Tennis champion, Serena Williams, enters her next chapter with a new lifestyle brand of performance-care products designed to redefine and ritualize self-care. She has teamed up with two CPG veterans to launch Will Perform, a line of clean, cruelty-free topical pain relief and daily muscle care solutions designed to reimagine recovery – as both a concept and a category. Williams’ co-founders are Hank Mercier, a seasoned CPG executive and Will Perform’s CEO, and Eric Ryan, the serial entrepreneur behind the eco-friendly household brand method, nutrition brand OLLY and First Aid brand Welly.
Will Perform Public Benefit Corporation is an active lifestyle recovery brand to help everyone to perform their best. With Williams at the helm, the brand redefines recovery as performance care through a modern take on topical pain relief and unique daily and nightly muscle recovery solutions.
With an authentic and inclusive point of view, and a lineup of thoughtfully designed, clean, cruelty-free products, Will Perform aims to make a recovery a welcomed ritual in our daily life so we can stay active and healthy.
And, yes, the lifestyle brand is named after the tennis star. “Once we began to test the names, and I saw the word will, it was perfect because it’s a homage to my last name Williams, and it will work. The product will perform, and you will do better,” Williams says to ESSENCE.
The launch assortment includes five products, spanning four categories: WILL Relieve, WILL Cool, WILL Rest, and WILL Soothe. The “relieve” and “cool” products offer pain relief, while the soothe and rest products offer daily skin and muscle care. When developing the products, Williams kept a contemporary outlook top of mind. “I felt more need to have a modern approach to pain relief and muscle care. And quite frankly, I couldn’t find the products I liked and needed on the market. So, if we focus on a category like this, it could help people recover. I wanted to make that distinction of, like, if this works for me as someone performing on a very high level every day, how much more would it work on other people?” she says.
The unique lineup of products intends to elevate the current recovery category market by bridging the gap between performance and self-care in everyday life. According to Williams, recovery is a critical part of self-care. “It’s important because when you see the word recovery, you should think of it as a ritual or a daily regime. It shouldn’t be something you embrace when you get older. Recovery should be something you start doing when you’re young. So when you do get older, it’s easier,” she says.
Williams notes that her products are created from her experience with being frustrated by recovery products. “When playing matches, I had to apply the product myself. I wanted to create a line that would have a better application. Having an application where you don’t have to rub it in is so helpful,” she reveals.
In conceptualizing and developing Will Perform, she drew on the experience of her nearly three-decade-long athletic career to add something to the category that she knew first-hand was underrepresented, starting with how the category has been marketed to specific demographics. Williams and the team intentionally include millennial and Gen-Z groups as their desired audience. “Recovery products have been framed in the past for certain ages. I want to change that. We should all embrace personal care and skincare. And now, with Will Perform, you can start to retreat and recover, whether it’s a pain relief or muscle care, it’s such an essential part of performance,” she says.
Williams and the team considered a long list of factors, including formula efficacy, ingredients, design, application, and scent, to create a line of products that people can enjoy as part of an everyday routine. By doing so, Will Perform is reframing recovery as performance care, a subtle but significant shift that Williams hopes will invite athletes and anyone with an active lifestyle to adopt the practice to ensure vibrant and healthy lifestyles and, most importantly, self-care.
As far as her self-care routine, Williams is continuously working on and refining it. “I think one thing that moms often struggle with is self-care. At the end of the night, I have more time for myself, and I end up using Will Perform product because it has magnesium in it, which helps relieve, which makes me feel more relaxed, allowing me to get a good night’s sleep, but I need to go and spend a day at the spa. That would be nice.”
Will Perform launches today on the brand’s website and at Target and Target.com beginning December 18th.
