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- 🧡 Free Game: Wemby x Louis Vuitton
🧡 Free Game: Wemby x Louis Vuitton
Greatest chess collab ever!
Jeff Chen
January 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Together with
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Baseline!
This is your weekly blueprint for basketball culture:
đź’ˇ Brand Insights
đź’» Marketing Strategy
🧰 Creator Tools
đź““ Business Resources
Let’s jump right in…
MARKETING BLUEPRINT
The NBA is in Paris this week and I’m predicting it now:
Victor Wembanyama will meet with his brand partners at Louis Vuitton to plan a luxury chess collaboration that will be released within the next 12 months.
After Wemby made a surprise visit to play chess at Washington Square Park in NYC a month ago, he brought significant new awareness to the basketball and chess communities.
In fact, just look at how the chess community embraced him:
Chess.com analyzed his entire game and even offers a replay simulation (his opening chess strategy was the French Defense—you can’t make that up!).
Plus, the chess subreddit has hundreds of posts breaking down his gameplay.
Not to mention, there are now talks about an NBA players-only chess tournament.
The best part, is that Wemby and the NBA are already both partners with Louis Vuitton.
And since LV is also no stranger to $19,000 luxury chess collaborations, this idea could very well happen.
But unlike their chess collab with Tyler, The Creator—Wemby’s chess collection will have a much bigger impact.
Wemby’s viral chess moment dominated social media and brought the NBA an entirely new fan base of millions from the chess community.
Plus with Pharrell as LV’s creative director, I already know this will be the biggest chess collab EVER.
FREE THROWS
Sharing the tools and resources that I’m using this week:
🤖 Create AI - Transform your words into websites, tools, apps, and products in minutes.
🖼️ Public Work - Explore and use over 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.
📲 TikTok’s Impact - TikTok was banned and then immediately reinstated, but this Twitter thread perfectly summed up the social platform’s massive impact on culture.
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FAST BREAK
Here’s what you missed this week:
🏀 Unrivaled launched and they're in a league of their own. Here’s a quick video if you need a full 360° breakdown of what the league is about. Reply “Unrivaled” if you want me to do my own breakdown as well!
🎽 Victor Wembanyama's viral jersey swap with a child has ended up on Goldin Sports Auctions, with a starting bid of $10,000.🏀
đź’° Dawn Staley became the highest-paid coach in Women's Basketball history, signing an extension with the University of South Carolina through the 2029/30 season with a $4 million annual salary.
🖼️ Lonzo Ball revealed on his podcast that he personally designed and created the cover art for Gelo’s viral hit song “Tweaker.”
🌍 A group of investors being advised by LeBron’s longtime business partner Maverick Carter is seeking to raise $5 billion from private capital sources to form an international basketball league.
đź“ź The NBA released their full "Uncut NBA OGs: Friends & Rivals" special featuring LeBron, Steph, and KD from their sit-down in Paris.
📺 NBA veteran and basketball analyst Jamal Crawford has joined NBC Sports and Peacock’s team to cover the NBA starting in the 2025-26 season.
🏟️ The Indiana Fever announced a new $78 million HQ in Indianapolis that’ll have two courts, a childcare space and Pilates studio.
🚫 I would link it, but I can’t—@Jumpman23 deactivated all their social channels in the lead-up to the 40th anniversary retro release of the Jordan Banned 1s.
POST-GAME
That’s it for this week.
Appreciate you for reading as always!
- Jeff Chen | 🏀💡👨🏻‍💻
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