With new Sioux Falls headquarters, Gameday Social prepares for next stage of growth

The winds of her business were changing, and Jael Thorpe could feel it.

Within her Sioux Falls boutique, one line consistently outperformed everything else sold.

At the same time, mid-pandemic, overall sales were struggling.

“So I had to make the difficult to decision to close, which at the time was hard,” said Thorpe, founder of J.Ella Boutique.

“It was a failure. Seven years of pouring into this little store.”

The keyword, though, was “little.”

The boutique had two locations — one in Brookings, which sold, and the other at The Bridges at 57th, which closed in early 2021.

Had she hung in until a post-pandemic world, “it might have just kept ticking along because it was good enough and it was what I knew,” she said.

Instead, she shifted. Invested in the concept that seemed most promising. And went from a small local boutique owner to the CEO of a brand that is scaling nationwide.

“Looking back, I’m so thankful,” said Thorpe, now the founder and CEO of Gameday Social Apparel Co. “I don’t know if I would have ever stepped into it.”

“It” was a growing instinct — proven by early sales figures — that the apparel industry had ignored a key demographic: the female sports fan who wanted fashionable, on-trend attire.

“My humble background in retail positioned me well for this because I understand female consumers and trend forecasting, whereas I think for a lot of our big competitors, it just felt too risky,” Thorpe said. “Fashion is risky. It’s easier to continue producing mass amounts of safe, more generic products, where we’re small enough to be nimble and chase trends.”

The bets, though, appear to be paying off.

This week, Gameday Social officially opens its new Sioux Falls headquarters, converting a former call center at 2500 E. 52nd St. N. into a 42,000-square-foot vertically integrated facility with an office, in-house production, distribution and expanded warehouse space in a single location.

“The goal was to create a beautiful, inspiring space for our highly creative team internally but then also create a space that we can bring our partners from across the world and showcase the brand as well as showcase Sioux Falls,” Thorpe said.

“I always say I’m proud of being able to create a true fashion innovation from an unexpected place.”

Roots of success

The first production runs are underway at the new Gameday Social building in preparation for a warehouse sale Friday and Saturday.

A stack of sweatshirts tells the backstory:

“Bloom where you’re planted,” the front design reads.

For Thorpe, that has been the narrative.

Her business acumen began building while she was still a freshman at South Dakota State University. A native of Gary, southeast of Watertown on the Minnesota border, she began a photography business in 2006, then added a small boutique area to it in 2010. In 2011, the store opened its first location in Brookings, which now is under new ownership.

Along the way, she served on the Brookings City Council and as deputy mayor.

The Sioux Falls expansion for J.Ella Boutique came in 2015.

In retrospect, “that was the launching pad” for Game Day Social, Thorpe said. “That was the test site for the brand. So looking back, it is wild to me sometimes. Even what this company looked like five years ago was two people.”

That was Thorpe and her longtime store manager, who stuck with her after the boutique closed to build Game Day Social.

Today, there are about 40 employees as the business continues to hire for sales, warehousing and production.

An international team also supports various functions, including manufacturing in China, Vietnam, Pakistan and India. Thorpe has worked with a small, family-owned factory in China from the start but broadened her business amid concerns around global trade.

“Elevated textile manufacturing is very heavy based in China, and we have struggled to get the quality and turnaround times we need in other countries,” she said. “I’m all for more U.S. manufacturing, but unfortunately over the last 20 years, the United States has pretty much given up those facilities, that workforce.”

The business primarily operates as a wholesaler, supplying every major retailer that carries specialty licensed products — including Dick’s Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Rally House, Dillard’s and Scheels.

“Honestly, it’s some of the best stuff we have in our women’s shop. The quality is great,” said Tyler Gerdes, assistant store leader at Scheels in Sioux Falls.

“I know my wife actually has a couple pieces, and those are her go-to pieces if we ever go to a game. It’s one of our top performers and will continue to be one of our top performers.”

Staying on-trend is key.

The go-to-market strategy for many major apparel brands is 18 months, Thorpe said. At Game Day Social, it’s less than six months.

“Admittedly, that gets tough as you scale, but I’m really committed to it,” she said. “That’s been our ‘secret sauce.’”

Her merchandising and creative team lives and breathes trends, she added.

“By nature, they spend their personal time on social media and fashion influence; they’re so immersed in trend it’s kind of second nature,” she said. “It’s natural. It’s the content they’re all consuming.”

Day to day, Thorpe is “still pretty involved in the product development just in terms of setting guard rails on who our target market is,” she said. “And that’s sometimes the challenge of trend forecasting is knowing when to move on something. Is the market ready for it? Sometimes, we’ve been a little early, and then a year later, people understood it.”

The inventory covers everyone from college students looking for cute tops to business casual wear for older women, Gerdes said.

“They are some very smart gals over there,” he said. “Really anything that is trendy, they do a great job jumping on that train, and we just kind of follow what they see.”

While there are some brands competing in the space, the big names also are taking notice, Thorpe added.

“It’s been very interesting to see how over the last even one to two years, many of these big companies we compete against are starting to emulate. … I think they’re recognizing the underserved female consumer is pretty powerful. It’s a big segment.”

Thorpe has become a leader in the area entrepreneur community as well, said Brienne Maner, president of Startup Sioux Falls, where Thorpe serves on the board of directors.

“Personally, I’ve been a huge fan of her brand and products for years, and I’ve seen firsthand the quality and care she puts into everything she creates,” Maner said.

“From our perspective, watching Gameday Social grow has been inspiring and has breathed new energy into our growing startup ecosystem. Jael is the definition of a powerhouse leader who is always willing to give back in the best ways.”

Gerdes agrees.

“She is a great human being. She’s one of the best,” he added. “The communication, the quality of their product and the timeliness of having product in the store is by far one of the best.”

Future focus

Every major collegiate brand is represented in Gameday Social apparel and accessories, and the business now is in a position to produce a full spring collegiate line.

The apparel has started to grow into more professional sports, including “a lot of NHL collaborating,” Thorpe said. “That’s been a really fun space to enter, very adjacent to what we do, and our location here in the north.”

In recent weeks, the first nonlicensed collection launched under the name “Girls Who Sports.”

The target customer is the “social golfer,” that girl or woman who isn’t necessarily looking for performance golf apparel but something more fashion-forward. It will be carried by retailers starting next spring.

“It’s the collection that carries you from the course to the clubhouse,” Thorpe said. “I think the women’s golf space has really grown. I see it in our own team how many women golf, and it’s brand-adjacent to what we already do — a very similar target market.”

While a direct-to-consumer strategy hasn’t been core to the business, “we are actively building out a social selling strategy,” she said. “We’ll be working with more creators and influencers and inviting in that, but I would say we’ve always viewed it as a support to the B2B side of the business.”

Over her career, Thorpe has shown an ability to start, scale and now sustain a business, Maner added.

“Jael has built a textbook ‘scale’ stage company as she’s optimized her systems, expanded her market and built a phenomenal team,” she said.

“But this new building marks her official transition into the ‘sustain’ phase. It’s no longer just about managing rapid growth — it’s about anchoring Gameday Social as a permanent, enduring fixture in our region’s business landscape.”

The goal isn’t necessarily to broaden the scope of the business, but “it is deepening the relationship with those strategic partners,” Thorpe said.

The grand opening for Gameday Social’s new headquarters is from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, June 26. There will be tours, food trucks and family games in addition to the warehouse sale.

“Everybody has been so excited. … It’s been really fun to see those reactions, but I’ve also had to pause and remember a lot of people here didn’t know how gritty it was in the early days, so I’ve tried to do a better job telling that story,” she said.

This spring, her family went to Europe for a two-week vacation — a symbol of how she had built a team to the extent that she felt comfortable leaving the business in other hands for that time.

“The wheels were not going to fall off because I have a capable team and we had reached that level,” she said. “I would say the last five years have stretched me far past what I believed my limits to be. I’ve read that entrepreneurship is like involuntary therapy. It forces you to acknowledge your blind spots, your weaknesses, and it forces you to give up your ego. There’s just no time for that.”

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