“MRS.”
At a cafe on Melrose Avenue one recent afternoon, Savannah James was wearing a jersey with those three letters splayed across the front. Capitalized, white and large, they were impossible to miss against her all-black outfit. (The initials actually stood for “Martine Rose Sport,” a fashion brand.)
Intentional or not, it was a nod at the public image she embraces but has also tangled with over the years. James, 40, has been with her husband, LeBron James, since they met at her 16th birthday party in 2002, becoming a “WAG” — an acronym for “wives and girlfriends” — before the term even existed.
For decades now, James has been a courtside fixture, cheering him on as he became the league’s all-time leading scorer. The James family has uprooted itself each time LeBron signed with a new team — from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat; then back to Cleveland before an eight-season run with the Los Angeles Lakers. That became more complicated with the arrival of two boys, Bronny and Bryce, and daughter Zhuri.
Now her husband has joined the Philadelphia 76ers for the 2026-2027 season, but James will stay in Los Angeles. Together, James said, they decided that she would remain in their adopted home city so that she could drop off their 11-year-old daughter at school and, like many WAGs lately, build her small business empire, which she hopes will establish her as a figure in her own right.
“I’m a little bit more forward-facing now,” James said, though she worried that starting her own business would be perceived as a “money grab.” “But then also, why not me? “Why can’t I be taken seriously?”
She can pop into her studio to record “Everybody’s Crazy,” the call-in podcast she hosts with April McDaniel, her friend and business partner. She can also whisk off to a meeting for Reframe, a skin care label she founded last year, to look at new packaging samples. Or take a call in her home office for Let It Break, a women’s membership club focused on personal development that she also runs with McDaniel.
“It’s a lot of responsibilities that I hold right now, especially with everything that we have going on,” she said. “But it’s still a learning process. I didn’t go to college for this. I am a self-taught entrepreneur.”
As James walked through the glass doors of a two-story home she and McDaniel converted into the headquarters for Signed, the holding company for their ventures, employees approached her tentatively. She warmed everyone up by talking about pop culture, food and, on this day, run clubs (she’s not a fan).
Her team ran down sales figures for Reframe (up at least 18 percent in the third quarter, they said) and discussed an upcoming launch for a facial cleanser. When her colleagues suggested she front the advertisements, she disarmed them with a quip: “I don’t see myself as photogenic for a beauty campaign.”
She and McDaniel met in 2007, when McDaniel was planning an event hosted by LeBron and Jay-Z during N.B.A. All-Star Weekend.
Along with their podcast producer, the two women shuffled into the studio, which was decorated with a hot pink neon sign, tea roses and needlepoint pillows, one of which read: “If I’m too much, go find less.”
As the pair planned upcoming episodes of “Everybody’s Crazy,” the conversation veered from their children to costumes for a Halloween-themed episode on ghosting.
“Maybe we can both be Dolly,” McDaniel said, referring to Dolly Parton, “though I’d need to get boobs.”
“Girl, I don’t want to be Dolly,” James said. “And you don’t need anything extra.”
James considered going as Whitney Houston, at which point she rose to her feet to belt out Houston’s cover of “I’m Every Woman,” using a pen as microphone. (She later changed her mind and says she’ll now dress as Mary J. Blige.)
“Savannah is very optimistic and I think can really almost empower you to believe you can do anything,” McDaniel said. “And you need a friend like that.”
Their podcast conversations are often picked apart online. Last month, the pair were at the center of a media maelstrom following an admission that James flies first class when they travel, while McDaniel stays perched in business. Online commentators have also accused James of being parsimonious, considering her husband’s net worth.
McDaniel waved away the criticism. “All we can do is worry about us,” she said.
Growing up in Akron, Ohio, the youngest of five siblings, James was “very outgoing,” said her mother, Jennifer Brinson, a retired nurse. James’s father, JK Brinson, Jr., worked at a rubber factory, but her parents managed to send her to a private Catholic school through the sixth grade. She later attended a public middle and high school.
James remembered Catholic school as difficult. “There were three or four Black kids in my class,” she said. “That lack of representation, especially at that moldable age, is hard when you are trying to figure out who you are.”
James loved French and biology and imagined she might become a nurse, like her mother, or an aesthetician. She was on the softball and cheer teams.
“We were all cheerleaders — we were very humble about it, but we were very, very popular back then,” said Amber Brooks, a nurse in James’s hometown and her childhood best friend.
James met her husband the summer before he was drafted to join the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003. He was in the grade above hers at the private Catholic high school he attended across town. They met through a mutual friend at her Sweet 16, when LeBron James pinned money on the birthday girl’s dress, a custom in African American communities.
“He thought he was a big man because he gave me $20,” James said.
Their first date was at an Outback Steakhouse. As they kept seeing each other, she changed her phone ringer for him to Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin.’”
“He just started to call me his girlfriend, but I don’t recall getting a note that says, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’” she said.
During her senior year of high school, James learned she was pregnant with their first child, LeBron “Bronny” James, Jr., who was born during his father’s second N.B.A. season.
Initially, James’s parents were concerned “because of the stigma that the N.B.A. players get,” said Jennifer Brinson, referring to the “the girls and the going out and the parties and the temptations.”
LeBron remembered wanting to rise to the occasion. “For me, you know, being a part of a single-parent household myself and not really ever having my father around, I knew it was something that I was going to take very seriously,” he said in an interview.
As LeBron’s star rose, James recalled reading “awful things about myself” in blogs accusing her of being a “doormat,” riding on his coattails and getting pregnant “because of who he was,” she said.
Struggling to reconcile their private life with her husband’s public persona, she decided to play a “background” role in his career. “I’m not putting myself out there to be judged or have people say things about me that I know hurt me,” she remembered thinking.
Such became the couple’s rhythm. LeBron would dominate his opponents on the court, and James largely hung back, working on his charitable foundation in Akron and taking care of the family with the help of her parents.
But after three children, three moves and some two-dozen seasons of basketball, James is ready for something new.
This change was spurred, in part, by her daughter, who once told her she wanted to emulate her mother. After years of therapy, James said, she is now more confident in her decisions. “Those are the things that I want to be able to show to her as a young woman,” she said.
She is staying put in Los Angeles so as to not disrupt Zhuri’s schooling. (Bronny plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, and Bryce is on the basketball team at the University of Arizona.)
“It’s going to be challenging, for sure, because she’s always been my backbone,” LeBron said of living in New York without his wife. (He commutes to Philadelphia.) “But, listen, whatever my daughter, whatever my wife need in order for them to continue to grow. I’m landing my plane soon. It’s all good.”
James’s personal transformation may not have caught up with the public’s perception of her, either. This week, the former N.F.L. player Shannon Sharpe attributed a weak performance by the Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert to being distracted by his fiancé Madison Beer’s concert tour over the summer. Athletes, he said, “need somebody that understands — you need a Savannah James.”
LeBron, too, still needs a Savannah James. But he says it’s now his time to take a back seat and be “a helping hand, a backbone.”
Sure, he’s been a guest on her podcast, but he doesn’t dish out unsolicited business advice. To be fair, she hasn’t asked her husband — a serial entrepreneur, perpetual brand ambassador and billionaire — for help.
“To do something that I know was bootstrapped by me from the ground up, I think is important to me,” she said. “Let me figure it out.”
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