Off Season Steps Up to the Plate: Kristin Juszczyk’s Brand Debuts Its First MLB Collection at Urban Outfitters

• A Brand Built on Sidelines Finds Its Way to Home Plate
• What’s Actually in the Capsule
• Why Urban Outfitters, and Why Now
• The Philadelphia Activation
• Baseball’s Crowded, and Increasingly Stylish, Fashion Bench
• Where the Collection Goes From Here

Kristin Juszczyk did not set out to build a sports apparel label. She built jackets for herself, standing on the sidelines at San Francisco 49ers games where her husband, Kyle Juszczyk, plays fullback. Those custom pieces, spliced together from team gear and reworked into something that actually looked like fashion rather than merchandise, ended up on Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game, and from there the whole thing snowballed in the way that only a genuinely good idea snowballs. By January of last year, Juszczyk had partnered with entrepreneur Emma Grede and the National Football League itself to launch Off Season as a proper brand, with a licensing arrangement through the NFL Players Association and a debut lineup of puffers built around five teams.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by OFF SEASON (@offseasonbrand)

That NFL launch mattered because it proved the concept could scale past one designer’s closet. Juszczyk has been fairly open about the fact that the debut collection was only ever meant to be a starting point, telling followers early on that she was working to eventually cover all 32 NFL teams, a comment that set the tone for how Off Season has approached every rollout since. Scale, not scarcity, has always been the point.

What is happening now is the natural next step, and honestly a fairly obvious one in retrospect. Off Season has moved from football into baseball, unveiling its first Major League Baseball collection, called MLB Summer ’26, in partnership with Urban Outfitters. It is the brand’s first collision with MLB and, just as significantly, its first wholesale retail partnership with any outside retailer. Everything up to this point had lived on Off Season’s own site or league adjacent storefronts such as NFL Shop and Fanatics. This is the moment the brand walks into somebody else’s house, and does so with a genuinely established retailer rather than a niche boutique, which says something about how quickly Off Season has been able to build credibility within licensed sports apparel.

The collection went live at Urban Outfitters on July 11, both online and inside a run of stores in cities that happen to double as MLB strongholds, before it widens out to Off Season’s own site, MLB Shop, Fanatics, Revolve, and select ballpark retail on July 22. That staggered release, giving one retailer a head start before the rest of the market gets a shot, is a familiar playbook in streetwear, and it is a slightly newer one in officially licensed sports apparel, which tends to move at a more institutional pace.

stir

The collection itself is a six style capsule, built entirely around women’s sizing that runs from XXS up to 3XL, which is worth pausing on given how much team apparel still treats women’s fits as an afterthought. The pieces lean into lightweight jerseys, brushed windbreakers, and open knit sweaters, and the design language draws from the actual view history of the sport rather than a generic sports logo aesthetic. Pinstripes show up reworked into something closer to tailoring than uniform. Jersey stitching gets exaggerated in places you would not expect on a stadium giveaway shirt. Team graphics get scaled down and placed with more intention than the usual chest sized crest.

Eight teams anchor the main assortment: the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, San Francisco Giants, and San Diego Padres. Three more, the Atlanta Braves, Detroit Tigers, and Houston Astros, get folded in specifically through the collection’s lace back tee, which reads like a deliberate way to extend reach into a few more fanbases without overcomplicating the core lineup. Altogether the capsule spans 47 individual pieces once every team and style combination is counted, which is a genuinely dense drop for a six style collection and suggests Off Season is treating team variety as the real product, not the silhouettes themselves.

A vintage baseball glove and Dodgers-inspired sportswear reinterpret classic diamond aesthetics through a contemporary fashion lens.

Vintage inspired baseball apparel has become its own small industry lately, and Off Season’s approach sits closer to the fashion end of that spectrum than the merch end. You can see it in a mesh sweater with contrast trim, or a halter style piece that has clearly been designed to be worn well outside a ballpark. Other pieces in the assortment take a more direct route, working in tracksuit sil and rugby style tees that read as sporty without leaning on an obvious team crest to do the work. That is really the whole thesis of the brand’s name. Off Season is explicitly not trying to make something you wear only on game day and then retire to a drawer. The unisex sizing philosophy Off Season established with its NFL puffers has clearly shaped this drop too, even though the MLB capsule itself is built specifically around women’s fit, a choice that reads as a deliberate effort to serve a customer that traditional licensed baseball apparel has historically underserved.

It is also worth noting how differently this collection is being talked about compared to a standard licensed merch drop. Coverage so far has focused almost entirely on styling potential rather than team spirit alone, treating the pieces as wardrobe additions first and fan gear second. That framing lines up with how Off Season has positioned itself from day one, and it is probably the clearest signal yet that baseball apparel is catching up to what has already happened in football and basketball fan style over the past couple of seasons.

why

The choice of retail partner is not incidental. Urban Outfitters has spent the past few years leaning hard into brand collisions and licensed sports product as a way of staying relevant to a customer who treats fandom as an aesthetic category rather than a loyalty test. Shea Jensen, President of Urban Outfitters, framed the partnership around that exact audience, noting that sports have become central to youth culture and style, which is why Urban Outfitters was proud to kick off this collaboration during MLB All Star Week in its home city of Philadelphia

That detail, the timing around All Star Week, is doing a lot of quiet work here. All Star Week is the one stretch of the MLB calendar when the league’s cultural footprint briefly rivals football and basketball, with attention from casual fans who otherwise check in maybe a handful of times a season. Landing a retail exclusive in the middle of that window is a deliberate bet that baseball’s fashion crossover moment has finally arrived, mirroring what has already happened at NBA courtside over the past couple of years with figures like Timothee Chalamet turning pregame arrivals into their own genre of style content.

Juszczyk herself has talked about the collection in terms that sound more like a love letter to the sport than a standard press quote, describing baseball’s pull as something rooted in tradition, community, and hometown pride, and saying she wanted the capsule to hold onto that feeling while still giving women pieces that felt genuinely exciting to put on. It is a fairly consistent thread across everything Off Season has released so far. The brand keeps returning to the idea that team apparel does not have to choose between authenticity and actual design.

active

Retail launches like this rarely stop at putting product on shelves, and this one leans into the moment with an actual street level activation. On Saturday, July 11, the same day the collection went live, Urban Outfitters and Off Season set up a pop up at Walnut Garden in Philadelphia running from noon to 2 p.m., giving shoppers a chance to browse the collection in person and meet [Kristin Juszczyk] directly. The afternoon included ballpark inspired food, content moments built for social capture, and a run of giveaways, alongside a custom wrapped mobile activation that moved through the city over the course of the day.

Philadelphia is not a random choice of city for this either. It is Urban Outfitters’ home market, and it happens to be hosting MLB’s All Star festivities this year, which gives the retailer a rare chance to stage a hometown moment with national attention already pointed at the city.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by OFF SEASON (@offseasonbrand)

straddle

Off Season is not walking into an empty field here, and that context matters for understanding what this launch actually represents. Baseball apparel has quietly built up a fairly deep bench of premium fashion partners over the past couple of seasons. Aviator Nation, the California based athleisure brand known for its vintage sweats, released its second MLB collaboration earlier this year and more than doubled its team count from six to thirteen in response to fan demand, which tells you something about how quickly appetite for this kind of product has grown. Polo Ralph Lauren, Madhappy, Sporty & Rich, Fear of God, and Terez, the last of those working through a partnership with retailer Revolve, all currently hold ongoing licensed fashion partnerships with the league as well.

What sets Off Season apart from most of that list is the retail exclusivity angle and the sheer piece count the brand is bringing to market on day one. A 47 piece assortment across eight core teams is a meaningfully bigger swing than a limited capsule drop, and it signals that Off Season is trying to establish real shelf presence rather than a one off collectible moment. It also fits the pattern the brand set with its NFL debut, where variety across teams, rather than a small hero product, was clearly the strategic priority from the start.

extend

The Urban Outfitters exclusive window runs through July 21, after which the MLB Summer ’26 collection widens out considerably. Starting July 22, the capsule becomes available on Off Season’s own site, MLB Shop, Fanatics, Revolve, and a selection of in venue ballpark stores, giving fans who missed the initial window, or who simply prefer shopping through the league’s own retail channels, a clear path to the product without much delay.

For Off Season, the real story here is less about one capsule and more about proof of concept. The brand launched around football, expanded its footprint through an outside retail partner for the first time with this baseball release, and has been fairly explicit that broader team coverage is the long term plan across whatever sport it touches next. If the Urban Outfitters union performs the way both companies are clearly hoping it will, it is not hard to imagine this exact formula, retail exclusive window, hometown activation, broad team rollout, becoming the template Off Season repeats the next time it moves into a new league.

There is also a question worth sitting with here about what comes after baseball. Off Season’s Instagram bio already lists partnerships across the NFL, NBA, WNBA, Team USA, and Formula 1, which suggests MLB was never going to be the last stop. Given how quickly the brand moved from a single designer’s sideline looks to a licensed multi league operation with a national retail partner, it would not be surprising to see another sport added to that list before the year is out. For now, though, the story is baseball, and for a brand built on turning fan gear into something people actually want to wear off the field, landing a retail exclusive during All Star Week in a city as baseball obsessed as Philadelphia feels like exactly the right place to plant a flag.