"IN GATHER Round, we wear pink."

Just like that, with a simple sentence and a tap of the 'post' button on the club's social media platforms, Gold Coast set about a cultural phenomenon that shook up football's visual landscape and set the tone for the club's bold and modern future.

This week's set of Gather Round fixtures marks 12 months since Gold Coast stepped out in pink for the first time. The success of the concept, both from the club's ability to build a distinctive new identity, as well from a commercial perspective, has been a defining one in the Suns' emergence as a serious competitive force.

Pink had never been a permanent part of a club's colourway in Australian Rules football before. No team had been daring enough to try it. In reality, it hadn't really been on Gold Coast's radar when the club set off to conduct a full-scale logo and guernsey rebrand in the final months of 2024, either. But when the idea came about, the Suns' heavy hitters were immediately intrigued.

Gold Coast president Bob East and chief executive Mark Evans were the first to spot the endless possibilities, both from a commercial and a growth perspective, to playing in pink. But they also understood the conservatism that often plagues sporting organisations the world over, and knew the risks of trying something different within the AFL landscape.

So, Evans took the idea to the club's players and staff across both its men's and women's programs. The feedback he received was nothing short of overwhelmingly positive. However, he saved asking legendary coach Damien Hardwick for last. In doing so, he was perhaps expecting his first shred of doubt around the concept.

"The test of this sort of stuff is if the AFL fixtured us to wear this in a Grand Final, would we wear it?" Evans tells AFL.com.au. "So, I asked Damien. His answer was, 'I'll wear a hessian sack in a Grand Final if I have to'. That might be a pink hessian sack now, but he was all in."

Amid the club's rebrand was a sleek, modern logo. There was a deeper, more serious shade of red. There was a single-block colour scheme that mirrored successful sporting organisations abroad. Everything was geared towards reflecting Gold Coast becoming a more respected, and feared, football team. Pink tied into such a concept.

"When we decided that we were going to launch a new brand, we wanted to showcase an attitude for the club," Evans says. "We thought it was the right time to tell the competition that we're serious about what we're doing, we want to win, and we have to be prepared to be different and evolve if we want to attract new audiences. There was this whole approach of being fearless in what we do."

Pink stemmed from there. As Gold Coast engaged the AFL around its visual rebrand, things really started clicking into place. The League's art director, Marty Cook, had long been inspired by the pink of Major League Soccer side Inter Miami and the American club's willingness to interrupt global sport's 'sea of sameness'. His only hurdle was finding an Australian team willing to share his vision.

The Suns just made sense. It was a fresh club not mired in decades of history and therefore not bound to certain colours or patterns. It had a president and chief executive that wanted to be bold, distinct and fearless through the process of their rebrand. And there was, of course, the famous pink hue of the city's skyline at sunrise that connected the colour to the place.

Almost instantly, everyone at the club – from players, coaches and staff, to those at board and executive level – loved the idea. But for this to really work, the Suns needed to commit wholeheartedly to pink. It couldn't be a gimmick, nor could it be a one-off novelty. It had to be part of their identity. So, almost every department within the organisation went to work.

Gold Coast's head of brand, Dominique Burgess, set the club's focus towards Gather Round – itself a relatively new initiative in the AFL landscape – to launch the concept to the football public. Its merchandising team realised that the colour's unique place in fashion and culture leant itself to lifestyle gear, which became just as integral to the collection's release as the jumper itself.

The club's digital department, spearheaded by Tom Beverley and driven by James Southern, Jack Doormann and Somha Sleeth, hired out Coolangatta's famous Pink Hotel to set up a photoshoot with star players like Noah Anderson, Touk Miller and Lucy Single to really make the campaign pop. The pink collection, almost instantaneously, went viral. The reaction, likewise, was hugely upbeat.

"We got an incredible response to it," Evans says. "The range sold out multiple times. We'd reorder and it would sell out again. We found it really hard to predict the volumes that were required. We got to the end of the year and more than a third of our sales were in the pink range. More pink jumpers sold in 2025 than our entire number of jumpers in 2024. It's incredible.

"This is more than just, 'I barrack for the Suns so I'll buy something'. We hit something that is seriously attractive to a wide audience. Probably a football audience, but potentially to people that just like the lifestyle range. It's probably the only time the Suns have led the industry on an initiative like this."

The success is reflected in the numbers. Gold Coast sold nearly 9000 units of pink for the 2024-25 financial year, accounting for 36 per cent of the club's overall revenue. The total guernsey sales for the pink range alone showed a 132 percent increase on the entire 2024 range, which included home, away and clash jumpers combined.

The club's round 21 fixture against Richmond, marketed as the 'Pink Game', was the biggest retail day in Suns history. Where normally the club accounts for three to four dollars of merchandise sales per ticket holder for home fixtures, the number recorded on that Saturday evening more than doubled.

The widespread love affair with the pink jumper also saw Gold Coast's plans to wear it solely for Gather Round evolve. The Suns' men's side ultimately donned pink four times last year, including for their semi-final clash with the Lions, while the AFLW program wore it two more times.

And that's just the start. This year, the charcoal logo that adorned Gold Coast's maiden pink jumper will be replaced by a zinc edition that the Suns hope will be embraced even further. Already, that's proven to be the case. Since being launched on March 17, less than a month ago, the club estimates that sales on the latest pink lifestyle range are up around three times compared to last year.

This year's collection now includes t-shirts, hoodies, polos, shorts, caps, jackets and three-quarter zips, as well as the guernseys themselves. Such has been the club's willingness to get behind the range, Evans and his wife Lynne have even taken to modelling the gear for the club's online shop.

Plans are also in place for the colourway's influence in the club's brand to evolve even further in the future. Some of those will unfold in South Australia this week. In an effort to maximise the exclusivity of the latest drop, Gold Coast will sell 'soccer style' pink jerseys only at the club's Gather Round captain's run on Friday and during the Suns' clash against the Swans at Norwood Oval on Saturday.

It's all part of the club's plan to turn Adelaide pink once again, just like it did last year.

"We've always had an attitude of being here to grow the game," Evans says. "We're not backing away from that, it's an altruistic purpose and it's hardwired into us. But we also want to tell people that we intend to be more than just a nice place for southern clubs to play in the middle of winter.

"We want to make our mark on the competition. If you want to be respected for that, then you must have an attitude of wanting to win. Off the field, winning is about growth in this market for us. If you go with a growth mindset in this market, we can't just replicate what a club like Melbourne does with its history and tradition.

"We have to celebrate that we're not encumbered by some of those things and charge off into better spaces. This is a brand colour now. It's not a gimmick. It's a brand colour and it's a unique thing that we've created and we want to preserve that."