Fresh off of her World Cup victory with the United States Women’s Soccer Team, Megan Rapinoe is advising her twin sister Rachael as the latter readies the CBD brand Mendi for launch.
Mendi is expected to debut next month and will offer consumers CBD infused gel capsules, gummies, and salve sticks. Rachael Rapinoe, Kendra Freeman, Brett Schwager, and Britt Price founded Mendi with the specific goal of providing athletes products engineered for training and recovery.
The Portland-based company already seems to be garnering considerable attention. The Rapinoe sisters anticipate selling out of their initial inventory within one month from launch.
Megan, who has become an icon for the LGBTQ community and has famously feuded with President Trump, may be known worldwide for her recent contributions to the U.S. Women’s World Cup victory, but Rachael has experienced quite a bit of success in soccer as well. The twins were both star athletes while playing for the University of Portland. Rachael also had a professional stint with the Icelandic professional women’s team, Stjarnan Women. During her career, Rachael has turned to CBD to deal with the grueling demands of college and professional athletics.
“I take 25 milligrams of CBD probably two or three times a day, every day. I have for the past three years,” Rachael told Willamette Week. “It’s always in my system.”
In 2006, at the age of 21, Rachael suffered a serious knee injury and was prescribed opioid-based treatments. CBD for recovery was not on the radar for most athletes, including Rachael.
“Cannabis was so stigmatized in sports—and has been for a really long time. Obviously, now, some of these bans are lifting, but I didn’t really come to learn much about cannabis and how it pertains to performance and recovery until just five years ago, when I started seeing other athletes using it and talking about it for pain management, inflammation, and insomnia,” Rachael said.
The Rapinoe sisters are expecting to get their products into major retailers.
“Anywhere selling aspirin and Band-Aids—we want to be on those shelves. Because of my network and relationships with athletes, my sister being one of them, we’re going to do a soft launch [online] when we open our CBD store, and then we’ll do our big PR marketing push in September or October using athlete influencers,” Rachael said.
According to Rachael, Megan also uses CBD and the cannabinoid is commonplace among veteran soccer players. Rachael and Megan Rapinoe already bring a lot of star power to Mendi, but the sisters may try to bring other athletes on board.
“We’ve also been talking to a lot of other athletes in other spaces; I can’t name names yet.”
The Rapinoe sisters are certainly not the first athletes to join the CBD industry, but according to Rachael, their products will be the best.
“Yeah, there are some copycats out there,” Rachael explained. “But no one holds a candle to the brand that we’re building. It’s very easy to throw up a website and to sell product and to shove it into the marketplace. Anyone can do that—we could have done that three months ago. What we’re doing here is building a brand.”
