The New Athlete Fashion Marketing Playbook: Personal Creative Directors
Plus, SportsVerse hit 5K!
Hi everyone, and welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can't find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture.
The big breaking industry-shattering news heading into today’s newsletter is that SportsVerse passed 5,000 subscribers sometime over the weekend. I randomly started this newsletter in January to house all my pearls of wisdom after leaving The Business of Fashion. I wrote down in my journal (proof) that I’d like to reach 5K subs by the end of 2025, not imagining this would be remotely attainable. For the first time ever (that I’ll publicly admit to), I was wrong.
Since January, SportsVerse has become an exercise of consistency and pure enjoyment, writing two newsletters (almost) every single week, including the week I moved countries. I’ve interviewed everyone from sportswear giant CEOs to WNBA MVPs to Olympic gold medalists to designers to interns to students, and I’ve loved it all. It’s been fun doing it in tandem with the whole gang over at OffBall, too.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
Over the weekend, American tennis player Taylor Townsend (a doubles specialist currently ranked world no.2) announced the hiring of her very own creative director.
“Every match is an opportunity to make a statement, and together, each look will be a reflection of my approach to this game — with confidence and power,” said Townsend on Instagram. Her new creative director is Domo Wells, who has made a name for herself in sports in recent years through doing the same role for the NWSL’s Washington Spirit.
I’ve been writing for years about the value creative directors bring to sports teams and leagues. But this news is significant because it’s the first time in professional sports that I’ve seen an athlete publicly hire a creative director on an individual level.
Now, Townsend and Wells will work together consistently to bring a cohesive strategy to the former’s match outfits and red carpet moments. It’s a smart branding play which reflects the shifting fashion marketing playbook for modern athletes.
It’s now the norm for most high profile and even up-and-coming athletes to have their own stylists, who help source looks for tunnel walks, editorial shoots and red carpet events like awards ceremonies. People like Courtney Mays and Brittney Hampton have long played the role of creative director for their clients, who range from Chris Paul to Paige Bueckers. However, they have only been these athletes’ stylists by name, rather than official creative directors.
It may seem like a small distinction, but Townsend’s hiring of Wells as a full-on creative director serves to elevate the role into a function that seems more strategic and curatorial than a regular ad hoc styling gig. As I wrote back in February (and countless times before that, this blueprint is the future for forward thinking athletes, and I think a decision like this is set to open the floodgates.
Should Athletes Hire Creative Directors?
Back in February, this was the question I posed in a SportsVerse newsletter, where I laid out why I thought it was only a matter of time before such a development happened. Here’s what I had to say:
Over the past couple of years, creative directors have become an increasingly common fixture in the world of sports. At The Business of Fashion, I broke news of the first Premier League team to hire someone for such a role, and also asked the question, “Do Sports Leagues Need Creative Directors?” (the answer is yes) in a story that got a lot of traction after LA-based designer Guillermo Andrade was hired for Major League Soccer’s inaugural Leagues Cup.
It’s a role that has been around for a while in sporadic examples but is steadily becoming a go-to tool for sports teams and organisations to differentiate their look and feel, seek out fashion industry collaborations, and eliminate their corporate approach to communications and their visual identity.
Last year alone, the Washington Spirit hired Wells as creative director, while FC Como Women, newly acquired by Mercury/13, hired Ines Rovira in a similar role as part of a wider growth strategy to align with the fashion industry. Meanwhile, sports creative director musical chairs began after the MLS hired Roman King as its first full-time creative director off the back of the results he yielded for the WNBA in that same function.
But strangely, an interesting frontier in sports that has yet to be broken is an athlete hiring a full-time creative director. Today’s newsletter unpacks the benefits such an appointment could unlock for innovative athletes willing to add to their already large support networks.
The Age of Athlete Empowerment
These days, athletes are multi-million (sometimes billion) dollar brands and media businesses in their own right. It’s not to say that they weren’t before, but the freedom athletes now have to engage with and build their own fanbases directly via social media has dramatically shifted the balance of power between them and the businesses they work with.
For example, French World Cup winner Kylian Mbappé’s 123 million Instagram following dwarfs that of Dior, the luxury label he has been an ambassador for since 2021. His teammate Jude Bellingham’s 40 million-strong following will soon surpass that of Louis Vuitton, which signed him as an ambassador last year. Meanwhile, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s Instagram following is four times the size of Canada Goose’s, which he has repped and co-created products with since 2024. Lululemon has 35 million followers fewer than its latest ambassador, Lewis Hamilton. Angel Reese has a bigger online following than Reebok, which made her the face of its revamped basketball category in 2023.
Such deals have become an aspiration for many up-and-coming athletes who understand the unique opportunity that sports stardom brings to enter other cultural realms and broaden their fanbase and revenue streams beyond their day jobs. The one thing the above athletes all have in common is a masterful approach to sculpting their public personas beyond the sports they play, which has led to interest from a whole host of major brand names.
Increasingly, athletes are turning to stylists at the outset of their careers as they look to build their personal brand and make similar connections in the creative industries. The best stylists also often help their clients navigate the intimidating network of editors, PR agencies and designers who hold the keys to the fashion industry, which hasn’t always been as accepting of the presence of athletes as it is today.
A Strategic Creative Advisor
It makes me wonder, given how much importance is now placed on an athlete’s personal brand, why no one has gone one step further and hired a business-minded creative like a stylist, designer, or photographer as a full-time creative director. The role would allow athletes to create a 360° strategy to curate their personal style, visual branding, and communications and curate collaborations and partnerships across fashion and other creative industries that fit their personality and values.
Plus, the announcement alone that a top athlete was working with a creative director would probably be worth its weight in media exposure, let alone the long-term benefits if executed correctly with the right partner.
Traditionally, important decisions relating to an athlete’s personal image are handled by an army of different stakeholders—often with their own personal agendas—from managers to publicists to personal shoppers to stylists to agents to their girlfriends or boyfriends.
It can lead to muddled output, with certain deals or announcements not conducive to the image or reputation an athlete wants to achieve long term. For example, many athletes don’t realize that signing deals with fast fashion brands—while lucrative and exciting early on in their career—counts negatively down the line if they want to one day work with top luxury fashion houses or even attend their shows.
Hiring a singular creative director who could then build out their own team of experts attuned to the ambitions of the athlete, be they in fashion, music, art, or another creative discipline, could prove a more effective strategy. It may also be particularly useful for top athletes in lesser-known sports to bolster their appeal in the eyes of brands that naturally gravitate to big-name stars in basketball, soccer, and tennis.
Before you go, be sure to check out:
My interview on Muse54, where I sat down to talk about my career journey to date, from growing up loving sports to working in law to doing the many things that I do now. Muse54 is a platform founded by the amazing Cheriece Hylton, whose own career journey is well worth getting to know. You can follow Muse54 on IG here.
For my UK audience, I was a guest on TalkSport last week, where I sat down with co-hosts and Flex and former Premier League and England striker Darren Bent, for a discussion on How Black Culture Shaped Modern Football. We spoke on everything from fashion to music to hairstyles and our childhood icons growing up as football lovers in the UK.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM
Great read! Also, have you noticed that most of the F1 drivers competing for this year’s World Championship are stepping out in notably more stylish looks than years gone by? In particular, if you look at NZ-born driver Liam Lawson in Austin, TX a couple of weeks ago, his get-up in the Paddock had overt Western/cowboy flare. The look felt… Prepared? Perhaps the F1 marketing teams have hired their own creative directors, too…
Congrats on 5k!!!! Cheers brother