Most of the time, if you are a ridiculously popular player in any professional sports league, you get to be promoted by a few major brand companies. In the NBA’s case, these companies are often shoe providers like Nike and Under Armour. Steph Curry happens to be one of those athletes with a lot of endorsements, his biggest, the shoe deal with Under Armour. These elite stars are brands in their own right and use not only their own name to sell products, but they need a flashy logo on top of it.
What is Steph Curry’s logo? Steph has created a few different logos throughout his time in the NBA but the main one is simply his initials. The letters “S” and “C” are written very sharply right next to each other, in a way that can also be read as his jersey number – 30. Stylistically the sharp ends of each character are a nod to his shooting accuracy and keen eye on the floor. It is a very simple design, yet everybody knows exactly who’s brand it is when they see it.
Curry has another logo that he tried out in the past and has used from time to time. He isn’t the only player in the NBA to have a popular logo among fans, there are quite a bit more players with recognizable logos.
What Is Curry’s Other Logo?
Towards the end of the 2020 year, Steph decided that a logo change would be beneficial to his brand. This logo isn’t used very often anymore, but it is a combination of his name and the thing he does most in the NBA. The logo features a combination of both the “S” and “C” initials, looking sort of like an open ended eight towards the top. Along with those initials, they added a little extra wing at the very top of the design. This usually indicated a post three-point make celebration when a player holds his three fingers up into the air. At first glance, it is easy to just see a plain “S” with a lot of other random designs around it. However, this logo is actually very well done and created in a way to hold multiple meanings in a short amount of space.
The Start of It All
As a professional athlete, it didn’t used to be so common for a company to ask them to launch a personal brand for themselves when signing an endorsement contract. That all changed when Michael Jordan entered the league. There wasn’t any specific color scheme included in Jordan’s logo, but it became unbelievably popular in a short amount of time. After signing for Nike and rocking the sneaker world, Jordan was doing photoshoots when this logo started to come around. He kept hitting this one pose when he jumped into the air and spread his legs open while pretending to dunk the basketball. Pretty soon it got morphed into that logo we all know and was called the Jump Man. Not only did everybody instantly know who’s brand they were buying when they saw the logo, but it soon became the standard for major companies in the country. Without Jordan’s logo becoming so iconic, maybe personal brands don’t take off as much as they did.
Much like Curry having multiple logos associated with his personal brand, this isn’t the original Jordan logo. When he first launched his own kicks, the now iconic Jordan 1’s in 1985, they featured the Air Jordan logo. This still appears on merchandise to this day.
Other Notable Brand Logos
Kobe Bryant has a very notable brand logo. This logo started to appear on the Nike Air Huarache sneakers and consist of six geometric pieces. While it may look like a pretty simple design, Kobe used to say that it has a far deeper meaning than what it looked like on the surface. Bryant said that the logo was representing a sword in a sheath, to symbolize raw talent. The sheath was the effort that the person put into their own development as well. This logo is often used in a variety of different colors but gold and purple seem to be the most popular due to his time on the Los Angeles Lakers.
Another notable one is Kyrie Irving. Irving’s is special in its own way. It is a simple “K” with two “I”s inside of it. According to Irving, the logo represents ancient runes and the designers themselves even admitted that they had to create the entire thing from scratch. It is usually seen in black and white so that you can clearly visualize the entire thing. Leave it to Kyrie Irving to create a logo so intriguing yet so simple at the same time.
How Do These Logos Come About?
There are a few reasons why players have been able to use their own logo. The obvious one being their play on the basketball court. These top companies want people that are wildly popular, and use the stars’ images to grow their own brand. With the NBA, shoe companies are prominent because it is something that every player wears when playing. Some have even started collecting them over the years. These companies then go after all the most popular NBA players at the time, and sign them to one of three different deals. They could either go to a merchandising deal, a cash deal or a color way deal. All are completely different from one another, but the color-ways are really when the logos come to life. If a player is popular enough to get such a rare deal, then a signature shoe is certainly on the way for them. At this point, it is up to the player to work with other designers and create that logo for himself so that he can put it on every signature shoe. It’s why the only big logos we see are from superstar players. I don’t think anybody would be going crazy over an Andre Drummond logo on their shoes. It’s a very big deal to reach this stage for any NBA player, but the companies have been giving them out a bit more frequently over the last couple of years. We are bound to see even more incredible logos from NBA players in the next few years.