Playa Society founder and owner Esther Wallace has always known what’s up when it comes to women’s basketball. The streetwear brand’s latest apparel collaboration with the WNBA celebrates those who helped build up the hype around women’s basketball.
“We’ve known that we’re dope,” Wallace said. “But we’re glad the rest of the world is catching up. This collection pays homage to those who built this — the players, the creators — everyone who knew we were dope and did the work to get us here.”
The summer 2024 collection features a creme hoodie and T-shirt with the phrase “If You’re Just Now Tuning Into Women’s Basketball, We Told You So” in the WNBA orange colorway. The pieces will be available on the brand’s website Friday. The tagline describes Wallace’s work with Playa Society and her commitment to elevating the players.
This is the second WNBA collaboration in a month for Wallace, who also designed the new apparel line for the Golden State Valkyries. The Valkyries are the Golden State Warriors’ WNBA affiliate team and the first of the two new expansion teams introduced into the league since 2008. Named after a host of female warriors in Norse mythology, the team will play its first season in 2025. The apparel has already sold out twice since it was first released.
Wallace told Andscape there are no words to describe the opportunity to work so closely with the WNBA, but it was a long time coming.
The Golden State Valkyries T-shirt by Playa Society.
Briele Chanel
“I don’t even think flattered is the word,” Wallace told Andscape. “I don’t know what words to use. To [initially]get the email from Golden State Warriors” — both teams share a front office — “to be in on those early conversations like ‘we don’t have a name yet, we don’t know what it’s going to look like yet, but we know we want some Playa Society merch,’ that was cool.”
Wallace wasn’t stressed about how everything came together for her Valkyries apparel collection. Yes, she created pieces before the team had a name, but these are her favorite projects. Everything she’s been doing with Playa Society prepared her for this.
“It’s like you’re playing in the clutch, right?” Wallace said. “Fourth quarter and have to get this design done, then just to see everybody’s response and how much everybody loves the product that was cool because it’s like, OK, I did it in the fourth quarter and came away with the win. It was special.”
Wallace knew as a child she wanted to design apparel. “I was that kid walking around with a sketchbook,” she remembered. “I took it everywhere. It was my whole childhood.” She began to make outfits for herself and even assumed she would go to the Fashion Institute of Technology for college.
Esther Wallace launched her streetwear brand Playa Society, in January 2018. The company’s name was inspired by a scene in the movie Love & Basketball.
Briele Chanel
“However,” Wallace said, “I happened to be very tall.” While people around her pushed her to play basketball, she insisted she would be a designer. “I was very stubborn.”
It wasn’t until she dropped out of the performing arts high school, where she was enrolled to learn costume design that she began to consider what life on the court could look like for her.
“All of my friends went to the regular public school, and I dropped out after like, three days, and ended up going there,” Wallace said. “I didn’t realize that school had the No. 1 girls’ basketball team in the state and some of the top-ranked basketball players in the country. Of course, I didn’t know that because I didn’t care about basketball at all.”
She was convinced to start playing basketball during her sophomore year and attended a basketball game at the University of Massachusetts (Wallace is from nearby Springfield). UMass was playing against Temple, which was a life-changing experience for her.
“This is Temple when Dawn Staley is coaching,” Wallace explained. “So I see Dawn Staley on the sidelines, Candace Dupree, who was playing at the time, and all these Black girls. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ ” All it took was seeing Staley and her team for Wallace to forget about design.
Wallace thought she would play basketball as long as possible and then coach. She played overseas while she was getting her master’s degree. “I did my master’s thesis on the misrepresentation and the underrepresentation of women’s sport when it comes to sports advertising.”
WNBA star Jewell Loyd teams up with best friend’s son to bring autism awareness with her new sneaker releaseRead now
Though Wallace maintains that she wasn’t thinking about starting a business at the time, “someone at some point was like ‘why don’t you solve this problem?’ ”
From there, she started to imagine what it would be like if she could design and impact women’s basketball instead of coaching. Wallace returned to the United States in 2014 and got to work.
“I started playing around with my own screen designs, I tried to build my own printing press, but that was a disaster,” she said.
Instead, Wallace designed the pieces and took them to be printed. In 2017, she developed a simple but direct T-shirt. The word “female” was crossed out over “athlete” on a separate line. Business took off.
“When I designed it, I had a feeling this could probably be big,” she said. “So at first I was nervous to put it out because I wasn’t sure, but I finally put it out and all of a sudden I was selling hundreds of this T-shirt.”
Initially, she printed the shirts in batches of 40 to 50, and when those sold out, she increased the number of shirts to 100 at a time. The shirts just kept selling out. “When I started selling them, it was at the farmers market tables. That kind of thing, but when I put it online, I was selling hundreds of them.”
This was when it became clear to Wallace what she wanted to build a brand around. She gave herself two months to develop Playa Society as a concept, name, and branding.
Wallace said she knew she needed a deadline. Otherwise, she would never have decided to put anything out. “I was like wherever you’re at, it’s going to be good enough. That’s what I kept telling myself,” she said. “I’m such a perfectionist and I just could pick things apart forever.”
Playa Society was launched in January 2018. The company’s name was inspired by a scene in the movie Love & Basketball.
WNBA program grows players’ brands, league’s visibilityRead now
“Like many young Black girls, I was obsessed with Love & Basketball,” said Wallace. “There’s that scene where Monica is hyped-up in the car, she’s like, ‘I’m a ball playa.’ That conversation was always the essence of what I wanted to create — just her standing up for herself in that moment, that was the energy I wanted. The ‘ball playa’ part really stood out. I wanted [my brand]to be rooted in community, so I played around with what that language could look like, eventually landing on Playa Society.”
Wallace launched her brand, and WNBA players embraced it almost immediately. In April 2018, WNBA All-Star Candace Parker wore the “The Athlete” shirt on former NBA player Kevin Garnett’s Area 21 show on TNT. It was a big moment for Wallace, personally and professionally.
June’s best sneaker drops: Your guide to must-have releasesRead now
“The message connected with her for some reason. It gave me a little bit of energy and more momentum to keep pushing,” she said. “I was giving shirts to all the players in the NBA during a time when no other brand was giving any thought to the WNBA or women’s basketball, so I was building these connections.”
At one point during the summer of 2018, all the WNBA players were wearing Wallace’s apparel because the Women’s National Basketball Players Association purchased them from her, and it meant a lot to earn the players’ support. “Sue Bird was one of my first customers. Sylvia Fowles. Natasha Cloud is always purchasing,” Wallace said, naming a few of her earliest supporters.
For Wallace, having that support just made her want to go harder for her girls. In 2020 (pre-COVID-19 lockdown), she left her job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked in marketing. It was the biggest risk she’d ever taken, but that summer, she was selling “thousands and thousands” of the “The Athlete” T-shirt, which was still her primary product at the time.
The following summer, Wallace had the chance to speak to someone at the WNBA and pitched the idea of a Playa Society collaboration. Wallace said she approached the conversation as practice for what could come in the future, but the WNBA liked her ideas. “They were like, ‘yes!’ and I was like ‘really?’ ”
Her first WNBA collection was launched in September 2021. It included a hoodie, a pair of sweatpants with the corresponding team logos on the pants leg, and a T-shirt with the WNBA logo.
“I remember it selling out,” Wallace recalled. “This is back when I used [e-commerce platform] Shopify, and the Shopify notifications would make the cash sound. I just remember it going off, and off, and then it started to die down.” That’s when Wallace checked and noticed her first release had sold out in the first hour.
She said that was a big day, and she has continued to respond to the demand. “It’s just been a matter of building this whole thing, as the community was growing, as women’s basketball was growing. Responding to the need and desire for better merch, but also exploring new designs.” It’s been a challenge as Wallace mainly has operated as a one-woman team.
While the designer is excited that the WNBA is shining under a new spotlight, she wants to be clear that the attention shouldn’t be fleeting. “The WNBA, the product has been good. It has been great, and it will only get better,” Wallace said. “That needs to be at the forefront of everybody’s mind here, so it’s not like we suddenly have a good product. There’s a lot that has gone overlooked and underrepresented.
“Hopefully, I can do a lot more of that because I know a lot of people are going to focus on what’s happening right now. I just want to celebrate the game and women as a whole beyond just like the moment.”
Channing Hargrove is a senior writer at Andscape covering fashion. That’s easier than admitting how strongly she identifies with the lyrics “Single Black female addicted to retail.”
