The second big-name athlete to walk away from Under Armour this year isn't a coincidence. It's a pattern worth naming.
Under Armour and The Rock Just Called It Quits After 10 Years. He's the Second Big Name to Walk This Year.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Project Rock training brand has ended its decade-long partnership with Under Armour, first reported by WWD. The relationship began in January 2016, expanded into performance apparel and footwear the following year, and produced eight sneaker models since the Project Rock 1 launched in 2018, plus a multi-year UFC collaboration. Under Armour will keep distributing existing Project Rock inventory through October, and both sides describe the split as amicable.
Johnson and his ex-wife and business partner Dany Garcia retain the Project Rock trademark and are seeking a new manufacturing partner. "After an impressive 10-year run, Under Armour and Dwayne Johnson are bringing our partnership to a natural conclusion," the brand said in a statement, adding it's "creating a more unified expression" in its training category as it sharpens its core business.
This is the second marquee athlete exit for Under Armour in less than a year. NBA star Steph Curry left the brand in November 2025 after a long-running partnership and signed with China's Li-Ning in June. The departures land during a broader company reset: Under Armour reported a 4% revenue decline to roughly $5 billion in fiscal 2026 and has cut its product assortment by about 25% to concentrate investment on core lines.
One athlete leaving is a contract ending. Two athletes leaving inside a year, during a revenue decline and a 25% product cut, is a brand actively narrowing who it wants to be. That's not necessarily a bad strategy, trying to be everything to everyone is how a lot of legacy brands lose their identity, but it is a real signal for anyone doing partnership deals with Under Armour right now: expect a tighter roster and a clearer point of view about which categories the brand is actually willing to fund long term.
Good discussion case for the Brand Management Practicum on reading a "natural conclusion" press statement critically. Ask students what other evidence in the story, revenue trends, product cuts, a second high-profile exit, changes what looks like a routine contract expiration into a strategic retreat. Corporate language is designed to sound uneventful; the job of a brand strategist is noticing when the surrounding facts say otherwise.
Chipotle didn't need to invent a new menu item. It just needed to notice what a 16-year-old already orders every single time.
Chipotle Just Handed Its Kid's Meal to a 16-Year-Old. She Didn't Even Have to Change Her Order.
Chipotle launched its first-ever creator-inspired Kid's Meal, built around 16-year-old YouTube and TikTok star Salish Matter's actual go-to order: a kid's cheese quesadilla with white rice, black beans, guacamole, chips, and chocolate milk. The digital-only "Salish Matter Order" is live on Chipotle's app and website, with menu-board placement at LA-area locations where Matter is based, and runs through a contest where five winners who post with #SalishxChipotle get flown to LA for lunch and content with her.
Matter posts family-friendly content with her father, photographer Jordan Matter, on a YouTube channel with more than 37 million subscribers, and co-founded Sincerely Yours, a skincare brand for tweens and teens. She's the youngest creator to land a digital menu item at Chipotle, following past collaborators like Shawn Mendes, Miley Cyrus, and NBA players Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges, but the first built around a Kid's Meal specifically rather than an adult order.
The move is a deliberate age-down of a tactic that's already worked on Gen Z and millennials, aimed at Gen Alpha, a cohort Chipotle's own research shows exerts outsized influence over household dining decisions. Recent HarrisX and Allison Worldwide data found 91% of surveyed parents say their Gen Alpha kids influence brand preferences, with teen girls driving purchase decisions at a 67% rate versus boys. It also lands as Chipotle climbs out of a slump, Q2 same-store sales rose 2.2%, its best result since late 2024.
The smartest part of this deal is what Chipotle didn't do: they didn't ask Salish to promote a new item, they turned her actual, years-long order into the product. That's the same authenticity principle behind the Hailey Bieber Gap jeans we covered last week, find what the creator already does and formalize it, instead of asking them to perform enthusiasm for something new. Aging this playbook down to Gen Alpha is the real story here. If your client's brand hasn't thought about how kids influence household purchasing yet, this is the proof point to bring to that conversation.
Some brand equity is worth resurrecting exactly as-is. Goldfish just bet its whole back-to-school push on one 20-year-old tagline.
Goldfish Brought Back Its Most Iconic Line for Back-to-School. The Crackers Are Doing Late-Night Talk Shows Now.
Goldfish, the Campbell's Company-owned cracker brand, revived "The Snack That Smiles Back," its most recognizable tagline from the early 2000s, for a new back-to-school campaign built with agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address. Two stop-motion spots have launched so far: "Photoshoot" follows a Goldfish model posing inside the bag for a cheese-backdrop shoot, and "Talk Show" stages a Late Night With Real Cheese bit where the celebrity guest, a Goldfish cracker, has already been eaten before it can appear.
Underneath the nostalgia, the campaign carries a sharper product message than the original tagline ever did: real cheese, no artificial colors or flavors, baked not fried. That positioning arrives as Campbell's works through real headwinds, the company's fiscal Q3 sales fell 4% year over year to $2.4 billion, though CEO Mick Beekhuizen pointed to "early signs of progress" specifically in the snacks category as Goldfish refocuses on households with kids.
The timing is deliberate: launching just as parents are shopping for lunchbox staples puts Goldfish back in the conversation during the exact seasonal window when snack purchasing habits reset for the school year, running across paid, earned, and owned media with more creative planned throughout the year.
This is the disciplined version of a nostalgia play: Goldfish isn't just recycling a beloved line for warm feelings, it's using that same beloved line to carry a new product message about real cheese and no artificial ingredients. That's smart sequencing for a legacy brand under real sales pressure, borrow the equity people already trust, then use the attention it buys to say something you actually need parents to hear right now. Compare this to Express's approach last week: different category, same underlying logic, lean on the era of your brand that customers already love instead of inventing a persona from scratch.
JFrog had one of the cleanest earnings beats of the quarter, and the market responded exactly the way it's supposed to.
JFrog (FROG): Stock Jumps 13% on a Quarter That Beat Every Estimate on the Sheet
Software supply chain platform JFrog reported second-quarter revenue of $163.8 million, up 28.7% year over year and 5.2% ahead of the $155.6 million Wall Street expected. Adjusted earnings of $0.27 per share beat consensus by 12.4%, and adjusted operating income of $32.6 million topped estimates by nearly 13%. Cloud revenue grew 53% to $87.5 million, now 53% of total revenue versus 45% a year earlier, while free cash flow hit a record $53.8 million.
Shares jumped 13.2% on the report and kept climbing over the following days, moving from the mid-$70s in late July to above $93 by mid-August. JFrog raised its full-year revenue guidance to $650 million at the midpoint, up from $630 million, and lifted its baseline cloud-growth outlook to 41-43%. More than 80% of new customers spending over $1 million annually are now also adopting JFrog's security products, and the company patched an Artifactory zero-day vulnerability that an OpenAI model helped identify, with no breach to its cloud offering.
CEO Shlomi Ben Haim tied the growth directly to AI-driven software development, noting that AI coding tools are increasing the volume of binaries, packages, and models organizations need to manage and secure, and that JFrog is positioning its platform to support AI agents as participants in the software supply chain alongside human developers.
This is what a clean quarter looks like: beat on revenue, beat on margin, beat on cash flow, and the stock moved up and kept moving up instead of the muted or confused reactions we've seen from some of this earnings season's bigger names. JFrog is a useful reminder that not every AI-adjacent stock story has to be about a chatbot or a big model release, sometimes it's the unglamorous infrastructure layer, securing and managing the software AI tools produce, that's quietly compounding the fastest.
⚠️ Not investment advice. Verify independently before any decision.
The standing lineup, no changes today.
NBA Finals Recap
The Knicks won the championship. Still the standing sports pick until something replaces it.
ABC/ESPNClaude for Small Business
Anthropic's push into small business tooling. Worth tracking as a comp for our own AI-in-the-loop positioning.
AnthropicAnthropic IPO S-1
$965B valuation, $47B run rate. Watching how the media frames the filing as it moves through the process.
S-1 FilingSilicon Valley Girl
Still the sharpest lens on tech culture from the inside. Recommended for anyone building a personal brand in AI.
YouTube"The Art of the Brand" Podcast
Camille Moore and Phillip Millar keep delivering the best brand-strategy conversations in podcast form right now.
PodcastTed Lasso, Season 4
Premiered August 5. Ten episodes, weekly, through October 7. Early word is it earns the return.
Apple TV