Happy Labor Day, and welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story! For years, professional tennis player Taylor Townsend kept hearing the same answer from apparel sponsors: no thanks.

Her Nike deal ended in 2017, and despite being one of the world’s top doubles players, she struggled to land another clothing sponsor. Instead of waiting for a brand to believe in her, she started her own.

This week, while competing at the U.S. Open, Townsend is also growing TT By Taylor Townsend, her fashion label, and launching Down the T, a digital media brand focused on her life and interests beyond tennis. A recent Brooklyn pop-up for her latest collection drew more than 600 fans, underscoring that her appeal extends well beyond the baseline.

Townsend saw a gap between how women’s sports are marketed and how athletes actually want to express themselves, Inc. staff reporter Ali Donaldson writes. Rather than waiting for incumbent brands to change, she created a platform that reflects her own style, personality, and audience. As she put it, she’s bringing “flavor and sauce” to tennis and building a business around it.

In this story, you’ll discover:

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Most tennis players compete in major brands like Adidas, Nike, or New Balance. Townsend created her own.

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER

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-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 on 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 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 interlocking 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 as 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. 

“This is something that I’ve kind of been pushed into,” says Townsend, 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. 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 underserved 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 focused 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 multimillion-dollar merch line.

For Townsend, who is currently ranked the world’s second-best doubles player, the timing of this expansion couldn’t be better. The launch of the new collection and Townsend’s digital media brand comes during the two-week window when tennis peaks in American popular culture and when she tends to shine the brightest on the court. The leftie, who is outranked in doubles only by her partner, Katernia Siniakova, has enjoyed her best Slam singles results in New York, reaching the fourth round of the U.S. Open in 2019 and 2025. 

This year, after a stellar doubles season with Siniakova, winning titles at the French Open, Madrid Open, Miami Open, and Indian Wells (tennis’s largest stage outside of the Grand Slams), Townsend has already booked her singles spot in the third round, and she did so in commanding fashion. After beating French Open finalist Maja Chwalińska in the first round and dispensing with her opponent, Taylah Preston, in 48 minutes in the second, Townsend saluted the crowd and told ESPN the thing she enjoyed the most about her performance was her ‘fit, which was designed by Anthony Lattimore with creative direction from celebrity stylist J. Bolin.

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