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The Phoenix Mercury rebranded for the first time in team history, and the new look is part of a wider trend across the WNBA as teams modernize their logos for a growing league.
The new Mercury logo shows an “M” that’s a simplified version of the letter taken from the team’s old script wordmark. The bottom of the “M” is angled up at 19.97 degrees as a nod to the team’s 1997 founding as one of the league’s eight original franchises, and it’s set on a circle with a crescent shadow that represents the planet Mercury. The modernized logo was designed in-house.
The rebrand comes at an inflection point for the team, which lost star player Diana Taurasi to retirement in February, and lost the 2025 WNBA championship to the Las Vegas Aces in October. The Mercury are considered the WNBA’s best-run organization, according to an anonymous survey of WNBA players released by The Athletic in July, in part because of their facilities. Mercury President Vince Kozar tells Fast Company, “Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to be a fan.”
It also comes at an inflection point for the league. Game attendance is at an all-time high, and the WNBA is expanding. The Golden State Valkyries joined last season, with the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo set to debut next year, and future franchises planned for Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia, which would bring the league to 18 teams by 2030. In a more crowded league, teams are simplifying their branding to stand out.
Before the Mercury, the New York Liberty introduced a simplified version of the team’s Statue of Liberty logo in 2020 that’s just Lady Liberty’s hand holding a torch. And in 2021, the Seattle Storm dropped a logo showing a detailed Space Needle illustration in favor of a simpler form of the landmark.
“What we learned looking at the Storm and Liberty examples was you can do a really clean modernization—one that cleans up the ’90s busyness of the logo and streamlines your color scheme—without completely rebooting or reimagining your marks,” Kozar says.
The mark is the team’s primary logo, but it has other new marks too, including those that set the team name in a futuristic sans-serif font. There’s a global mark that wraps the Mercury logo in a roundel, a “Merc” logo that writes out the nickname over a map outline of the state of Arizona, and a “PHX” logo that Nike created in 2021.
Kozar says these additional marks, which will appear on uniforms, courts, and merchandise, “just give our brand so much more depth and diversity.”
