Megan Smalley didn’t plan to build a powerhouse ecommerce brand. Scarlet & Gold started as a creative side project—until she got laid off.

Fast forward 12 years, and Scarlet & Gold is one of the only women-owned businesses licensed for NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) merch on Shopify. This March, their Shopify sales are up 74.2% year-over-year—with over 53.6% of those sales tied to March Madness merchandise.

And here’s the kicker: 69.5% of their basketball sales come from just two NIL deals.

So how did she do it? What makes NIL merch so powerful? And what’s it really like running an ecommerce business that lives and dies by game-day hype?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

👉 Read more from Shopify’s newsroom: shopify.com/news/march-madness-entrepreneurs

🔗 Check out Scarlet & Gold → scarletandgoldshop.com
🔗 Need custom merch? → scarletandgoldcustom.com

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This is a story about ecommerce, sports, and the weird world of NIL merch.
It’s about how one Shopify store turned athlete partnerships into real growth.
And it’s about what happens when you take a risk—and it actually works.