Taylor Townsend Is Serving Up Aces at the U.S. Open While Building a Brand With ‘Flavor and Sauce’
Most tennis players compete in major brands like Adidas, Nike, or New Balance. Townsend created her own.
Taylor Townsend. Illustration: Inc; Photo: TT
Days before Taylor Townsend took the court in Queens for her first match of the U.S. Open, the 30-year-old attracted a crowd of hundreds of tennis fans about a half an hour away in Brooklyn.
Last Saturday afternoon, a line of people snaked around the block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, all waiting for their chance to catch a glimpse of the professional tennis player and snag one of the pieces from her latest clothing drop. More than 600 people showed up to the pop-up shop, which Townsend described to her more than 500,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok as “an afternoon celebrating tennis, style, culture, and the launch of my newest merch.”
The space, dubbed TT’s House, was stocked
The space, dubbed TT’s House, was stocked with a DJ booth, tables of tooth gems, and racks of streetwear-inspired looks. The collection spanned hoodies, mesh shorts printed with flames, baseball caps stamped with two overlocking t’s, and cropped t-shirts lettered with phrases such as “Setting the court on fire,” “Let my racket talk,” and “Hot mom,” a nod to Townsend’s 5-year-old son AJ and her own place in tennis history, becoming the first mom to reach to reach the No. 1 doubles ranking, a feat she pulled off last summer.
One year after Townsend hosted her first pop-up shop in Times Square and started competing in clothing from her own eponymous label, TT By Taylor Townsend, the three-time Grand Slam champ has expanded her entrepreneurial vision, bringing her on- and off-the-court looks to an even larger audience through direct-to-consumer sales and her new digital media brand, Down the T.
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“This is something that I’ve kind of been pushed into,” says Towsend, whose contract with Nike ended in 2017. “It’s been over a decade since I’ve had a clothing sponsor, and it’s not because we haven’t reached out, not because I haven’t tried. Every time that we reached out, I was let down, or I was pushed to the side.”
That personal need has become a growing business
That personal need has become a growing business. For elite female athletes, this has become a common backstory as an increasing number of pros and Olympians have turned to entrepreneurship out of necessity. The frustration of being undeserved by incumbent brands turns into an opportunity and a white space to fill.
That was the case with Allyson Felix, who landed on Inc.’s Female Founders list in 2022. After blasting her former sponsor Nike for its maternity policies, the Olympic sprinter started her own female-centric running shoe brand, Saysh, and later launched Always Alpha, a management company focussed exclusively on repping female athletes. She’s not alone. Olympic skier Kiley McKinnon launched Halfdays, a ski brand that makes outdoor gear for women, after being forced to compete for Team USA in men’s ski gear. Olympians Sue Bird, Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, and Simone Manuel did not see enough coverage of women’s sports in mainstream media, so they teamed up to start Togethxr, a media and e-commerce company that puts a spotlight on female athletes and has turned its trademarked mantra “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” into a viral multi-million dollar merch line.
Source: www.inc.com
