Client Spotlight: Canary + Varsity Brands
When a hurricane hit, Varsity Brands was ready — almost. Here’s what changed.
Company:
Varsity Brands
varsitybrands.grantcircles.org
About:
Founded in 1972, Varsity Brands has grown from a sports equipment distributor into a tech-enabled services company serving schools, teams, and spirit organizations across the country.
Company size:
6,000
Industry:
Manufacturing
Varsity Brands is a leading provider of sports, spirit, and achievement products and services — from uniforms and equipment to recognition programs — serving schools, colleges, and youth organizations across the country. The company’s mission is captured in a simple phrase: in the game for good.
For Josh Lipscomb, SVP of Total Rewards, that mission creates a direct line to how he thinks about their workforce. If the purpose of the company is helping people show up fully for the young people they serve, then their financial lives can’t be in crisis. That belief was tested when a major hurricane tore through the region. What happened next changed how Varsity Brands thinks about supporting its people.
The Opportunity
Varsity Brands employs approximately 6,000 people across a diverse workforce: roughly 35% are production workers earning under $20 per hour, many of whom speak Spanish or Vietnamese as a first language and don’t have company email addresses. Another 40% make up a travel-heavy sales force with variable earnings. The remainder work in corporate and support roles.
Lipscomb’s main challenge is creating programs that address financial hardship for all workforce segments. While Varsity Brands had long recognized the need to support employees through unexpected financial crises, Lipscomb had seen firsthand at two prior organizations how internally managed relief funds create problems of their own: perceived bias, conflict over allocation decisions, and significant administrative burden. Good intentions aren’t enough infrastructure. Without a system that’s equitable, private, and built to hold up under pressure, the people who need help most can end up underserved or unserved entirely. That gap became impossible to ignore when a Category 4 hurricane tore through the region.
When the Storm Hit
Some Varsity Brands employees lost everything.
Luckily, they were in the middle of implementing Canary’s Grant Circle platform. But before that was ready, the company improvised. HR and leadership sent checks, Venmo payments, whatever they could to get money to people quickly. It worked — but it was messy, inconsistent, and exactly the kind of informal response Lipscomb had seen go wrong before.
Within weeks, Varsity Brands formalized its relief fund through Canary. The same crisis that had overwhelmed their informal system became the backbone of something scalable.
“The fact that I work for a company who acknowledged this and stepped up to make this a little easier says a lot.”
Varsity Brands Employee
The Solution
With Grant Circle, Canary’s third-party employee relief fund, Varsity Brands now delivers charitable grants to employees navigating crises quickly and with dignity during life’s most stressful moments. The program is designed with accessibility, equity, and privacy in mind: employees apply directly through Canary rather than through HR, removing the discomfort of disclosing financial hardship to a manager or colleague. The third-party structure also eliminates the bias and allocation conflicts that can undermine internally managed programs. Decisions are made consistently, transparently, and without putting HR in the middle. This program has also given Varsity Brands something they didn’t have before: real visibility into what their workforce is actually facing. Through anonymized program data, Lipscomb saw how many employees were navigating medical expenses they couldn’t cover — hardships that were previously invisible to HR. That insight has opened conversations about where else the company could close the gap between what their program offers and what employees actually need.
Why it Works
For Lipscomb, the decision to partner with Canary wasn’t a difficult one. The program mapped directly to Varsity Brands’ values, making it an obvious expression of who they already are rather than a line item to justify.
When a company’s entire reason for existing is helping people show up fully for the communities they serve, investing in the financial stability of its own workforce isn’t a budget conversation. It’s a values conversation.
The Impact
They're in it together
$51,558 raised in donations from the Varsity Brands work community to help each other when times get tough
Financial help at scale
294 individuals helped though the Varsity Brands program to date.
Small Grants, Big Impact
$1,111 is Varsity Brands average grant size. This is enough to fill a prescription, cover a car repair, or make a rent payment in a moment of crisis.
Ready to prioritize the financial well-being of your employees?
Get in touch to see how Grant Circle can impact your organization.