ELEVEN by VENUS WILLIAMS
Turning a Founder-Led Brand Into a High-Performance Growth Platform
As President & Partner of SWAT, I partnered closely with Venus Williams and the ELEVEN leadership team to help strengthen the brand, direct-to-consumer platform, content systems, and growth strategy as the business expanded beyond tennis into a broader performance lifestyle company.
PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE
Before we met, Venus had already made the uncommon decision to forgo major endorsement deals and build her own performance brand from the ground up.
She wore ELEVEN during competition at the highest levels of global tennis, which meant the product could never simply look good. It had to perform under real pressure.
What struck me immediately was how seriously Venus approached the business itself. She was not licensing her name. She was building a company with long-term intention, discipline, and focus.
From Brand to Business
When I joined the business through SWAT, ELEVEN already had strong product and a clear founder identity. What it needed was a more integrated growth system capable of scaling the business without compromising the quality and credibility that made the brand work in the first place.
Working closely with Venus, her COO, and a lean internal team, I led a transformation across brand strategy, DTC, content systems, retail expansion, and creative direction.
We introduced the platform “Walk Tall. Be Proud.”, rebuilt the Shopify experience around editorial storytelling and product flow, and developed a more operationally disciplined content engine designed to maximize every creative asset across e-commerce, social, retail, and investor communications simultaneously.
Nothing was created for a single purpose. Every asset was designed to work across the entire ecosystem.
We also elevated the creative expression of the brand itself across digital, retail, and wholesale channels.
I pushed for a more editorial and dimensional approach to the e-commerce experience, incorporating both still photography and motion content directly into product storytelling to better capture the movement, energy, and performance qualities of the apparel itself.
That shift immediately elevated the digital experience while simultaneously creating a much more versatile content library that could extend across social, retail partnerships, lookbooks, catalogs, pop-ups, investor materials, and broader brand communications.
CONNECTING VISIBILITY TO COMMERCE
One of the most effective opportunities centered around connecting Venus’s on-court visibility directly to commerce.
I developed and launched “Want Her Look?”, a simple but highly effective system using email and social to immediately direct fans toward the exact outfits Venus debuted during tournament play.
The first collection sold out within five hours, creating a direct bridge between live visibility, cultural momentum, and revenue performance.
Within six months, revenue increased 65%, return customer rate doubled, and conversion nearly quadrupled.
More importantly, ELEVEN evolved into a platform capable of supporting Venus not only as an athlete, but as a founder and long-term business builder.
Eleven by Venus launch at Selfridges
Takeaway
One of the biggest shifts I often see with founder-led brands is what happens once the strategy, operations, creative, and infrastructure finally start moving together in a more cohesive way.
Once the business is aligned and positioned to perform on all cylinders, the entire company starts elevating. The vision becomes clearer, decision-making gets sharper, momentum builds faster, and the ambition of the founder becomes much easier for the rest of the organization to rally around.
Venus brought extraordinary focus, intelligence, and competitive rigor to every aspect of the business.
My role was helping build the systems, creative infrastructure, and operational discipline capable of carrying that same level of precision across the entire company.