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By Steff Yotka

To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

As a native New Yorker, Dao-Yi Chow has dabbled in sports his entire life. He has reminisced about his basketball days at Public School and his tennis passion while working with Sergio Tacchini, and is an avid runner in his personal life. Football was never among his top three sports—which makes sense, as New York football teams play in New Jersey. So when Andrew Rosen, whom Chow calls a mentor, and Jens Grede, approached him about a new performance and lifestyle brand they were starting, called Brady, he thought, “Brady? That’s such an interesting name for a brand.” 

“A couple of weeks into discussing it with them I asked, ‘Brady, you don’t mean like Tom Brady?’” Chow recalls with a laugh. “They were like, yeah, we thought you knew!” And so the Brady brand was born. 

Chow approached the legacy of one of the winningest quarterbacks in the NFL—and one of the most successful athletes in any sport—from a standpoint squarely rooted outside of fandom. “There’s New England Brady, Tampa Brady, but the brand is really beyond that,” Chow says. “We wanted to create a system of clothing that blends performance and lifestyle, inspired most by his approach to the game.” 

So what does that mean for clothing? For one, there are not really one-to-one adaptations of Brady’s own fashion choices. The inspiration is more abstract, it’s clothing to take a guy throughout the many phases of his day. “In my life, it’s football in the morning, and I train. But then I’m home and I do family things: I go play basketball with my kids outside; go for a walk; then you’re chilling out at dinner,” Brady told GQ. “I wanted to have enough where you could go between different parts of the collection and put things on and they’d feel really comfortable, look good, fit good, and they would fit for whatever occasion you’re heading off to.”