From the Fairway to the Future: How Lauren Teague Is Reinventing Sports Fandom

It started with a pile of outgrown children's jerseys and a problem no marketplace seemed designed to solve.

Lauren Teague had spent the better part of two decades teaching brands to build genuine fans — not mere followers. She had been one of sports' earliest social media managers, the original voice of @PGATOUR on Twitter, the consultant who helped Fortune 500 companies understand that community is a business strategy, not a nice-to-have. She knew better than most that fan identity is wrapped up in what people wear. And yet, when her kids grew out of their gear, she had nowhere meaningful to send it.

"Every piece of sports apparel has a story to tell," she has said. "With a foundational belief that 'we are what we wear,' FanWagn offers a platform for those stories to continue."That frustration, and that conviction, became FanWagn.

A Career Built on Fandom

I remember watching her present to SEMpdx in 2010 as the voice of their brand and learning how she connected those brand stories to social media. Her marketing expertise is rare because she can combine the storytelling with the deep technical expertise needed for exceptional search experience.

To understand FanWagn, you have to understand Lauren's career trajectory because the company is not a pivot. It's a destination she was always heading toward.

Lauren Teague's professional story begins in Canby, Oregon, with a grandfather and a golf course. She grew up watching golf on TV every weekend, then moved from the stands to the course itself — working as a ranger, a greens crew member, a beer cart attendant. Golf wasn't just a sport for her; it was her first lesson in what it means to be a fan of something.

That love led her to Northern Arizona University and then, in 2007, into the nascent world of social media in sports. She joined the PGA Tour as one of the organization's very first digital hires, eventually spending seven seasons as the social media lead and what she describes as the TOUR's first "Fan Engagement" employee. Armed with an LG flip phone and early Twitter, she built the @PGATour presence from scratch, coaching players, tournaments, and executives on connecting with fans in real time. Connecting stories, social, and true fan engagement at scale with a flip phone.

What she built there was unusual for its era: social strategy oriented around relationships, not reach. She was not chasing impressions. She was engineering loyalty.

After leaving the tour, Lauren joined Convince & Convert Consulting — the respected marketing advisory firm led by Jay Baer. She spent eight years working with clients across B2B, B2C, healthcare, higher education, and sports. She also consulted through Brain+Trust Partners and eventually launched her own firm, Teague FC, through which she has advised brands on content strategy, fan engagement, and social media architecture. Her client roster over the years has spanned the PGA Tour, PGA of America, Cisco, Kaiser Permanente, the Grand Ole Opry, and Oregon State University, among others.

She has also built a parallel life as a professional speaker, describing her style as "live consulting with a microphone" and as host of the Brand to Fan Show, a podcast that interrogates how brands build genuine affinity rather than transient attention. Her thesis, sharpened over two decades: fans transact in stories and sales, and the companies that earn both are the ones that treat community as infrastructure.

The Idea That Became FanWagn

FanWagn launched in August 2023, and it was built from a specific insight that Lauren had earned both as a marketer and as a mom.

Sports fan apparel is a $25+ billion industry. But it exists almost entirely on a one-way conveyor belt: fans buy, wear, and eventually discard. The resale market for fan gear, unlike luxury fashion or sneakers, had no dedicated home. General platforms like eBay or Poshmark carry some jerseys, but they weren't built for fans. They don't understand that a Portland Thorns jersey and a Dallas Stars "Blackout" jersey are not the same product category to the person buying them. Context — team, player, event, era — is everything.

Lauren saw that gap clearly and designed FanWagn to fill it. The platform is what she calls a "re-commerce marketplace". It was specifically built for buying and selling pre-loved, authentic sports and college fan apparel. The phrase she coined for the category is Second Fan Fashion®, and it functions both as a product descriptor and a statement of values: fan gear deserves a second life, not a landfill.

The model serves three constituencies simultaneously. Buyers get a dedicated, searchable marketplace for collectible and affordable fan gear, including hard-to-find vintage pieces and player-specific items. Sellers get access to buyers who actually want what they're offering, without geographic limitations. And sports leagues, teams, and manufacturers get a pathway toward sustainability goals. She has created a way to extend the lifecycle of apparel that's already been produced, reducing the environmental burden of textile waste. That work has been a beautiful weaving of leveraging AI to power search functionality and great storytelling.

Textile waste is one of the most underappreciated environmental crises in consumer goods. Sports apparel, produced in massive quantities and retired quickly as rosters change and seasons turn, is a meaningful contributor. FanWagn is, in her words, a way to "create circular options for sports textiles to make fandom more sustainable."

What FanWagn Is Building

Since its 2023 launch, FanWagn has been steadily expanding its vision. The platform has added an excellent AI Listing Assist tool lowering the friction for sellers to get their gear online quickly. It has built out a fundraising program, "FanWagn Fueled Fundraising," that lets teams and organizations raise money through gear resale. It has partnered on curated drops, including an exclusive stateside release of limited-edition Pride merch from a collaboration between The Sports Bra and SOOO London. She’s proud of that work because it’s her business model and also because the pieces would have otherwise ended up in storage or a landfill.

The women's sports angle is increasingly central to FanWagn's positioning, and for good reason. The resale market for women's sports gear has surged alongside the broader boom in the category: from Caitlin Clark's college jersey to NWSL merchandise, fans are searching for player-specific gear and vintage pieces that general resale platforms aren't equipped to surface. FanWagn was built for exactly this demand.

Lauren has spoken openly on LinkedIn about the evolving shape of FanWagn, regularly sharing the strategic thinking behind the business with her network. She writes frequently about the intersection of sustainability and fandom, about the economics of re-commerce in sports, about what it means to build a company that serves fans first. Her posts reflect a founder who is not just selling a platform but actively developing a new category and inviting her community along for the reasoning.

Her recognition from WISE (Women in Sports and Events) in Portland in November 2024 — named their Woman of Inspiration for the year — reflects both her business innovation and her commitment to mentoring the next generation of women in sports business. She was selected by membership vote, which is perhaps the most fitting form of recognition for someone who has spent her career arguing that community validation is the only kind that actually counts.

The Philosophy Behind It All

Lauren has a phrase she returns to consistently: fans transact in stories and sales. It sounds like a marketing epigram, but it's actually an operating principle.

The transactional layer, the purchase, the resale, the marketplace, is not separate from the emotional layer. When a fan buys a vintage Thorns jersey on FanWagn, they are not simply completing a purchase. They are continuing a story: the story of a player, a season, a family ritual, a community. The jersey carries that meaning forward. The platform just makes the handoff possible.

This is a notably different frame from how most resale marketplaces are built. Most optimize for transaction volume. Lauren is optimizing for what she calls affinity — the kind of lasting connection between a brand and its fans that generates repeat behavior, word-of-mouth, and identity-level loyalty. It's what she taught clients for twenty years. Now she's building it into the infrastructure of her own company.

She described it simply in one of FanWagn's founding documents: "I want to use the success of this business to invest in solutions to address [textile waste] on a grander scale." That's not a founder talking about a product feature. That's a founder talking about a mission arc.

What Comes Next

The broader context around FanWagn is favorable. The secondhand retail market is growing rapidly across categories, driven by Gen Z and Millennial consumers who are increasingly sustainability-conscious and value-driven. Women's sports revenue is projected to exceed $3 billion globally in 2026, up from $2.4 billion in 2025, a 340% increase over four years. The fan communities that have formed around women's sports in particular are exactly the kind of passionate, identity-invested audiences that FanWagn was built to serve.

Lauren has spent her career at the intersection of fandom and digital strategy which makes her unusually well-positioned to build a marketplace that requires both. She understands what fans want emotionally. She understands how to build communities online. She understands the content and engagement mechanics that drive marketplace adoption. And she understands sustainability not as a marketing claim but as a structural marketing, product, and design principle.

Lauren believes your jersey has a second life and a second story. As she navigates yet another big milestone in her fascinating career, I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.