Page 46 - Sharp Winter 2023

expired after back-to-back injuries, and he struggled to secure a spot as a defensive midfielder. Plus, as he approached his thirties, he felt he was aging out of the sport altogether.
“Out of nowhere, I was 29 and I didn’t have a club,” he recalls over Zoom on a recent afternoon. While he recovered from his broken ankle, he flipped clothes on eBay. The experience proved inspiring. From there, he toyed with the idea of creating a brand of his own.
By the time he was finally recruited to Cyprus-based Pafos FC in 2019, he was thinking ahead to a life after pro sports, which he had never considered before. In March 2020, his career halted entirely, and he found himself alone in Cyprus, trapped in lockdown, like the rest of the world, and unable to leave. “I started to get really depressed,” he shares. “They closed all the borders, so I couldn’t see anyone.”
During his time in isolation, Williams got reflective. He had developed a passion for styling while he was still a full-time midfielder, so a line of his own didn’t seem so far-fetched. “When I was playing, I would be drawn to all the brands that got big later. I always found them when they were unknown, and years later, all the players in the Premier League would wear those clothes,” he recalls. “So, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna start my own label.’”
The brand’s optimistic name also came about in Cyprus. “I was sitting on my terrace on a sunny day, and I was thinking about how my life is kind of like a beautiful struggle: I was a professional athlete, I was in Cyprus, I was shut down from the world in a re-
ally nice place, but mentally, I was in a very bad place,” he says. “I wanted to take that story of overcoming adversity and translate it into something beautiful.”
First came the t-shirts inspired by each of his childhood he- roes: Allen Iverson, Lenny Kravitz, and Prince, all American heroes introduced to him by his father, a New Yorker who fell in love while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army. Next came drops merg- ing streetwear staples like hoodies and sweats with asymmetrical button-ups, letterman and field jackets, and, most recently, cycling sunglasses.
But the struggle didn’t end when he launched his first pieces. Managing the day-to-day of Beautiful Struggles was initially so stressful that Williams began to lose his hair. Without a background in design — Williams does not sew or sketch — taking garments from ideation to execution had a steep learning curve. “It’s way more challenging than I expected. As a consumer, all you see is the finished product,” he shares. “The biggest challenge for me was patience.”
The latest Beautiful Struggles campaign, aptly entitled Impatience Is My Weakness, leans into that. The campaign reinforces the idea that Beautiful Struggles is not a self-aggrandizing vanity project or a haphazard collection of tees and jackets. It’s Williams’s autobiographical outlet, charting his shortcomings and challenges as much as he highlights his inspirations and dreams.
For Williams, embracing this duality is key to understanding the brand. “It’s a way of living — overcoming adversity or seeing the good things when something bad happens to you,” he says. It’s also how he wants to make an impact. “In the most humble way, we’re trying to change the world. But in an authentic way. Beautiful Struggles is bigger than me.”
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46 GUIDE • WINTER 2023
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