How Collide’s Marketing Mayhem Built a Sports Empire From Pickles, Bangers, and Cherry Bombs
The Portland-based creative agency has used knowledge of its city and partners to tell a different game day story and sell it to the world through Official League gear
Put a developmental or collegiate sports league in a city park for a summer on its own, and you might end up with a pleasant diversion for the neighborhood and some valuable experience for the players.
Put those teams in the hands of a marketing firm that knows exactly what its home city is about, and the world becomes your potential fanbase.
The collegiate wood-bat West Coast League’s Portland Pickles were founded in 2015 and purchased in 2017 by former Seattle Seahawks punter Jon Ryan and Alan Miller, founder of the Travel With Purpose media network, music magazine Filter and the Collide Agency.
When the Pickles first moved into Walker Stadium at Lents Park in Portland’s Lents neighborhood, capacity was roughly 1,500 seats. In 2022, after Miller and his team introduced mascot and social media darling Dillon T. Pickle, invited bands including Sleater-Kinney and Portugal the Man to the ballpark and filled the promotional calendar with events including Tattoo Tuesday, Exploding Whale Night and Karen Night, capacity expanded to more than 3,500.
“When we’re talking about the Pickles, it’s a whole experience,” said Monique Gilbert, Collide’s VP of accounts and special projects. “We’re trying to create a universe, so every detail is intentional and we do have to push ourselves to be creative every year.”
Now, after years of bringing Dillon and company down to South By Southwest, subjecting him to porch thefts and lewd online pics, propping up a merchandise store downtown, opening a short-lived Pickles Public House on Portland’s Mississippi Avenue, and playing exhibition games in Mexico, the Pickles have seen attendance ferment from 1,833 fans per game in 2022 to 3,969 for each home matchup during the 27-game 2026 season—helped by an increase to nearly 4,400 capacity.
That’s a lot more fans raising chairs over their heads for every run scored, but it’s also produced more than 107,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. That’s for a team with no direct connection to Major League Baseball, no national television contract, and no merchandise deal.
In fact, in 2022 Collide launched its own merchandise brand—Official League—to produce gear for the Pickles and some of its other holdings and to give that merch a bit more connection to modern fashion and culture. Today, Official League produces products for AEW, Coachella, the NBA, the NHL, minor league hockey, the AUSL, Minor League Baseball, the NWSL, the USL, the UFL, curling, pickleball, and multiple music partnerships—keeping that cultural thread intact.
We’re trying to create a universe, so every detail is intentional and we do have to push ourselves to be creative every year.
Monique Gilbert, VP of accounts and special projects, Collide Agency
In 2025, Collide announced its plans to add soccer to its sports portfolio with the debut of Portland Bangers FC in the United Soccer League (USL) USL 2 developmental league—complete with sausage-link mascot Saucy. A year later, Collide unveiled Portland Cherry Bombs FC, a women’s team competing in the USL W League developmental league. Their mascot—the fuse-stemmed, leather-clad Mary T. Cherry—has her own backstory about leaving the labels and constraints of the orchard behind for a loud, proud life in Portland.
“You know Portland, they can sniff out bullshit,” Gilbert said. “Our feeling is that Portland doesn’t want anything that’s glossy or sanitized: They want the real deal, they want something that reflects who they are.”
A pickle barrel of apparel
Much like the pickling process itself, Collide has put a considerable amount of effort into keeping the Portland Pickles and their surrounding culture fresh.
The team keeps picking at portions of Portland culture and finding niches of fandom waiting to be recognized. The last installment of the Twilight film series released 14 years ago, but fans still visit Portland filming sites like the Cullen house in the West Hills and local screenings among other Oregon Twilight settings still sell out—which made this year’s Pickles Twilight night and Team Edward/Team Jacob slushies and merch a monster draw.
On Simpsons Did It First Night, the Pickles teamed with Portland-based Simpsons animator Dave Warren to make cards based on team owner Ryan and Portugal the Man. Warren even came out to the park to meet fans and sell illustrations. Longstanding Portland drag club Darcelle’s shows up for Dillon’s Drag Race, Heated Riv-Dill-Ry night ended in a kiss between players, and no real birds were harmed when the team recreated Randy Johnson’s 2001 mid-pitch obliteration of a pigeon.
While the team’s Portland Pickles Public House closed last year, the merch store it opened in November 2021 in Downtown Portland—The Pickle Jar—remains a fixture and is still run by Brian Anderson, best known to Pickles fans as game day soundtrack provider DJ BA.
“We want to stay hyper local, we want to connect with the community, whether that’s the fans or our small business partners, which are a huge part of what makes the Pickles very Portland and successful,” Gilbert said. “When you look at our retail shop downtown, that’s just another touchpoint and it’s fun to go in there because you see people come into the shop before games and they want to know what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, Collide’s Official League merchandise brand succeeded in growing the agency’s reach globally while expanding its presence in Portland as well. Founded in response to a need for Pickles merchandise that could be customized to reflect the team’s personality and surroundings, Official League has since expanded licenses to the NWSL, MiLB, and minor league hockey’s American Hockey League to help them produce more localized merch of their own.
Also serving as Official League’s VP of music, Gilbert noted that its Local Legends program pairing bands with their hometown teams has provided the intersection of sports and culture that Collide has been building toward since its acquisition of the Pickles. In its first year, Local Legends paired Dinosaur Jr. with the Worcester WooSox and had frontman J. Mascis throw out the first pitch of a game.
Blending Los Angeles artist Cuco with the Ontario Tower Buzzers resulted in a meet-and-greet and DJ set at the team’s ballpark. From The Killers and the Las Vegas Aviators to Fall Out Boy and the Iowa Cubs, Local Legends has kept growing. By listening to the needs of both the music and sports communities they work with and recognizing the “natural geekdom between baseball and music,” Collide has been able to use the relationships it’s built in both worlds to offer a unique mix of products that was unavailable before Official League’s existence.
Official League’s success allowed it to establish its brand headquarters and warehouse on Portland’s Southeast 50th Avenue and launch its first dedicated store at that location—with plans for an event space in the same location. With both Collide and Official League expanding into sports beyond baseball, Gilbert sees even greater opportunity to meld its overlapping cultural interests.
“I don’t want to say marketing because that sounds like such a technical term, but I would almost say it’s like our fandom and our passion,” Gilbert said. “It’s another avenue for creative expression, it’s another avenue for connection, it’s another avenue for community building, and it’s been a lot of fun.”
Finding a new pitch
In 2025, Collide announced its intention to bring a USL League Two developmental men’s team to Portland and found itself in a different sort of pickle. The agency had already developed a reputation in local sports during its irreverent-but-successful run with the Pickles that included a West Coast League championship in 2024.
But soccer’s a bit of a different story in Portland: The Timbers have a history that began in the North American Soccer League in 1975 and includes an MLS title. The Thorns have three NWSL championships to their credit and have brought a steady stream of U.S. women’s national team players and other global talent through Providence Park.
Even the University of Portland has two women’s titles to its credit and has turned out stars including Christine Sinclair, Kasey Keller, Megan Rapinoe, and Steve Cherundolo. The name Clive Charles is uttered throughout the city’s soccer culture with unmatched reverence.
So how do you balance the two? On the soccer side, Collide respected the ties to the city’s existing soccer lineage and brought in head coach Jorge Villafaña and assistant Diego Valeri—both members of the Timbers’ 2015 MLS Cup squad. During the Bangers’ first two seasons in Portland, they’ve already brought out a fan base accustomed to the more intense, shorter, fast-paced environment of soccer—and Collide’s team has adapted from the Pickles’ laid-back baseball pace.
“Soccer is a very serious thing in Portland, and we have the utmost respect and reverence for soccer culture and the importance of soccer to Portland, so we take the game seriously, we take the community seriously, but we don’t necessarily take ourselves that seriously,” Gilbert said. “We bring in people who are experts in the space to create the team, because we want to be creative, but we also want to be credible.”
Yet Collide has found the areas of soccer culture where it’s easier for an agency to make a contribution, bringing in local artists to make each match’s promotional items and giving Official League some home-grown soccer merch. It cheekily named the team the Portland Bangers—claiming a basis in English sausage and hard-kicked goals—and designed a link-laden mascot named Saucy T. Sausage who, in his waning days as Late Show host, Stephen Colbert described as “wearing his own children as hair” and “a porno version of the Grinch.”
Soccer is a very serious thing in Portland, and we have the utmost respect and reverence for soccer culture and the importance of soccer to Portland, so we take the game seriously, we take the community seriously, but we don’t necessarily take ourselves that seriously.
Monique Gilbert, VP of accounts and special projects, Collide Agency
However, this year, as Portland had the WNBA’s Portland Fire and the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) Portland Cascade join the Thorns among its women’s pro sports franchises, Collide jumped into women’s sports with a bang by launching the USL W League Cherry Bombs. Taking their name from The Runaways’ 1976 song and offering fans merch in patterns named for women’s rock and punk icons, the Cherry Bombs pulled players from 150 tryouts and put together a promotional calendar reflecting the communities it wanted to reach.
On game day, the team packs in The Portland Opera, live bands, tattoo artists, and local food and beverage vendors. On social media, it touts Bomb Ass Bands all season, including Altar Girl, Trans Panic, and J. Graves. And from the very beginning, it gave Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette (PPCW) the logo space on the front of its jerseys and 10% of the money from their sales.
At the end of the season, the Cherry Bombs and Official League teamed with Sleater-Kinney on a ‘94 Kit whose presale proceeds benefitted PPCW. If there was any doubt as to how the jerseys and their message would be received four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the federally protected right to abortion services, Gilbert said they were erased during the Cherry Bombs’ launch party at Portland’s since-closed Lloyd Center mall, where bands played and Cherry Bombs merchandise almost immediately ran out of stock.
While its orchard-runaway mascot Mary T. Cherry and its team of would-be pros have their own stories to tell, Collide sees the full story of the Cherry Bombs as the transition from marketing to community. Gilbert relayed the story of a friend who went to an Angel City F.C. NWSL match in Los Angeles, saw someone standing in line wearing a Cherry Bombs jersey, and immediately took a photo. With that image, Gilbert saw how the Cherry Bombs were resonating in a world beyond Portland.
“I think it’s opening up a whole different avenue for values that have not necessarily been represented in sports before,” Gilbert said. “There are people in women’s sports, there are people in music, there are fans, there is a huge community in Portland and beyond that share these values and want to find a way to be a part of it and to contribute, and hopefully we’re able to offer some small way to be a part of that.”
