A’ja Wilson, a center for the Las Vegas Aces, is widely acknowledged as the best player in the Women’s National Basketball Association. She is something like the league’s on-court answer to LeBron James or Michael Jordan.
“I don’t shy away from having conversations with her about being the greatest to ever play,” said Becky Hammon, who has coached the Aces since 2022.
Ms. Wilson was the W.N.B.A.’s Rookie of the Year in 2018, won its Most Valuable Player Award in 2020 and 2022 and won a championship in 2022. But while she racked up achievement after achievement, one marker of basketball stardom eluded her: the shoe.
If Ms. Wilson were playing in the National Basketball Association, she would have long ago gotten a signature shoe, the on-court footwear designed with and for a player. More than two dozen N.B.A. players have them.
For years, marketers largely ignored the women’s game. But Ms. Wilson’s star has risen alongside that of the league she plays in, and in early 2023, Nike finally told her that it planned to create a signature shoe for her.
“I probably cried for a couple of days,” she said.
The plan remained secret, and her fans got angry as Ms. Wilson continued to dominate on the court — winning another championship in 2023 — without any news of a shoe. Fans were happy last May, however, when Nike announced that it would release her signature shoe, the A’One, this month, alongside an apparel collection.
(The year in between gave them even more reasons to be happy: Ms. Wilson became the first player in W.N.B.A. history to score 1,000 points in a season, won a third M.V.P. Award, was named one of Time magazine’s women of the year and had her jersey retired by the University of South Carolina.)
The A’One went on sale on Tuesday, with a “Pink Aura” version, making Ms. Wilson the first Black W.N.B.A. player to have a signature shoe since 2011.
“It’s time for people to have a shoe and see a shoe from someone like me, considering it hasn’t been done in a long, long time and it comes from a Black female athlete in this world,” she said. “I’m grateful.”
The 28-year-old was speaking in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris, at a hotel suite overlooking Le Bon Marché, the famous department store. Her 6-foot-4 frame was dressed in the athletes’ off-court uniform of sweats, with jewelry in her ears and on both sides of her nose. She was there on behalf of Nike. It was men’s fashion week, so outside the hotel, photographers waited behind a rope in case celebrities emerged.
The Rise of the W.N.B.A.
W.N.B.A. players are bigger stars now than they ever were before, arguably with more cultural impact than they had even in the league’s heady early days in the 1990s, when players like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes became household names. Last season, interest in the league spiked, buoyed by the popularity of the rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Brands rushed to play catch-up.
That resurgence has happened in the shoe industry, too, where brands have struggled to monetize products connected to female athletes.
The first W.N.B.A. player to have a signature shoe made for her was Ms. Swoopes in 1995. Nike’s Air Swoopes had a tab on the back that made it easy to put on with the long fingernails she liked to sport. Nike made seven editions of it, the most it has made for any female player to date.
Eight other W.N.B.A. players released signature shoes between 1995 and 2001, according to a database kept by ESPN. In 2005 and 2006, Nike made shoes for Diana Taurasi, who starred at the University of Connecticut, for the U.S. women’s national team and for the Phoenix Mercury. After her shoe, Nike didn’t make another signature shoe with a women’s basketball player until 2023.
Nike wasn’t alone in its hiatus. Between 2011, when Adidas released a product with Candace Parker, and 2022, there were no W.N.B.A. signature shoes, according to ESPN’s database. There just wasn’t much of a market, industry observers say.
Women’s models make up a small portion of the basketball shoe business, said Matt Powell, a retail analyst with BCE Consulting, in part because many female basketball players prefer wearing a men’s shoe.
“It costs a tremendous amount of money to develop a shoe and then to build that shoe,” Mr. Powell said. “If sales are not going to be huge, and that is the history of what we’ve seen, any brand is like, ‘How much of an investment can we make here?’”
That all started to change when women’s college basketball became more popular. Social media allowed players to create personal brands, and in 2021 the National Collegiate Athletic Association shifted its rules to allow athletes to capitalize on name, image and likeness (N.I.L.) deals, increasing their visibility with commercials and other advertisements.
Broadcast channels helped, too: ESPN began televising the N.C.A.A. women’s tournament in 1996 but did not air the championship game on its broadcast network, ABC, until 2023. Ms. Reese’s Louisiana State team defeated Ms. Clark’s Iowa for that title, drawing nearly 10 million viewers.
The 2024 championship game drew 18.9 million viewers, beating the men’s championship game by about four million, according to Nielsen. That interest has trickled up into the W.N.B.A. as the players moved there, too.
In July 2023, Nielsen reported a rise in interest generally in women’s sports. It also said surveyed viewers were frustrated by a lack of access to live women’s sports and a lack of media coverage.
“Sneaker companies are always reactive to the public, and they’re always responsive to what they perceive as popular at a given time,” said Brandon Wallace, an assistant professor at Indiana University who has studied the industry.
Sabrina Ionescu’s shoe came out in 2023, her fourth W.N.B.A. season, all with the New York Liberty. It was Nike’s first unisex shoe and is one of the most popular shoes for N.B.A. players to wear during games. Players have said they like its look, which includes intricate embroidery and customizable colors, and how it feels on their feet. The structure is similar to Kobe Bryant’s shoe, which revolutionized the industry.
Nick Depaula, a journalist who covers the sneaker industry, said he expected Ms. Wilson’s to be popular among the men as well. In part because of its design — he cited “the grip and the support and the lightweight element” — and in part out of solidarity.
“She’s worn LeBrons for years and supported his line,” Mr. Depaula said, referring to the Los Angeles Lakers superstar, who also has a deal with Nike. “There’s an element of players excited for her personally.”
Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat, who has been romantically connected to Ms. Wilson, has already worn her shoe in a game, before its release.
Mr. Powell, the industry analyst, also said he believed that Ms. Wilson’s shoe would do well among women’s basketball shoes, in part because of the heightened interest in the W.N.B.A. and in part because of its relatively low price. Adult sizes are $110 and children’s $90, compared with $190 for Mr. James’s signature shoes or $130 for the Sabrina 2.
The Caitlin Clark Comparison Game
The launch of Ms. Wilson’s shoe has not come without controversy.
In April 2024, when news broke that Nike was planning a signature shoe for Ms. Clark, then heading into her rookie season with the Indiana Fever, it set off a firestorm.
The news of Ms. Wilson’s shoe wasn’t public yet. Her fans wondered if racism played a part in giving Ms. Clark, who is white, a shoe before the much more professionally accomplished Ms. Wilson, especially since the only other active players with signature shoes — Ms. Ionescu and Breanna Stewart, a two-time M.V.P. — are both white.
Others noted Ms. Clark’s exceptional popularity: She was selling out arenas and causing opponents to move their games to bigger venues. Games she played in set viewership records.
Strangers debated Ms. Wilson’s merits. Some said that her personality wasn’t charming enough, or that her style of play lacked charisma. Frontcourt players are sometimes thought to be less marketable because their style of play is often less flashy.
“It was very hard for me to navigate, only because in the back of my mind I’m like, ‘Yes, I know a shoe’s coming, but I really have nothing to share,’” Ms. Wilson said. “And to constantly be in those conversations and constantly having my name dragged through the mud and having my résumé dragged through the mud is really hard.”
When the shoe was announced, Nike leaned into the controversy: Ms. Wilson wore a sweatshirt that had “Of Course I Have A Shoe Dot Com” written on it.
Now some writers and fans are wondering why Ms. Clark isn’t getting her shoe alongside Ms. Wilson.
A prominent Substack sports columnist, Ethan Strauss, suggested that Nike was delaying Ms. Clark’s shoe because of Ms. Wilson’s coming product, calling it “corporate malpractice” to not cash in on Ms. Clark’s popularity.
Tanya Hvizdak, Nike’s vice president of global sports marketing, said Nike was not delaying Ms. Clark’s shoe for Ms. Wilson. She said creating a signature shoe took time and disagreed with the characterization that it had taken too long for Ms. Wilson to be awarded a shoe.
“What I would say is we’ve been supporting our women’s basketball athletes for 40 years,” Ms. Hvizdak said.
Mr. Powell, the analyst, said Nike’s recent struggles as a business and its overhaul last year were instructive as well.
With Nike’s stock price falling and cultural relevance slipping, its board announced the abrupt retirement of its chief executive, John Donahue, in September and said Elliott Hill would replace him. Mr. Hill had spent 32 years with the company before retiring in 2020.
“I think we would have seen the Caitlin shoe a lot faster if Elliott had been at the helm,” Mr. Powell said. “His predecessor just did not appreciate product and the value of endorsement.”
Nike is expected to announce a shoe soon with Paige Bueckers, the first pick in this year’s W.N.B.A. draft. Ms. Reese, who plays for the Chicago Sky, has a shoe in the works with Reebok and has already released lifestyle shoes for day-to-day wear.
A Move Into Fashion
It confuses the people close to Ms. Wilson that marketing opportunities have come more slowly than her basketball accolades.
“She’s a supportive person,” said Sydney Colson, a teammate for the last three seasons and one of Ms. Wilson’s closest friends. “And not even just superstars, but people like that are just rare to come by.”
Ms. Wilson decorates the lockers of her teammates for their birthdays and buys a cake celebrating Pride for her gay teammates each year. Last year’s Pride cake was pink with disco balls, rainbow frosting and lettering that spelled, cheekily, “Hooray you gay.”
Ms. Wilson is also outspoken. When Mr. James signed a $154 million contract with the Lakers during her rookie year, she posted a tweet saying the W.N.B.A.’s best were hoping just to reach $1 million. At the time, the league’s top players made salaries of $115,500. Ms. Wilson will make $200,000 this season, which opens on May 16.
Nike and Ms. Wilson declined to comment on the size of their overall deal, but The Wall Street Journal and The Athletic have reported that Ms. Clark’s Nike deal is worth $28 million over eight years.
Ms. Wilson has not shied away from discussing the impact of race on why she is sometimes called not marketable.
“It’s 100 percent about race,” she said. “And it’s one of those things where we can sit there and say that all the time, but there’s going to always be someone that’s like, ‘Well, no you’re just making it about race.’”
As new opportunities have come her way Ms. Wilson has used them to cultivate her image. She has especially leaned into the fashion world’s recent embrace of her; Vogue and GQ, for instance, featured her last month in a spread related to the Met Gala.
The collection with Nike includes single-leg leggings like the ones that Ms. Wilson popularized in the W.N.B.A., made in hot pink, and a hot pink sweatshirt with satin-lined hood (because her mother got tired of seeing her wearing a bonnet at the airport, Ms. Wilson said).
When she went on tour last year for her book, “Dear Black Girls,” her team approached the designer Sergio Hudson, who has dressed Michelle Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Beyoncé, Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez, to outfit her.
He knew Ms. Wilson was stylish, and he liked the idea of supporting a W.N.B.A. player, especially one from his home state, South Carolina.
“When I saw her walk out in the first outfit we made for her, I was like, ‘This girl is a star,’” Mr. Hudson said.
“At that time it wasn’t how it is now,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago, but it’s like overnight things have shifted and the W.N.B.A. girls are prime celebrities, and everybody wants to dress them.”