The Mis(sing) Brand Collaborations of Lauren Bell: Why Cricket is Falling Behind the Global Athlete Playbook
How Eileen Gu, Ilona Maher, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese can help to create cricket stars off the pitch.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is one of my all-time favourite albums; if you don’t know, then get to know. After leaving the Fugees, she released her only solo album, which propelled Hill’s career to new heights as she became the first female rapper to have a diamond-certified album.
Her namesake, England opening bowler Lauren Bell (admittedly spelt differently), is, I believe, in dire need of a similar moment. Not on the cricket pitch, but away from it.
She currently has 2.3M Instagram followers and 87k on TikTok, a following that has grown on the back of a championship-winning WPL season with Royal Challengers Bangalore. Bell has a strong online presence, is charming, and wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of Vogue. Add to this being the poster girl for English cricket, and she must have loads of brand partnerships, right?
Aside from featuring in a campaign for WPL tournament sponsor ChatGPT India and a short feature in a Jack Whitehall-led promo video for Seat Unique, Bell’s brand partnerships have been lacking.
Unfortunately, at the moment, if she were to release an album, the title would be: The Mis(sing) Brand Collaboration of Lauren Bell… Excuse the awful pun, but you get the point.
Ilona Maher on the runway, Angel Reese showing off her own Mcdonalds meal, Paige Bueckers as the face of Lego and Eileen Gu at the 2026 Winter Olympics
If Bell or her team are looking for inspiration, then they need not look too far.
Let’s look at the top 20 of the Forbes list of the highest-paid female athletes of 2025. Freestyle skier Eileen Gu, rugby’s Ilona Maher, and basketball’s Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese could all be used as examples of how female athletes can maximise their commercial opportunities.
So, let’s explore what these four have been doing outside of sport and why cricket must take note.
Eileen Gu
She was looking to win back-to-back gold medals yesterday but had to settle for silver in the freestyle ski big air. Gu’s 2025 earnings of $23.1M put her fourth on the Forbes list of the highest paid female athletes behind tennis trio of Coco Gauff, Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek. The crazy part $23m of the $23.1m has come away from the slopes…
Naturally, you might be asking: how?
Well, she is so much more than an athlete. She is an IMG model who has walked the runway for major brands such as Victoria’s Secret, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton. Away from the catwalk, she has tapped into both her American and Chinese heritage, partnering with Chinese brands such as TCL Electronics, Luckin Coffee, and Bosideng, just to name a few.
So, what could Lauren Bell’s team learn from Gu? Simply put: leveraging your audience. Gu has a massive following on China’s social media app, Weibo, which is one of the reasons why she is so commercially attractive to Chinese brands. Bell, similarly, has a massive following in India.
Women’s cricket there is seeing increased investment from the BCCI following India’s success at the last ODI World Cup, which means the WPL will only continue to grow. Bell is a star for Royal Challengers Bangalore and is likely to become the cornerstone overseas player for the franchise. Bangalore is the ‘Silicon Valley of India’, and we are starting to see the major rise of an Indian middle class with spare cash to spend. I will leave you to put two and two together regarding the variety of potential partnership opportunities.
On a side note, I would encourage you to go and do some research into the latest valuations of IPL franchises and why they have attracted interest from both private equity firms and owners of other sports teams, such as the Glazer family.
Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese
Both are investors in the 3-on-3 league, Unrivalled, which was set up by their WNBA co-stars; Angel is also an equity holder. She is an investor in Topicals skincare as well as DC Power FC. Bueckers, meanwhile, co-developed the “Ragerz” snack line with Chris Paul for Good Eat’n, becoming the first WNBA player with a salty-snack equity deal. Just to outdo herself, she was also the Creative Director for her campaign with DoorDash—in charge of the commercial, the merch, and the curated fan experience.
It is narrative control, however, which stands out for these two women. Both are fluent in culture. Whether it’s the captions they use on Instagram—which could easily have come straight out of a group chat—or the “fits” chosen for the pre-game tunnel walk, they simply don’t miss. Reese has embraced her role as the WNBA’s antagonist to Caitlin Clark. She knows who she is, and whether you are a fan or not, what you get is 100% real; her podcast could not be named more appropriately: Unapologetically Angel.
In the summer of 2025, Lioness Ella Toone and her commercial agent, James Marshall, launched Amicizia studios, whose mission is to grow off-field opportunities for female athletes. Ella now has a podcast, much like Angel, in which she and her friends "spill the tea"
Athletes have realised the value of turning themselves into content studios. Once again, cricket has not changed with the times; apart from Kevin Pietersen and his YouTube channel, The Switch. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise; he was always ahead of the curve.
At the end of 2025, Reese and Bueckers broke the internet by putting their on-court rivalry aside for a joint Reese’s x Oreo campaign. They realised that their combined audience was more valuable than their divided ones. Bell should be looking for campaigns with her RCB teammates, specifically Smriti Mandhana. A joint UK/India campaign for a global tech giant like Samsung, or a luxury jeweller like Boodles, would leverage Bell’s Western “cool” alongside Mandhana’s Indian “royalty.”
If she wants to go down the “founder athlete” or equity route, then leveraging RCB’s connection with Bangalore’s Silicon Valley would be a perfect start.
Ilona Maher
It’s fair to say that Ilona Maher absolutely nailed the algorithm; throughout the Paris 2024 Olympics, she gained over two million new followers across Instagram and TikTok. In 2025, she was part of a game-changing collaboration with Barbie, in which they released a new muscular doll. This partnership was a "full circle" moment; she used her platform during the Games to promote positive body image and showcase the reality that the bodies of international female athletes range enormously from sport to sport (check out this response to a troll).
She also has partnerships with Maybelline for her war paint, her iconic lipstick and Coppertone for long-lasting suncream. Taking this a step further, she is the co-founder of Medalist,a skincare brand specifically for active women.
Rugby, in terms of its UK following, is closer to cricket than to the other sports mentioned in this article. The type of brands that Ilona Maher partners with are right up Bell’s street. The lack of partnerships for her within the beauty or active beauty space is truly baffling.
It might be too late for the Bell brand to capitalise on having a home World Cup if collaborations are not already in the works. However, with LA 2028 on the horizon, she would be silly not to have a plan in place, as Maher and Red Rose Ellie Kildunne did to capitalise on all eyes being on the Olympics.
In summary what are female atheltes doing to gain more off field opportunities:
Leveraging their unique audience.
Skin in the game.
Leaning into Themselves. Athletes as content studio’s.
Having a long term strategy, so they don’t miss out when the spotlight is on thier sport.
I wanted to finish with a lyric from Jay-Z “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business man.”