Basketball in the mid-2000s was a vibe. All over, kids and adults around the game had notoriously ill-fitting clothes. Someone on every playground could be seen mimicking Allen Iverson, dribbling with shorts down to their ankles.
As a teenager during that era, Hollie Mershon fell in love with basketball. The Malvern native was a star at Archbishop Carroll, where she led the women’s basketball team to a state title in 2009. (Later, Mershon and her teammates were inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame.) Like everyone around the sport, Mershon gravitated towards oversized clothing — though for her, the appeal had little to do with fashion.
“There’s a level of security and safety I feel when I wear something oversized and cozy, almost like a form of protection,” Mershon says. “It’s something that I’ve been doing my entire life.”
Mershon can recall sneaking into her father’s dresser as a kid to borrow his largest T-shirt to wear to bed. In third grade, she’d arrive at school in what came to be known as her “comfort jacket,” and refuse her teacher’s demands to take it off. Not until adulthood did Mershon realize that her attire played a role in the regulation of her mind.
“You can get both physical and emotional comfort from oversized clothing,” says Mershon. “I feel like I have permission to just relax.”
Nowadays, Mershon is trying to revive the big-fit fashion trend with this larger mission in mind. She’s the solo entrepreneur behind Weightless, a premium, Philly-based lifestyle brand that donates a portion of sales to the Quell Foundation, a national organization focused on reducing the stigma around mental health in some communities. Mershon also uses her online presence to advocate for mental health awareness, particularly within the athletic community.
Weightless came out of a difficult time in Mershon’s life, when she was battling the anxiety and uncertainty of retirement from basketball. After graduating from Drexel as one of the school’s all-time leading scorers, Mershon played six years of professional ball in Sweden, Lithuania, and Portugal. When she finally retired in 2019, she felt what hard-charging athletes often do at the end of their careers: a gaping emptiness in their life.
“I was an athlete for over 20 years,” she says. “I was grieving a version of myself that I was leaving behind.”
Weightless, which celebrated its one-year anniversary last week, sells hoodies, sweatpants, and rugby shirts which are made to feel a little like weighted blankets. All of the products are double-knit 100 percent cotton, making them soft and heavy — designed to feel “like a comfy hug,” says Mershon, who has self-funded the company so far. She wants the clothes to make the people wearing them feel a sense of lightness — or weightlessness.
Fans of the clothing include Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Zack Baun, who was pictured in one of Mershon’s green hoodies while arriving at the stadium for a game last season — and later exclaimed (in a voice note sent to Mershon): “This is by far the most comfortable hoodie I own.”
So, how exactly does a first-time entrepreneur go from zero to Eagles in one year?
The mental game
Mershon didn’t set out to start a clothing company. She set out to make herself a hoodie.
In 2019, while living in Sweden, she had just made the difficult decision to retire from basketball. Remarkably, following two ACL recoveries, Mershon had not only returned to the court, she won a championship while gutting it out through pain. Then she called it quits. Little did she know that the real uphill climb lay ahead.
Mershon lost her identity overnight. No training. No teammates. No physical competition to distract from everything else and structure her life. She began grappling with an uncomfortable question: Who am I now? It wasn’t long before Mershon fell into a prolonged struggle with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she couldn’t shake for the first time in her life.
“Nothing I did immediately after sports was fulfilling,” she says. “And I was not aware of what was happening to me until my mom pointed it out: I was grieving a version of myself at the time.”
Her initial attempt at reinventing herself did not go as planned. After leaving Sweden, Mershon moved back home and got a job with a local developer. But she quickly found herself rudderless at work. Once the pandemic hit, she spent plenty of time at home underneath a weighted blanket. She started wondering if there was a way to walk around feeling that way at all times.
“I started researching weighted hoodies just to buy one for myself,” she says. “I wasn’t at that point of thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to start a company.’” None of the weighted sweatshirts on the market felt quite right. Nothing felt like a cosy hug. That’s when Mershon wondered, for the first time, maybe I could make the ideal product myself?
This led Mershon to researching manufacturers, then fabrics, and then construction techniques. She knew she wanted a hoodie that felt heavier but she didn’t want to simply add weight to a normal piece of clothing. She eventually connected with a manufacturer in China through TikTok, and after three prototypes, she had something she loved. Around that same time, Mershon had started working with the Quell Foundation, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit focused on normalizing conversations about mental health in specific communities — such as first responders and athletes.
Naturally, Mershon decided to fold aspects of that mission into her own brand. “I set out to create a brand that offered a constant reminder of the light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “We’re all about the pursuit of feeling lighter, living lighter, moving lighter.” Every one of her designs features the company’s name (and ethos) on its front.
That’s a message everyone needs to hear, but especially elite athletes. Whether you look at studies or testimonials (like Eagles offensive lineman Lane Johnson’s column about mental health for the Citizen), they reveal a similar finding: Pro athletes suffer from a higher prevalence of mental disorders than the general population, due to a variety of factors, including identity struggles like the ones Mershon faced.
On social media, Mershon is building a community around sharing her wellness story. And she’s deadset on connecting with other athletes who’ve done the same.
Last fall, after hearing Zack Baun discuss his own mental lows on a podcast, Mershon reached out to the Eagles star’s agent. Soon enough, he was strolling up to the Linc in a Weightless hoodie — a major boon for a nascent, self-funded company. It paid off. Fox 29’s Good Day Philadelphia reached out to Mershon for a segment, leading to at least 100 sweatshirt sales. (According to Mershon, Weightless hit its first-year sales goal but she did not disclose those numbers.)
More than measuring success through units sold, Mershon strives for impact. This fall, Mershon is participating in a discussion series on 10 college campuses, including Drexel, which will accompany an upcoming documentary she helped produce about college athletes’ mental health.
While the hoodie can get people in the door, Mershon ultimately wants it to lead to a deeper conversation.
Building something lighter
For now, Mershon is taking a decidedly grassroots approach to growing her brand. She’s participated in a number of wellness pop-ups in Philly, including Philly Mag’s Be Well Philly Fest. Additionally, Mershon has begun working with women’s basketball players from Philadelphia’s Big 5, providing two athletes from each school — Drexel, Penn, St. Joseph’s, Villanova and Temple — with products to serve as brand ambassadors.
It’s the world Mershon knows best, and it’s a world in which the conversation around mental health has plenty of room to grow — as evidenced by the tragic deaths of Drexel basketball player Terrence Butler and Penn track athlete Madison Holleran, among others lost to suicide, in recent years.
Eventually, Mershon would like to develop partnerships with Philadelphia’s professional sports teams, including the forthcoming WNBA franchise. She also has her eye on athletes who’ve spoken openly about their own mental health journeys, such as Lane Johnson and Tyrese Maxey.
And who knows? Maybe a retail store down the road. “Opening the first Weightless store in Philadelphia, where the brand was born, would be incredibly surreal,” says Mershon. “I’d want it to be a physical extension of the community we’ve built online, where people can experience the brand — and hopefully leave feeling a little lighter.”
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