Faves is an athlete marketing platform that enables athletes to monetize their audiences through shoppable storefronts while helping direct-to-consumer brands build and measure partnerships with elite performers. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Faves co-founder and CEO Thomas Salas to learn more.
Thomas Salas’ Background
When asked about his background and the experiences that led him to establish Faves, Salas shared:
I’m Thomas, the Co-Founder and CEO of Faves. I’m a former collegiate track and cross-country athlete at the University of Portland, where I also studied engineering. While I was there, our team finished second and third in the NCAA, the highest finishes in our program’s history. We were a small, scrappy team with significantly less funding than most top-10 programs, which created this intense blue-collar culture where we had to outwork everyone to compete.
After college, I joined Kard Financial as one of its first growth hires, helping scale one of the largest brand marketplaces in fintech. We connected banks, brands, and consumers through embedded commerce, and I got to see firsthand what it takes for brands to invest millions of dollars in new marketing channels. I was with the company through its Series A, which was an incredible learning experience.
From there, I spent time experimenting in fintech with incentive marketplaces before ultimately starting Faves about a year and a half ago. The common thread through all of this has been building marketplaces that create real value for all sides, and now I’m applying everything I learned to help athletes and brands build better, more authentic partnerships.
How Faves Started
When discussing how the idea for Faves came together, Salas explained:
I’ve spent the majority of my professional career building and scaling massive marketplaces for brands. I’d seen what it took for brands to invest millions of dollars in data-driven distribution channels, what type of data they were looking for to invest real budgets, and what it took to actually build a successful marketplace.
At the same time, I was talking with a lot of my friends who were still running professionally. A lot of my old teammates compete on the Olympic and world stages, either in the marathon or on the track. We saw how influential they were, constantly being asked what products they were using or how to use different things. They’re really seen as experts and leaders in sport, so their voices are much more valuable. They have huge followings, but they typically don’t do a good job transitioning that platform into substantial earnings. Anyone who has been in the running scene knows how big that gap is.
It felt like a bit of a no-brainer for us. We saw how much brands were paying elsewhere for reach and trust, and how much consumer demand there was for this behind-the-scenes access. We wanted to bring a lot of that investment back into sports and into the athletes’ hands.
At the end of the day, we built this for the athletes because we wanted to help them chase their dreams. It’s really all about the athlete. We give them the tools to build a business from their platform while ensuring the brand gets the return it needs.
The Faves Launch Party
When asked about his favorite memory from working at Faves, Salas recalled:
There are a lot of amazing memories. We really operate like a professional sports team internally. Everything is pretty fast-paced, and we’re pushing pretty hard, so there are a lot of late nights and a lot of big swings from a business perspective.
Our launch party is a pretty rad memory that sticks out in my head. Our first athletes were mostly Colorado-based. Sam, who led much of our initial onboarding for our first athletes, is based in Boulder. So, we felt it was only right to throw our launch party there and bring together many of the people who were part of it from day one.
We brought the whole team out, rented this really cool yakitori venue, and had a DJ, food, and a community atmosphere with our earliest believers and some of the best athletes in the endurance world. It was cool to bring that culture together in one place. It was something special.
Faves’ Core Platform
When describing Faves’ core products and features, Salas detailed:
Faves puts the way athletes engage fans, monetize, and build partnerships in one place. Every Faves athlete curates a shoppable storefront of products they actually use and love, ready to be shared with their audience. The storefront generates revenue for athletes, enhanced insights, and new offers from brands they actually want to work with.
On the brand side, Faves is the premier athlete marketing arm for direct-to-consumer brands. We help brands leverage Olympic medalists, world champions, and elite performers to reach their target audiences at scale, measure performance, drive awareness, and grow sales through voices consumers actually trust.
Measuring Brand ROI
When asked how Faves measures return on investment for brands and what makes its data compelling enough to support larger marketing budgets, Salas explained:
For most brands today, it’s hard to go from the first touchpoint to having long-term athlete partnerships. You need to be data-driven in your decisions, but a lot of brands today feel like they’re just guessing.
That’s the magic of Faves and our data. What Faves does that is so special is connect athletes’ top-of-funnel, cross-platform social data with bottom-of-funnel shopper and transaction data. Athletes on Faves build insights that brands simply can’t get anywhere else.
We use that data to drive better recommendations for brands, so they can build the right cohorts of athletes to deliver the results they’re looking for. We’re doing this at scale with the most influential voices in sports.
Scaling Athlete Participation
When discussing Faves’ strategy for expanding athlete participation across additional sports and global markets, Salas noted:
We started in endurance, and those are our roots. We’re never going to leave that world. We want to be a bigger part of that culture in 2026.
We’re entering a really unique place in time where, across the board, athletes are deciding to build a “post-W-2” career, stay in sports longer, and build a real platform for themselves through social media and their own brands. For those people, we want to be the platform that makes that pursuit and career path possible.
Women’s sports demand real attention today, and we’ve already seen that we’re making a really big impact. About 70% of our athletes on the platform today are women, and they’re making tens of thousands of dollars a month on Faves. I think that’s really special. So, we want to continue supporting more women in their athlete-creator journeys.
Similarly, for many Olympic-sport athletes, the majority of their reach and value really accrues on their social platforms. So, how do we continue to support and elevate them? I’d say those are two categories where we’re really doubling down in 2026.
Balancing Athlete Earnings And Monetization
When asked how Faves balances athlete earnings with its own platform monetization, Salas clarified:
Faves is free for athletes. It’s mission-critical that we increase access to opportunity, so we’ll never charge them. This priority has allowed us to offer substantial earnings to athletes to date.
On the flip side, we’ve brought together the best athletes in the world with a platform that brands want to use at scale. That’s where we make money. Brands use our platform to scale partnerships in an automated way that yields stronger returns with minimal lift and headcount.
To date, all earnings have gone to athletes. As we launch the formal brand product in the coming months, we’ll start seeing platform monetization.
Faves’ Differentiators
When asked what differentiates Faves from its competition, Salas emphasized:
Faves is the only platform that connects actionable first-party data, targeted brand deals, and audience distribution in one place for both athletes and brands. Most platforms today either handle data, run a marketplace, or offer e-commerce, but they lack the network effect and streamlined funnel that effectively connects the athlete, brand, and fan.
We’re also purpose-built for athletes. Traditional influencer platforms don’t work well for them because even the biggest athletes can’t out-post lifestyle influencers, so they get passed over even when they’re the best fit. We focus on serving athletes properly while making sure brands get maximum value from the system.
Future Goals
When discussing Faves’ future goals, Salas concluded:
Long-term, we envision a world where every direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brand sponsors athletes at scale. Athletes are an extremely powerful class of influencer with amazing audience reach, and we want to make it effective for brands to invest in them across the board.
We’re also entering a post-W-2 economy where more people are becoming creators and traditional career paths don’t always make sense. For athletes who have spent their whole lives in sport and built a platform around it, we want to help them stay in sport longer and turn that platform into a profitable business.
That’s the world we see: one where it really pays to be an athlete, and it pays to work with them.
