Tennis champion Naomi Osaka has for years made the tennis court a runway, with her Nike outfits often paired with pieces made in collaboration with designers such as Hana Yagi and Robert Wun. Her next staple piece: one she’s designed herself.
Such is the brand of luxury leather goods Osaka unveiled Friday at the Fame to Fortune Summit, a daylong conference organized by the affluent community-building organization Uncharted that aimed to connect celebrities flirting with potential business ideas with investors eager to fund them. Osaka showcased a prototype of one of her handbag creations during a chat alongside her business partner Mike Cherman, the founder of the Los Angeles streetwear line Chinatown Market, in which she called the brand her “biggest dream” outside of tennis.
“Being a really good tennis player has given me a lot of amazing opportunities to invest and also just to surround myself with some really great people and I feel like that’s gotten me to this point where I want to create my own thing,” Osaka told Fortune‘s executive editorial director Diane Brady during the fireside chat, which also served as a pitch to potential investors in the crowd. “It’s something that I want to pour all my energy into because I believe in it too with all my heart.”
Osaka’s conversation, in between her practice rounds at this year’s U.S. Open, was one of the keynote panels during the daylong confab, held at the sprawling Southampton, New York, shoreside estate of Uncharted co-founder Michael Loeb. Variety was one of the conference’s five media partners alongside Yahoo, Fortune, the New York Stock Exchange and Culture.
Over the course of the morning, guests filtered into the estate’s backyard deck, which included several food stations (including a Mexican spread by the Hamptons native Crispy Taco Co.), a coffee station with Kenyan coffee farmer Margaret Nyamumbo’s brand Kahawa, an opportunity to test drive Cadillac’s CELESTIQ sedan and a mixture of cocktails and mocktails for a crowd where an 11 a.m. Friday morning libation is less an end-of-week reward and more an expectation. Attendees mingling around the house’s pool ranged from finance professionals who flocked from across the country to names familiar among media and entertainment circles, including one-time CNN chief Chris Licht chatting in a small gaggle and former child actor Skai Jackson of the Disney Channel’s “Jessie” introducing herself to a new crowd.
Jackson, 24, says that while the summit was the first time she’d attended an event so heavily focused on business, it tapped into her entrepreneurial spirit as she batted around three different venture ideas (all of which she declined to share with Variety).
“I feel like you always have to be really ready to start something up — it’s definitely such a huge commitment,” she says. “You have to be all just in with it and full throttle. So now that I have my baby, my baby is old enough, I feel like, OK, I can finally get back into doing what I want to do.”
It’s a goal Loeb and his Uncharted co-founder Justin Barth hoped the Fame to Fortune Summit would achieve for its attendees, with the two using their opening remarks to implore the hundreds of guests under the setup dining tent to break away from the communities they came with and network with someone new to help capitalize on their celebrity as they think about new businesses.
“I don’t think anybody is going to walk out of here today with a $100 million business or a billion-dollar business, but you’re going to come out with ideas, and also some of the enablers that are going to help you do it,” Loeb said.
Though that’s not to say all went according to plan. The temperamental weather conditions stemming from a looming storm had staff quickly setting up plastic coverings around the tent throughout Osaka’s conversation to protect from the oncoming rain. And, after an amusing crowdwork-focused performance by “foodie magician” Josh Beckerman, the keynote conversation that started the day’s programming was not with scheduled headliner VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, who dropped out, but instead with Kevin Durant agent and business partner Rich Kleiman, who spoke about navigating the music and sports industries and his time working with artists including Jay-Z, Solange and, of course, Durant.
Kleiman tells Variety that he didn’t really know much about the event when he was approached, but Loeb’s involvement and more time to network among the Hamptons crowd helped spur his participation.
“I’m not trying to come offstage and close a deal,” he says. “It’s fascinating to always meet people and see how what we’re working on connects with people. I think we all live in our bubbles … The more you get out of the world, the more you’re outside around people — that’s the best news of what’s happening. Social media can give you a very skewed indication. Real life, and understanding what people are talking about, what they’re wearing, what they’re interested in — that, to me, is the best case study and research that I can do. So I always look at those opportunities.”
