Brendan Schaub and Frankie Edgar

Jesse Katz first realized that his Roots of Fight brand was making headway into the MMA market was when he looked over his online orders and saw UFC commentator Joe Rogan’s name.

At the time, Roots of Fight had no contact with Rogan or anyone at the UFC. It was before its shirts could regularly be seen on stage at UFC weigh-ins, where other brands were paying thousands of dollars to fighters just to get their stuff seen.

“Joe Rogan, (UFC President) Dana White, those guys all bought their own shirts,” Katz, the Roots of Fight President, told MMAjunkie. “In the short time that we’ve been alive in this world, we’ve never sponsored any fighters, never sponsored any athletes, never really advertised or really officially marketed except for our own internal stuff and grassroots media stuff.”

It’s an especially important distinction these days, with the MMA-related sponsor and apparel market preparing for a radical shift. Now that the UFC has signed an exclusive deal with Reebok, the clothing brands that have populated this landscape face a brand new problem.

Once fighters are no longer able to sport their gear on fight night, at weigh-ins or at any of the UFC’s official fight week festivities, how will they manage to get seen by the fans who might actually buy their stuff? Once no amount of money can get your shirt on a UFC broadcast, how do you market to all the people watching those shows?

Dana White

Here’s where Roots of Fight, which launched officially in January 2012, might be in a unique position to prosper. Instead of playing the sponsor game to begin with, Katz said, his company focused on design and unique storytelling. The goal was to create the kind of clothing that fighters and fans alike would want to wear, regardless of whether anyone was being paid to do it.

That approach seems to be paying dividends now, and not just because of the changing landscape for apparel brands. Roots of Fight recently collaborated with Under Armour for a new collection centered around Bruce Lee, as well as pro boxers from Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali to Lennox Lewis and Jack Johnson. That comes in addition to the collections the company has already done on MMA mainstays such as the Gracie family and UFC middleweight Lyoto Machida.

Although it might seem counterintuitive, Katz said the key to making the brand stand out in the fight fan market is by resisting the urge to put the company’s name front and center, like many in the space do.

“What we’ve learned through our years in the business is, fans have these love affairs with their teams, their athletes, their sport, the icons that they connect with, and it becomes part of their being,” Katz said. “So for us, when we make a Muhammad Ali shirt, we want it to be literally just a Muhammad Ali shirt. We’re just telling that story, and it’s an authentic story. You want the art to be pretty and the people to like it, but we want people to understand the story and the history and own a piece of that history that they connect with, so there’s something meaningful behind it. We’re pretty much a different beast in this world because we don’t put our brand name on anything. Our brand name is on the inside neck label.”

Maybe it’s not the best approach when your goal is to be seen in the cage on fight night, with the company name blazing across some fighter’s chest as he makes his way to the cage or struggles to pull the shirt onto his sweaty torso before Bruce Buffer can announce the winner. But with that option now scheduled for extinction, thanks to the Reebok deal, Roots of Fight’s strategy suddenly looks a lot better.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.