Lashify Partners With Portland Fire To Create A New Kind Of Space For Women Athletes

As we enter playoff season in the WNBA, it’s worth looking back at just how far the league has come in 30 years. Gone are the early days of traveling long distances by bus, practicing in high school gymnasiums, and, frankly, being thought of as secondary athletes — and, more importantly, secondary women.

Women’s sports are experiencing a historic surge in revenue and engagement, with professional women’s sports revenue growing 4.5 times faster than men’s sports between 2022 and 2024. According to Nielsen’s recent Top of Sports report, the 2025 WNBA season was the most-watched in league history, with ESPN networks averaging 1.3 million viewers across regular-season games and 1.2 million across the postseason, both up year over year. It’s a big winning season for the girls. And winning with this new found support is what they’ll continue to do, on and off the court.

When the WNBA announced Portland as the league’s 15th franchise on September 18, 2024, as part of its expansion package alongside the Toronto Tempo, the Portland Fire arrived with the promise of new ownership, league leadership, and a series of milestones and initiatives for the Rose City. Among the biggest commitments was a new home for its athletes.

The first-of-its-kind dual-sport facility is designed as a dedicated women’s performance and training center shared by the WNBA’s Portland Fire and NWSL’s Portland Thorns. By the time of the tour, the 100,000-square-foot Kaiser Permanente Performance Center was pristine and almost untouched, it was a gleaming vision of what a modern women’s sports facility can look like.

The design follows a Scandinavian-modern sensibility: clean lines, soft colors, natural light, and a minimalist approach that carries through the workout and weight rooms, physical therapy floor, communal areas, and even the lounge. That lounge is where Lashify comes in. The beauty brand, founded in 2016 by Sahara Lotti, is known for its patented Lashify System, a DIY lash-extension technology designed to deliver a salon-quality finish at home. The brand’s partnership with the Portland Fire goes beyond putting a logo on a wall. Lashify’s branding appears on the abdomen of all three Fire jersey editions, while the partnership also includes a “Lashify Runway” arrival experience at Moda Center and the Lashify Glam Club, a community platform offering fans exclusive beauty content and a specialized brand loyalty program. But the partnership was never simply about placing a logo in a lounge or a jersey At its core they. asked a deeper question: What does it look like to show up for female athletes as whole people, not simply as athletes?

“When the Portland Fire team reached out, I immediately saw an opportunity to redefine what a women’s sports partnership looks like,” says Sahara Lotti, Lashify’s founder and CEO. “I wanted something tangible where players felt pampered and celebrated before stepping under the high-intensity lights.” For Lotti, that meant creating physical spaces that acknowledge the rituals and routines that exist around sport, including beauty.

“The idea of creating actual physical spaces, like our custom athlete glam room at the Kaiser Permanente Performance Center, and interactive fan destinations like the Lashify Runway at Moda Center was there from the beginning because beauty is an experience, not a print ad,” she says.

The resulting glam lounge feels less like a branded activation and more like a private sanctuary. There’s a three-seat vanity stocked with Lashify products, a sauna and steam room, a lounge area, and large walk-in showers. It is, in many ways, an acknowledgment of something that can feel surprisingly radical in women’s sports: that athletes might want to feel beautiful, cared for, and like themselves before they step onto the court.

Like fashion and the tunnel, which have taken on a spotlight of their own in recent years, pre-game beauty rituals are part of the performance — even if they’ve historically been treated as an afterthought. Getting glammed up before appearing on the big screen, taking care of your hair, doing your lashes, or simply having a place to decompress can be as much a part of an athlete’s routine as stretching or taping an ankle.

Lotti understands that the women occupying the facility are also students, mothers, entrepreneurs, and people building personal brands beyond the court. The facility reflects that multiplicity, with dedicated content rooms, extensive physical therapy spaces, cold plunges and hot tubs, a family room, and two thoughtfully designed lactation rooms for feeding or pumping. “We treated the space as a sanctuary, not a marketing gimmick,” Lotti says. “Athletes spend hours pushing their bodies to the absolute limit, and we know how much time they spend at the training facility.”

Much of the partnership was shaped collaboratively between the Lashify team and the players themselves. When Lotti first approached the project, she says she wanted to understand “the players’ routines, preferences, and how they express themselves off the court.”

The goal was to emphasize their multidimensionality women who dominate in their sport while also expressing themselves through fashion and beauty. “That’s central to why Lashify exists,” she says. And the players seem to feel that distinction. Nika Muhl, point guard for the Portland Fire, says the experience has been as much about being listened to as it has been about the physical space itself.

“It’s about hearing us. It’s about us asking for it as well,” Muhl says. “I feel like most of us are sometimes too shy or too, you know, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll just take what we’re given.’ But it’s okay to ask, and it’s okay to demand some things, and I feel like Lashify has provided that for us.”

“And you can tell,” she adds. “When you come into the space, you just feel it, and we’re just excited to be able to use it.” Her first impression of the facility hasn’t faded. “Seeing the facility for the first time has been amazing. And still, every time coming into it, it still feels the same way, like we see it for the first time.” For Muhl, the locker room is particularly meaningful. “Our locker room is my favorite part so far,” she says. “Especially as women in sports. Like, our space, our locker room, that’s our sacred space and area that we share. It’s an area we connect in.”

The details matter, too. There are tampons, hair dryers, personal-care products, small things that can feel monumental when they haven’t always been standard. “It’s new for me, personally. I don’t come from a place where that’s even an option whatsoever.”

And perhaps that is the clearest measure of how much women’s sports have changed: not simply bigger crowds or larger television audiences, but the expectation that the women at the center of it all deserve spaces built with them in mind.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com