A family sporting-goods firm that turned to lacrosse.

Brine began in 1922 as the W.H. Brine Company, founded by W.H. Brine, according to English Wikipedia; Front Office Sports, reporting in March 2021, also dated the brand to 1922 and described it as a maker of lacrosse, soccer, volleyball and field-hockey equipment. Wikipedia says the company began by selling sports equipment and uniforms to private schools and regional camps, and that it stayed in the hands of the Brine family, latterly as Brine, Inc., until it was sold in 2006. New Balance’s Warrior business, which runs the brand today, describes it on its website as having been Boston-based.

Lacrosse became the centre of the business in the decades after the Second World War. Wikipedia says Brine began making soccer balls and soccer equipment in the 1960s. It says that in the 1950s the company concentrated on lacrosse at a time when sticks were made of wood, and that the Brine family began to look at making sticks themselves with encouragement from coaches including A. MacDonald Murphy of Governor Dummer Academy, Ferris Thomsen, who coached at Penn and Princeton, and Mort LaPointe of Bowdoin College.

The material changed in the following decades. According to Wikipedia, the family tried laminated wood, plastic, fibreglass and aluminium for stick heads before settling on Surlyn, a DuPont plastic, and developed a moulding technique for the head.

Wikipedia also records changes in the family. It says Bill Brine left the company in 1986 and founded Cascade, a lacrosse helmet and eyewear business.

From family business to New Balance.

Brine widened its range before it changed hands. Wikipedia says it started an apparel line and a line of volleyball equipment in the 1990s, released a range of field-hockey equipment in 2000, began making lacrosse helmets and eye masks in 2003, bought In The Crease, a lacrosse goal and accessories company in Penn Yan, New York, in the same year, and began making athletic footwear in 2004. Wikipedia, citing Major League Lacrosse, adds that in 2005 the brand released a mobile lacrosse game titled Brine Lacrosse.

The sale came in 2006. On 8 August 2006 the trade publication SGB reported that New Balance had announced the acquisition of Brine, Inc., which it described as a maker of sporting goods for soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and volleyball based in Milford, Massachusetts. Jim Davis, New Balance’s chairman and chief executive, was quoted as saying that Brine’s motto, “Find Your Game,” fitted New Balance’s own approach to athletic achievement. Wikipedia gives the date of the acquisition as 4 August 2006 and says the company’s name then changed from Brine, Inc. to Brine, Corp. The Warrior website dates the acquisition of Brine to 2007.

New Balance already owned a lacrosse brand. The Warrior website says Warrior was founded in 1992 and acquired by New Balance in February 2004; Front Office Sports also gave 2004. From then on Brine and Warrior were sister brands under one owner, both selling lacrosse equipment, and the Warrior website now carries Brine’s company information on its own pages. Wikipedia lists the company’s headquarters as Milford, Massachusetts, and says it markets goals and goal accessories under the In The Crease name alongside its own brand.

Balls, cans and sticks.

A ball or stick brand is read at very close range and in motion, so its identity has to work at small sizes and on curved or narrow surfaces. On a ball, the name is usually printed or stamped onto the cover, often with a model name and a number that lets players tell one ball from another; on felt, leather or synthetic panels the mark has to survive wear, mud and repeated impact.

Packaging carries much of the rest. Balls sold in sets often come in pressurised cans or in tubes and boxes, and the label on that container — its colour, the name and the lettering — is often what a buyer sees first in a shop, long before the ball itself is handled.

Stick and racket equipment adds another surface. Heads, shafts and handles carry logos, model names and sometimes moulded lettering, and those marks are shaped to fit narrow frames and plastic parts.

Each guide that follows sets out what can be checked about a brand — who founded it, who owns it now and how its marks have appeared — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand redrawn for the women’s game.

In March 2021 New Balance gave Brine a new role. Front Office Sports reported on 8 March 2021, citing Sportico, that Brine would rebrand itself exclusively as a women’s equipment manufacturer, stop making men’s lacrosse gear, and change its logo and messaging. It said the overlap between Brine’s products and Warrior’s, together with the growth of women’s lacrosse, led New Balance to shift its focus. Team Insight gave the same two reasons, attributing them to Brine: growth in the women’s game and a streamlining of the work between Brine and Warrior. Team Insight, the Formula4Media trade title, reported on 18 March 2021 that the announcement had been made on 8 March, International Women’s Day.

The division was put plainly. “Warrior will be our brand for men, and now Brine will be a brand for women,” Warrior’s chief executive, Cindy Abbott, told Sportico, as quoted by both outlets. Front Office Sports also quoted Abbott as saying the company intended “to continue to bring innovation to the lacrosse industry” while building a community and a platform around the women who use the brand. Team Insight reported that, according to Brine, the change followed several years in which the brand had focused more on the women’s game and reduced its investment in the men’s side, and that the final stage of the transition was planned during the early months of the pandemic.

The brand already had a place in women’s professional lacrosse. Team Insight reported that Brine had been the official equipment supplier of the Women’s Professional Lacrosse League during that league’s two seasons, and that the league had folded in the autumn of 2020.

For a brand identity, the 2021 decision is a dated design event: a name that had covered several team sports and both men’s and women’s lacrosse was narrowed to one audience, and its logo was changed to match.

For a design guide, Brine shows how an owner with two brands in one sport can give each a separate audience and a separate mark. Compare New Balance, its owner, and Wilson, another American team-sports name. For this guide we use navy, teal and a gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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