It makes sense to me. The commercials? Not so much.
The 30-second spot shows workers building the Bills’ stadium, but it doesn’t tell us much about Carhartt. In the longer version, the only thing that really makes the brand stand out is the color of the hat worn by the man in the vest.
I know Carhartt is adding new colors, but I’d lean much harder into Carhartt Brown so viewers instantly make the connection between the brand and the workwear.
The creative just isn’t doing enough to make the most of the partnership. And that feels like a missed opportunity.
Is 2+ minutes even a “spot”….I know of TV series that lasted less time than that !!
Carhartt partnering and collaborating with the NFL is a marraige made in heaven. What a great alignment of brands and demographics. But the ads feel severely subtle in making that point. Maybe Carhartt just wanted to experience some kind of halo effect from tacking their logo on to the end of a football conversation, but that was some reeeaaallly subtle stuff.
This partnership just makes sense. What I like is that Carhartt hasn’t abandoned its core customer to chase the huge NFL audience instead, it has found a way to bring that customer into the story. Outstanding!
Celebrating the tradespeople who actually built the stadium feels authentic, relevant and completely aligned with what Carhartt stands for. That’s the sweet spot for brand partnerships: don’t borrow someone else’s relevance; find the genuine connection between their world and yours.
There’s also huge potential to bring this to life beyond advertising too, through limited collections, stadium activations and celebrating the people behind the scenes who make game day possible. Love this!
Great partnership—the intersection of Carhartt and NFL fans is huge. I love the idea of connecting an elite player like James Cook with the blue-collar ethos, it’s brilliant. The execution of the ads… as already mentioned here, not as strong. There’s just not enough mentions of the brand IMHO.
But next year, there’s a new stadium opening in Nashville, and the Titans have a similar blue-collar appeal; lessons learned this year can feed creative and planning for something similar next year. The concept is really strong.
The NFL keeps growing the game by making the circle bigger.
Like retail, the sports industry takes an ecosystem. Carhartt’s partnership with the NFL pulls the camera back from the field and Bills Mafia ticketholders to the hardworking people who built that stunning new venue.
Celebrating stakeholders who normally remain behind the scenes will deepen the NFL’s brand trust among Carhartt customers and their communities.
I think this is conceptually clever as it’s focusing on the labor that helps make sport happen rather than on the sport itself – and that speaks directly to the Carhartt customer. However, I think the execution is, at best, fair – and that’s being generous. The ad itself is not very compelling and it doesn’t have all that much emotional resonance; it also needs the viewer to join the dots on things like product quality and durability, which are important parts of the Carhartt message. Meh!
Carhartt is hardly the first work brand to court a wider audience. Levi’s, Timberland, and Dickies all made the same journey. The ones that survived kept their functional product genuinely credible while letting the lifestyle extensions run in a separate lane. Carhartt WIP does exactly that, and it works. So brand drift isn’t the real risk here. The NFL partnership is the moment the drift becomes visible to the core customer, because the NFL is about watching, not working. Honoring the tradespeople who built Highmark Stadium is a credible premise. Borrowing the stadium’s glow is something else entirely. The creative needs to hold that line. Right now, it doesn’t.