7 min readWhen Knicks frenzy overtook New York City this past summer during the team’s historic championship run, women fans—both long-suffering devotees and bandwagoners alike—went looking for something to wear. And in a city known for its fashion sense and individuality, the same old generic logo shirts and jerseys simply would not do.
DannijoPro answered the call. Seemingly overnight, the brand’s cropped blue satin bombers, bedazzled denim jackets with crochet collars, and artfully embroidered vintage sports tees took over Instagram, with celebrities like Brooke Shields, cool girls, and Ali Brunson, wife of star point guard Jalen Brunson, and Jordyn Woods, who wed center Karl-Anthony Towns shortly after he won the chip, photographed wearing DannijoPro. Knicks royalty Spike Lee even wore a DannijoPro custom jacket courtside at Game 5.
Danielle and Jodie (Danni + Jo, get it?) Snyder, the sisters and co-founders behind the bespoke fanwear company (a sporty spinoff of their original jewelry and fashion brand, Dannijo), say they were just happy to be along for the historic ride. “No one could have predicted the Knicks were going to go as far as they did, but that was amazing for us,” Jodie says of the win that ended a 53-year title drought. “People loved what we were doing.” Their Knicks finals shirts sold out three times; all 800 satin bombers (priced at $395) sold out, too. Overall, the sisters tell me their sales for 2026 are up 200 percent from last year. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” says Danielle, who, along with Jodie, lived in NYC for over a decade and visited during the finals. “The energy was electric and there was such community. People were buying merch because it was so much more than a garment. It’s a piece of history. It’s a relic now.”
The Knicks run may have fueled their virality, but DannijoPro’s popularity also stems from the fact that it is serving an audience that has been ignored for too long by companies that thought that, when designing sports merch for women, it was enough to “pink it and shrink it.” And although 75 percent of women identify as fans of one or more sports, and women’s sports merch is estimated to be a $4 billion market, still a quarter of female fans say they can’t find styles they like. “It’s crazy that we’re in 2026 and you can go to a game and not find anything you want to buy as a female fan,” Jodie says.
Three months after the Knicks took home the trophy, I reach the sisters as they are gearing up for the launch of their new NBA collection for the 2026-27 season and a number of other new partnerships that have come in the wake of their viral turn, including one rolling out this month with their hometown team, the Jacksonville Jaguars—DannijoPro’s first NFL collab. Danielle is in the brand’s atelier in Tiburon in Marin County, California; as we chat on Zoom, I see people hand-stitching various garments in the background. Jodie joins the call from her car in Jacksonville, Florida, where she heads up the company’s retail and business strategy.
The sisters, who are three years apart, grew up as close as could be in Jacksonville. They’ve been creative, crafty, and entrepreneurial from a young age. Their mom, a mental health counselor, didn’t have pierced ears, but she did have a killer clip-on earring collection, and the girls were obsessed with it. In middle school, Jodie took an interest in making jewelry of her own, and Danielle, wanting to do everything her big sister did, followed right along.
The Snyder sisters as kids on Halloween.
Their dad is a cardiologist, and they taught themselves how to do wire work using his medical tools. Soon, they were collaborating on intricately beaded designs and selling them in local stores. “We’d see kids around school wearing our handmade designs and they didn’t even know it was us making them,” Danielle says. “What we were doing was really fresh and cool. Girls and women could take our accessories and update a white tee and jeans, or anything basic, and make it their own. That was our first taste of using style to individualize and to tell stories and we caught the bug.”
They got their big break a few years later when Danielle was in middle school. Neiman Marcus bought 150 of their turquoise nugget necklaces. “I remember staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning cranking them out,” Danielle says. “And I had an exam the next morning.” The Snyders continued to balance school and their design ambitions. Years later, when Jodie was at the University of Florida studying business and public relations and Danielle at Vanderbilt, where she majored in psychology and Spanish, Jodie would fly up and they would do trunk shows at sororities on campus. “We were always making stuff for wherever we were in life,” Jodie explains. “And everything we do is rooted in sisterhood and wanting to be together, wanting to express ourselves,” Danielle adds.
Jodie (left) and Danielle in Dannijo.
Jodie graduated from college in 2004 and moved to New York City, with Danielle following in 2007. Dannijo was founded the following year and, like the Snyders’ childhood company, quickly became known for its statement jewelry pieces. Their collection was sold in Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel; characters on Gossip Girl and anchors on the Today show wore their necklaces; Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian did too (purchasing them themselves). “I remember the saleswoman calling us and saying, ‘You’re never going to believe who bought the Ruth Celia necklace,’” Danielle says. It was Queen B, who went on to wear it at Coachella, courtside at NBA games, and on a trip with her husband, Jay-Z, in Europe. “So we started getting press before we even really knew what PR was.”
They soon expanded into fashion, designing the “perfect silk slip dress” modeled after Kate Moss in the ’90s. When Jodie’s daughter was 3, she went to a tie-dye party and the next thing they knew, Dannijo was selling tie-dyed hoodies. They styled it over a slip dress and it went viral. “We sold thousands of tie-dye hoodies—it was insane,” Jodie says. “Basically, we just made things that we wanted to wear.” Collabs with Starbucks, Mercedes-Benz, and Swarovski followed.
In 2020, as the pandemic took hold in NYC, the sisters, like many residents, decamped for other parts of the country. Jodie moved back to Florida, while Danielle moved to the Bay Area. The move across the country was hard on Danielle, who was suffering from postpartum depression. “I was lost, lonely, and I didn’t have community,” she notes.
A Warriors jacket from DannijoPro’s new NBA Game Day 2.0 collection.
One day, her husband came home with Golden State tickets and told her they were going out. “That first Warriors game changed my life,” Danielle explains. “It changed my perspective. It got me excited again—I was excited to root for a team and to be a part of something.” They started attending games regularly and Danielle began creating her own designs to wear. “I started going through my husband’s closet and cutting up all of his old jerseys and making them into outfits for me,” she says. “My fix is always to be creative, so I was using my hands, doing stitch work, adding crystals, what have you.” Other female fans at the games began taking notice of her creative designs and asking where she had bought them. “Everyone was noticing because there was just nothing like it out there, so I called Jodie and I said, ‘This is really big.’” Soon, Dannijo’s sporty sister brand, DannijoPro, was born.
Launching a company focused on women fans was a “no-brainer,” Danielle says. “When I started making myself stuff to wear, that’s when I noticed what a crazy white space it was. Sports have never been more popular, but the product just had not caught up to that reality.” It took a year and a half to get an NBA license, but once they did, the first DannijoPro collection, which rolled out in 2024 at the Chase Center (where the Warriors play), quickly sold out.
A Sixers tee from the Game Day 2.0 line.
As ever, the sisters are their own inspiration. Jodie has two children and Danielle has three. “Our worlds have changed,” Jodie says. “We’re both in T-shirts and sweatshirts; we’re not getting dressed up every day anymore.” As such, the DannijoPro items they make aren’t just for game day. They are for the 70 percent of women fans who say they’ve bought sports merch, while only 51 percent have bought tickets to attend an event. “We wanted to create items that people want to wear on and off the court or field,” Jodie says. “It’s about making flattering silhouettes and clothes we all want to wear, and then applying them to the teams that we’re excited about.”
DannijoPro has three main products: officially licensed merch complete with the signature touches the designers have come to be known for, like crochet collars, hand-stitching, painting, and crystal work; “blanks” that can be customized with the help of its in-house artists (most orders come via DM); and vintage pieces that are reworked by hand.
Jodie and Danielle with the Knicks Championship trophy.
As Jodie talks, Danielle runs around the atelier pulling out products from their new collections to show me. In August, they launched designs they made for avatars in the NBA 2K game. In September, they debuted a collab with Roger Federer’s Laver Cup tennis tournament. Their new NBA collection, called “Game Day 2.0,” rolled out last month, while their Jacksonville Jaguars line will go on sale later in November. Future partnerships with other teams and leagues are in the works.
The sisters see their new company as “so much bigger than a fashion brand,” Danielle says. “We are reimagining fandom through a culture lens, and it’s about people. We’re living in a world of AI where everything’s like a bot. For us, it’s like, how do we bring really cool dynamic experiences in real life to people and create connections and community?”
“We think women fans should be celebrated in that there are products out there that speak to us,” Jodie adds. “It’s more than merch. I think it stands for so many other things. We can’t just accept that it’s okay to just slap logos on things, or pink it and shrink it, and women are just going to go with that. And at the end of the day, all these companies forget, but women have the buying power.”
Source: ELLE
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