President Trump’s trade war has created chaos for companies around the world, snarling supply chains, sowing uncertainty and muddling their ability to plan for the future.

After announcing tariffs that started at 20 percent for nearly all imports from European Union members — and more on other countries — the president has scaled the rate to 10 percent until July, saying his administration will use the time to negotiate bilateral deals with America’s trading partners. At the same time, Mr. Trump has escalated a trade war with China, potentially squeezing European companies.

We are a team of reporters who write about business and economic issues in Europe for The New York Times. In recent weeks, we have covered how tariffs have been affecting the car industry, financial markets and economic expectations for European countries.

To better understand the impact the tariffs are having on companies in Europe, including Britain, we would like to hear from business owners, entrepreneurs, managers and employees. How might the import taxes affect your company or job? Have you delayed hiring, postponed expansion plans or canceled orders? Have you altered your supply chains? We would also like to hear what tariffs mean for your production, and whether you are considering moving some part of it to the United States.

We will read every response and reach out if we are interested in learning more. We won’t publish any part of your response without contacting you first and obtaining your consent. Your contact information will not be shared outside The Times newsroom and we will use it only to get in touch with you.

The mood at Milken

As dealmakers descended on the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles this week for the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, they were laser-focused on one type of deal: trade deals.

The threat of an intensifying trade war cast a shadow over the event, Lauren Hirsch reports.

Many business giants in attendance — including Bill Ackman, Jensen Huang and Ken Griffin — started the year imagining how good things could be under President Trump. But talk at this week’s event, behind the scenes at least, was about how bad it could get. Speculation ranged from cautious optimism that the U.S. will quickly push through uncertainty to quiet fears of sustained pain.

Dealmakers view Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as their last hope. Executives including Paul Taubman, the C.E.O. of PJT Partners, lined up early Monday morning to hear from Bessent, whom many executives view as their advocate in the tariff frenzy.

The consensus: The U.S. needs to alleviate the oppressive uncertainty lingering over the American economy by reaching a deal with at least one country quickly. Even if that “deal” is more of a news release than a fully negotiated pact. (More on that below.)

Many are planning for a rough year. Some say the country is already in a recession, and the question is just how steep it will get and how long it will last. Volatility has made it all but impossible to make big investments or do deals, with exceptions like the $9 billion takeover of Skechers proving the rule. As if dealmakers needed any reminder of the unpredictable business environment, many arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday evening as Trump threatened mind-boggling tariffs on the film industry.

A dearth of deals is likely to be particularly difficult for the private equity executives that traditionally descend upon Milken in hopes of raising more cash. Fund-raising is getting harder as a sustained deal-making slump has kept their investors waiting to see returns.

Any concerns didn’t stop them from kicking back, though: one rooftop cocktail party jauntily served “NAV-gronis,” which may be a reference to the loans some private equity firms have resorted to as a way to find liquidity.

Some attendees are still betting on deregulation and tax cuts. They happily noted that Bessent called out permitting overhauls in his Monday speech. (“The president doesn’t want to just ‘drill, baby, drill!’ He wants to ‘build, baby, build!’ he said.) They argued that discontent consumers and falling polling averages may counter Trump’s worst instincts.

And several present still expect tax policies to supersede any current angst. “Tax policy drives investment decisions,” Gary Cohn, who served as director of the National Economic Council in Trump’s first term, said onstage. “One of the most important things that has to happen this year is we have to, at a minimum, extend the Trump tax cuts.”

One potential tax hike consumed conversations. As large universities feel financial pressure from Trump’s funding freezes and threats to revoke their tax exempt status, rumors swirled at the conference that the next budget bill could significantly raise the tax rate on realized profits for certain endowments, which is currently 1.4 percent.

The increasing pressure on university finances could result in more universities following Yale’s lead by reducing their exposure to private equity. One hotly debated topic at the conference: Just how steep a discount would Yale or other universities take when selling off their private equity stakes.

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HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

President Trump reportedly may pursue a major Medicare drug price overhaul. He could sign an executive order as soon as next week that would tie the prices the government pays for some medications to what other countries pay, though he hasn’t yet personally approved the plan according to Politico. Separately, Speaker Mike Johnson abandoned a potential big cut to Medicaid, bowing to pressure from politically vulnerable Republicans.

The Trump administration is weighing an overhaul of Biden-era chip export limits. The Commerce Department is planning to change a rule that imposes limits on how many artificial intelligence chips countries like India, Israel and Switzerland can buy, a spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. The move led to a jump in shares of chipmakers including Nvidia, which have argued that the Biden-imposed rules were denting American tech exports.

OpenAI hires Instacart’s C.E.O. to oversee its business and operations. The appointment of Fidji Simo, a former Facebook executive who has led Instacart for nearly four years, will oversee huge portions of the artificial intelligence giant, including sales and marketing. It’s meant to solidify the management team at OpenAI, with Sam Altman, who will remain C.E.O., free to focus on overseeing research, computing and safety systems.

The threat that Google investors really fear

Shareholders in Google mostly shrugged off two major antitrust defeats that the company suffered in federal court over the past year. They appear far more worried about the loss of a vital business deal.

Shares in the tech giant tumbled 7.5 percent on Wednesday after a top Apple executive said that the iPhone maker was considering replacing Google as the default search engine for its Safari web browser.

Apple is “actively looking at” adding A.I.-powered search engines as options for Safari, Eddy Cue, the company’s senior vice president of services, testified on Wednesday in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google’s search business.

Apple may eventually add search engines powered by artificial intelligence, including those from Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity, as options for Safari, Cue added.

It’s hard to overstate the potential impact. Being Safari’s default search provider means that Google served up billions of queries for iPhone, iPad and Mac users, giving it a huge leg up over search rivals. The arrangement is so powerful that Google pays billions of dollars a year for that right — and federal prosecutors have argued it should end.

Note that Cue testified on behalf of Google, and said he was worried about Apple losing that huge source of income.

Cue’s disclosure also underscores an existential worry for Google. While the company has praised its breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research, the financial engine behind the $1.84 trillion company remains search. The “search and other” division reported $50.7 billion in revenue last quarter, up nearly 10 percent year on year.

Cue noted that search queries on Safari dipped last month for the first time — already a worrying sign for Google — which he chalked up to users relying on artificial intelligence. Anything that poses a threat to the business that funds Google’s pivots to the future, including A.I., are something shareholders clearly take very seriously.

“Extreme flux”

President Trump’s trade war has put Jay Powell and his colleagues at the Fed in the same tricky place as much of the corporate world: in limbo. That was reinforced on Thursday when the president lashed out anew at the central bank chief.

But the uncertainty felt by Powell and corporate bosses could actually ramp up the pressure on the White House to deliver quick-win trade deals, or de-escalate its us-against-the-world tariffs fight. On Thursday morning, Trump teased that the “FIRST” one — with Britain — will be detailed on Thursday, with “many other deals” to follow.

The latest: Toyota and the shipping giant Maersk warned on Thursday that Trump’s levies were clobbering global trade and denting their bottom lines. “The current environment surrounding the auto industry, including trade relations, is in extreme flux,” Koji Sato, Toyota’s C.E.O., said at a news briefing.

Powell also has little visibility. That has essentially handcuffed the Fed on interest rates. The central bank has signaled that it’s in no rush to act, because lowering rates too soon could risk igniting inflation, just as companies warn that tariffs may scramble their supply chains and force them to raise prices.

On the flip side, staying on the sidelines too long could affect economic growth, threatening the labor market.

“It’s really not at all clear what it is we should do,” Powell said on Wednesday. That wait-and-see position is already irritating Trump. The president renewed his attack, writing on Truth Social that “‘Too Late’ Jerome Powell is a FOOL, who doesn’t have a clue.”

The divide between the markets and the Fed is also growing. Futures traders see another rate cut by July, but many economists aren’t so sure. “If our base case of a steady labor market and rising inflation is correct,” Aditya Bhave, a senior U.S. economist for Bank of America, wrote in a research note on Wednesday, “we don’t see a path to cuts in 2025.”

That uncertainty could take some shine off a big Trump announcement. With the president under pressure to show progress on trade deals, he promised that Thursday’s expected deal with Britain will be “full and comprehensive.” Trade specialists told The Times that they expect it to be more of a “framework” agreement than a finalized deal.

There are many questions about the nature of the accord. Will it cover digital services where the U.S. has a commanding trade surplus with Britain and most European countries? What about the billions of dollars’ worth of Hollywood films and TV productions that are produced in Britain, an outflow that Trump wants to stem via tariffs?

And more broadly, could this be a template for future deals?

What theme parks, and Abu Dhabi, signal about Disney’s succession

Disney reported earnings on Wednesday that handily beat estimates, with positive outlooks for its film and streaming businesses.

But the unveiling of a major theme park in Abu Dhabi underscores the importance of that operation to the media giant’s future — and may offer a clue about who could end up succeeding Bob Iger as C.E.O.

The entertainment giant, which owns ESPN, ABC, Disney+ and Hulu, more notably raised its profit outlook for the year at a time when most companies are revising their estimates for lower growth.

Disney said it expected higher earnings from its TV and streaming businesses, as well as its theme parks, the company’s most lucrative division. Shares jumped more than 10 percent, making Disney one of the S&P 500’s best performing stocks on Wednesday.

Then there’s the Abu Dhabi resort. The resort will be built and fully financed by an Abu Dhabi company, the Miral Group, with Disney overseeing the design and some of the management, according to Iger. Disney will not have any ownership and instead will collect a royalty.

Emphasizing the importance of the initiative, Iger greeted shareholders from Abu Dhabi for the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, announcing that the resort would connect “travelers from the Middle East and Africa, India, Asia, Europe and beyond.”

The resort could be insulated from President Trump’s trade war, including threatened tariffs on films produced overseas, since it’s ultimately a regional play, Brian Wieser, an analyst who runs the consulting firm Madison and Wall, told DealBook. (He added, however, that “travel tourism still faces big risks” and that “American brands face risks.”)

Then there’s the succession angle. Josh D’Amaro, the chair of Disney’s theme parks division, appeared with Iger in an interview on CNBC to discuss the Abu Dhabi theme park. Disneyologists are surely wondering whether the high-profile spot for D’Amaro, along with the strong performance of his division, suggests that he has an edge in the race to replace Iger.

His main internal rival is Dana Walden, the co-chair of Disney’s content business, though the board — led by James Gorman, the former Morgan Stanley C.E.O. — is also reviewing external candidates.

Disney said that it would announce Iger’s successor early next year.

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The British government made faster economic growth its No. 1 mission. But efforts to kick-start it have been repeatedly knocked off course by a global economy lurching from one crisis to another.

On Thursday, British officials appeared to secure a win. The country is set to announce some form of trade deal with the United States that will ease the impact of recent increases in U.S. tariffs.

President Trump said on social media on Thursday that the agreement with Britain “is a full and comprehensive one that will cement the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom for many years to come.”

British officials have been negotiating in Washington for months as they sought to insulate their country from Mr. Trump’s desire to reshape the global trade order. They also wanted to protect an economy that barely avoided a recession at the end of last year and was on course for a relatively strong recovery later this year.

However, officials failed to secure exemptions last month when Mr. Trump hit Britain with the 10 percent “base line” tariffs, which were imposed on America’s trading partners.

Britain is also subject to 25 percent tariffs on cars and steel. And the country’s leaders have been concerned about threatened tariffs on pharmaceuticals and films, two important exports. Like other countries, forecasts for Britain’s economic growth have been slashed because of the trade uncertainty.

The expected deal with the United States will be welcome in Britain for a number of reasons. It’s likely to vindicate overtures that the prime minister, Keir Starmer, has made to the president (including an invitation from King Charles for a state visit) and might overshadow a setback in local elections last week.

The deal could also support certain sectors, including Britain’s auto industry, which was most at risk from high tariffs. Cars make up about 10 percent of the value of British goods exports to the United States. Many of those are luxury cars, like Jaguars, Aston Martins and Bentleys, that are made with custom details in Britain. These automakers have found it economically prohibitive to shift production to the United States and have paused shipments there.

A trade deal is also likely to lift consumer and business sentiment, which have both slumped recently.

But there are limits to how much an agreement would support the British economy as a whole. Although the United States is an important trading partner, trade flows are heavily skewed toward services, with Britain exporting £137 billion worth of services to the United States last year, which were not affected by higher tariffs.

More than 60 percent of businesses reported that they expected U.S. tariffs would have no impact in the next month, according to a recent survey by the Office for National Statistics.

Though Britain has been in trade negotiations with the United States for five years, the deal is unlikely to be a full-blown free-trade agreement that incorporates lowering tariffs across a wide range of goods and increases access to many services, like the trade agreement Britain and India signed this week. An even bigger prize for Britain would be a closer relationship with the European Union, which represents about half of British trade. Some progress on an E.U. deal is expected later this month at a summit in Britain.

The Bank of England cut interest rates on Thursday, lowering them a quarter point to 4.25 percent.

British policymakers have cautiously cut rates since last year over concerns about lingering price pressures and a short-term bump in inflation expected this year. But some had recently emphasized the risk to economic growth from trade uncertainty. Overall, policymakers were divided on this decision. Five members, a majority, voted for the quarter-point cut; two voted to hold and two voted for a larger cut.

Economists have said that the greater threat to Britain is the uncertainty that Mr. Trump’s trade policy has created globally, rather than tariffs on Britain.

As an open economy, Britain is vulnerable to external shocks. So if other major economies such as the European Union, China and the United States fall into recession, it would sap the British economy. The uncertainty is expected to weigh on business investment and consumer spending.

“The center of the U.K. story is not tariffs; it’s domestic factors,” said Benjamin Caswell, an economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which downgraded its forecast for Britain’s economic growth to 1.2 percent this year, predicting weak business confidence and higher cost pressures. Businesses are also facing higher taxes on wages, which went into effect last month and could push up inflation.

The sluggish economic outlook means the government is at risk of being forced to raise taxes or cut public spending this year. That has left businesses wondering what will happen in the fall, which could lead to less investment and hiring.

“Tariffs have engendered a lot of uncertainty, but I don’t think that should take the government off the hook,” Mr. Caswell said.

There has been a mantra spreading among weary corporate executives who are becoming resigned to President Trump’s tariffs while still hoping to avoid the worst of their effects: Ten percent is the new zero.

The statement refers to the 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump put in place on most U.S. imports one month ago. Such a significant increase in U.S. tariffs would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But it no longer seems like such a big deal, compared with the truly large tariffs that Mr. Trump has already imposed or threatened elsewhere.

Mr. Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2 that he was planning tariffs of 10 percent to 60 percent on dozens of America’s trading partners set off a rout in the bond markets and a flight from the U.S. dollar as investors panicked at the prospect of an economically devastating trade war. Mr. Trump also ratcheted up tariffs on China to a minimum of 145 percent amid a trade spat with Beijing, bringing much of the trade between the countries to a halt.

That turmoil appears to have moderated Mr. Trump’s impulses somewhat. The president quickly paused tariffs on most countries, giving them 90 days to negotiate trade deals instead.

Mr. Trump also granted a lucrative exemption from China tariffs for makers of electronics and offered some limited relief for automakers. And he has hinted that he could do more, saying he likes to be “flexible.”

Investors have lapped up any signs of good news, even insubstantial ones. Stock markets have now regained nearly all of the losses they sustained after April 2, buoyed by comments from Trump administration officials that they are working to close trade deals with allies and planning to meet with Chinese counterparts to discuss their standoff.

The speed with which investors have come to accept Mr. Trump’s tariffs reflects an increasing embrace of tariffs as a policy tool. It also shows a decreasing tolerance in America for the predatory trade practices of countries like China, which has dominated global industries and systematically put rival manufacturers around the world out of business.

But it also indicates something about Mr. Trump and his negotiating style. By threatening gigantic tariffs in early April and then walking them back, the president seems to have increased the acceptance, at least in some circles, of the significant tariffs that remain in place.

This is a classic example of the psychological effect known as anchoring, when a certain piece of information, like a high number thrown out in the course of a negotiation, can reset a whole frame of reference.

Sekoul Krastev, a co-founder of the Decision Lab, a company that works with governments and organizations to apply lessons from behavioral science, said the anchoring effect was one of the more rigorous and tested in behavioral sciences. In all types of contexts, researchers have found that by throwing out a large number, they can quickly reset people’s expectations of what is normal and appropriate.

For example, Mr. Krastev said, a car salesman who wants to sell you a $50,000 car will show you an $80,000 one first. But the value doesn’t even have to be related to the decision being made. In experiments, people asked to think about the height of Mount Everest were more willing afterward to spend more on a sofa than they would have spent previously, he said.

“I do think it’s at play,” he said. “Let’s say you set an anchor for really high tariffs — that’s going to make the range of acceptable tariffs much higher than before.”

The truth, of course, is that the tariffs currently in effect still constitute both a major change for global trade and a huge tax increase for the country. The United States still has a 10 percent “universal” tariff in effect on most imports globally, as well as 25 percent tariffs on imported cars, metals and goods from Canada and Mexico. Overall, according to the Budget Lab at Yale, consumers face an average effective tariff rate of 28 percent, the highest since 1901.

Those tariffs may seem manageable compared with triple-digit tariffs now in effect against Chinese products and the double-digit tariffs that have been paused against dozens of other countries. But for some companies, tariffs of 10 to 25 percent are still enough to erase profit margins, stall expansion or hiring plans or even push them out of business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has warned that many small businesses in particular might not survive.

Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles this week, Jane Fraser, the chief executive of Citigroup, said companies could withstand lower tariffs, though trade uncertainty had forced them to pause investment and hiring.

“If it is 10 percent, most of the clients we talk to say, ‘Yeah, we can absorb that,’” she said. “If it is 25 percent, not so much.”

Some of the moves that investors are interpreting as good news are also fairly minor retrenchments in a major increase in trade protectionism. The exception given to automakers last Tuesday, for example, was relatively small, though it sent the price of some automakers’ shares higher that day.

And while Beijing and Washington have agreed to meet to discuss their trade standoff, the countries have a long way to go.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, would meet with Chinese officials this weekend in Geneva, where they will discuss trade and economic matters.

The administration might choose to quickly drop some of its tariffs on China as a good-will gesture once the countries restart negotiations — but tariffs have risen so much that the United States might have to cut them by more than 100 percentage points to meaningfully restart trade.

It is also unclear how much progress can be made on the serious economic disputes the countries have. The Trump administration has criticized China for a bevy of unfair trade practices, as well as for failing to stick to the terms of a trade deal the president negotiated in his first term. China, in return, has called Mr. Trump’s tariffs “illegal and unreasonable.”

Perhaps most important, despite being persuaded on occasion to show flexibility, Mr. Trump is still a self-described “tariff man,” reflexively drawn toward the power of an economic tool that he thinks is an effective way to persuade global companies to bring their factories to the United States.

Mr. Trump continues to find ways to deploy tariffs that few had anticipated. In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, he proposed adding 100 percent tariffs to movies produced outside the country and said Hollywood was dying a “very fast death,” arguing that this threatened U.S. national security. On Monday, the president said that tariffs on pharmaceuticals would be coming in the next few weeks and that he had already decided on the rate.

In a speech on Sunday, Maros Sefcovic, the European Union’s commissioner for trade, said that “more U.S. tariff actions could well be on their way,” pointing to investigations into lumber, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, critical minerals and trucks.

If all those investigations led to tariffs, he said, 97 percent of E.U. exports to the United States would be subject to taxes.

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted that he would preserve the threat of tariffs, no matter what.

Asked if he would take the possibility that some tariffs would be permanent off the table, Mr. Trump demurred.

“No, I wouldn’t do that because if somebody thought they were going to come off the table, why would they build in the United States?” he said.

Jeanna Smialek, Alan Rappeport and Tony Romm contributed reporting.

A’ja Wilson, a center for the Las Vegas Aces, is widely acknowledged as the best player in the Women’s National Basketball Association. She is something like the league’s on-court answer to LeBron James or Michael Jordan.

“I don’t shy away from having conversations with her about being the greatest to ever play,” said Becky Hammon, who has coached the Aces since 2022.

Ms. Wilson was the W.N.B.A.’s Rookie of the Year in 2018, won its Most Valuable Player Award in 2020 and 2022 and won a championship in 2022. But while she racked up achievement after achievement, one marker of basketball stardom eluded her: the shoe.

If Ms. Wilson were playing in the National Basketball Association, she would have long ago gotten a signature shoe, the on-court footwear designed with and for a player. More than two dozen N.B.A. players have them.

For years, marketers largely ignored the women’s game. But Ms. Wilson’s star has risen alongside that of the league she plays in, and in early 2023, Nike finally told her that it planned to create a signature shoe for her.

“I probably cried for a couple of days,” she said.

The plan remained secret, and her fans got angry as Ms. Wilson continued to dominate on the court — winning another championship in 2023 — without any news of a shoe. Fans were happy last May, however, when Nike announced that it would release her signature shoe, the A’One, this month, alongside an apparel collection.

(The year in between gave them even more reasons to be happy: Ms. Wilson became the first player in W.N.B.A. history to score 1,000 points in a season, won a third M.V.P. Award, was named one of Time magazine’s women of the year and had her jersey retired by the University of South Carolina.)

The A’One went on sale on Tuesday, with a “Pink Aura” version, making Ms. Wilson the first Black W.N.B.A. player to have a signature shoe since 2011.

“It’s time for people to have a shoe and see a shoe from someone like me, considering it hasn’t been done in a long, long time and it comes from a Black female athlete in this world,” she said. “I’m grateful.”

The 28-year-old was speaking in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris, at a hotel suite overlooking Le Bon Marché, the famous department store. Her 6-foot-4 frame was dressed in the athletes’ off-court uniform of sweats, with jewelry in her ears and on both sides of her nose. She was there on behalf of Nike. It was men’s fashion week, so outside the hotel, photographers waited behind a rope in case celebrities emerged.

The Rise of the W.N.B.A.

W.N.B.A. players are bigger stars now than they ever were before, arguably with more cultural impact than they had even in the league’s heady early days in the 1990s, when players like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes became household names. Last season, interest in the league spiked, buoyed by the popularity of the rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Brands rushed to play catch-up.

That resurgence has happened in the shoe industry, too, where brands have struggled to monetize products connected to female athletes.

The first W.N.B.A. player to have a signature shoe made for her was Ms. Swoopes in 1995. Nike’s Air Swoopes had a tab on the back that made it easy to put on with the long fingernails she liked to sport. Nike made seven editions of it, the most it has made for any female player to date.

Eight other W.N.B.A. players released signature shoes between 1995 and 2001, according to a database kept by ESPN. In 2005 and 2006, Nike made shoes for Diana Taurasi, who starred at the University of Connecticut, for the U.S. women’s national team and for the Phoenix Mercury. After her shoe, Nike didn’t make another signature shoe with a women’s basketball player until 2023.

Nike wasn’t alone in its hiatus. Between 2011, when Adidas released a product with Candace Parker, and 2022, there were no W.N.B.A. signature shoes, according to ESPN’s database. There just wasn’t much of a market, industry observers say.

Women’s models make up a small portion of the basketball shoe business, said Matt Powell, a retail analyst with BCE Consulting, in part because many female basketball players prefer wearing a men’s shoe.

“It costs a tremendous amount of money to develop a shoe and then to build that shoe,” Mr. Powell said. “If sales are not going to be huge, and that is the history of what we’ve seen, any brand is like, ‘How much of an investment can we make here?’”

That all started to change when women’s college basketball became more popular. Social media allowed players to create personal brands, and in 2021 the National Collegiate Athletic Association shifted its rules to allow athletes to capitalize on name, image and likeness (N.I.L.) deals, increasing their visibility with commercials and other advertisements.

Broadcast channels helped, too: ESPN began televising the N.C.A.A. women’s tournament in 1996 but did not air the championship game on its broadcast network, ABC, until 2023. Ms. Reese’s Louisiana State team defeated Ms. Clark’s Iowa for that title, drawing nearly 10 million viewers.

The 2024 championship game drew 18.9 million viewers, beating the men’s championship game by about four million, according to Nielsen. That interest has trickled up into the W.N.B.A. as the players moved there, too.

In July 2023, Nielsen reported a rise in interest generally in women’s sports. It also said surveyed viewers were frustrated by a lack of access to live women’s sports and a lack of media coverage.

“Sneaker companies are always reactive to the public, and they’re always responsive to what they perceive as popular at a given time,” said Brandon Wallace, an assistant professor at Indiana University who has studied the industry.

Sabrina Ionescu’s shoe came out in 2023, her fourth W.N.B.A. season, all with the New York Liberty. It was Nike’s first unisex shoe and is one of the most popular shoes for N.B.A. players to wear during games. Players have said they like its look, which includes intricate embroidery and customizable colors, and how it feels on their feet. The structure is similar to Kobe Bryant’s shoe, which revolutionized the industry.

Nick Depaula, a journalist who covers the sneaker industry, said he expected Ms. Wilson’s to be popular among the men as well. In part because of its design — he cited “the grip and the support and the lightweight element” — and in part out of solidarity.

“She’s worn LeBrons for years and supported his line,” Mr. Depaula said, referring to the Los Angeles Lakers superstar, who also has a deal with Nike. “There’s an element of players excited for her personally.”

Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat, who has been romantically connected to Ms. Wilson, has already worn her shoe in a game, before its release.

Mr. Powell, the industry analyst, also said he believed that Ms. Wilson’s shoe would do well among women’s basketball shoes, in part because of the heightened interest in the W.N.B.A. and in part because of its relatively low price. Adult sizes are $110 and children’s $90, compared with $190 for Mr. James’s signature shoes or $130 for the Sabrina 2.

The launch of Ms. Wilson’s shoe has not come without controversy.

In April 2024, when news broke that Nike was planning a signature shoe for Ms. Clark, then heading into her rookie season with the Indiana Fever, it set off a firestorm.

The news of Ms. Wilson’s shoe wasn’t public yet. Her fans wondered if racism played a part in giving Ms. Clark, who is white, a shoe before the much more professionally accomplished Ms. Wilson, especially since the only other active players with signature shoes — Ms. Ionescu and Breanna Stewart, a two-time M.V.P. — are both white.

Others noted Ms. Clark’s exceptional popularity: She was selling out arenas and causing opponents to move their games to bigger venues. Games she played in set viewership records.

Strangers debated Ms. Wilson’s merits. Some said that her personality wasn’t charming enough, or that her style of play lacked charisma. Frontcourt players are sometimes thought to be less marketable because their style of play is often less flashy.

“It was very hard for me to navigate, only because in the back of my mind I’m like, ‘Yes, I know a shoe’s coming, but I really have nothing to share,’” Ms. Wilson said. “And to constantly be in those conversations and constantly having my name dragged through the mud and having my résumé dragged through the mud is really hard.”

When the shoe was announced, Nike leaned into the controversy: Ms. Wilson wore a sweatshirt that had “Of Course I Have A Shoe Dot Com” written on it.

Now some writers and fans are wondering why Ms. Clark isn’t getting her shoe alongside Ms. Wilson.

A prominent Substack sports columnist, Ethan Strauss, suggested that Nike was delaying Ms. Clark’s shoe because of Ms. Wilson’s coming product, calling it “corporate malpractice” to not cash in on Ms. Clark’s popularity.

Tanya Hvizdak, Nike’s vice president of global sports marketing, said Nike was not delaying Ms. Clark’s shoe for Ms. Wilson. She said creating a signature shoe took time and disagreed with the characterization that it had taken too long for Ms. Wilson to be awarded a shoe.

“What I would say is we’ve been supporting our women’s basketball athletes for 40 years,” Ms. Hvizdak said.

Mr. Powell, the analyst, said Nike’s recent struggles as a business and its overhaul last year were instructive as well.

With Nike’s stock price falling and cultural relevance slipping, its board announced the abrupt retirement of its chief executive, John Donahue, in September and said Elliott Hill would replace him. Mr. Hill had spent 32 years with the company before retiring in 2020.

“I think we would have seen the Caitlin shoe a lot faster if Elliott had been at the helm,” Mr. Powell said. “His predecessor just did not appreciate product and the value of endorsement.”

Nike is expected to announce a shoe soon with Paige Bueckers, the first pick in this year’s W.N.B.A. draft. Ms. Reese, who plays for the Chicago Sky, has a shoe in the works with Reebok and has already released lifestyle shoes for day-to-day wear.

A Move Into Fashion

It confuses the people close to Ms. Wilson that marketing opportunities have come more slowly than her basketball accolades.

“She’s a supportive person,” said Sydney Colson, a teammate for the last three seasons and one of Ms. Wilson’s closest friends. “And not even just superstars, but people like that are just rare to come by.”

Ms. Wilson decorates the lockers of her teammates for their birthdays and buys a cake celebrating Pride for her gay teammates each year. Last year’s Pride cake was pink with disco balls, rainbow frosting and lettering that spelled, cheekily, “Hooray you gay.”

Ms. Wilson is also outspoken. When Mr. James signed a $154 million contract with the Lakers during her rookie year, she posted a tweet saying the W.N.B.A.’s best were hoping just to reach $1 million. At the time, the league’s top players made salaries of $115,500. Ms. Wilson will make $200,000 this season, which opens on May 16.

Nike and Ms. Wilson declined to comment on the size of their overall deal, but The Wall Street Journal and The Athletic have reported that Ms. Clark’s Nike deal is worth $28 million over eight years.

Ms. Wilson has not shied away from discussing the impact of race on why she is sometimes called not marketable.

“It’s 100 percent about race,” she said. “And it’s one of those things where we can sit there and say that all the time, but there’s going to always be someone that’s like, ‘Well, no you’re just making it about race.’”

As new opportunities have come her way Ms. Wilson has used them to cultivate her image. She has especially leaned into the fashion world’s recent embrace of her; Vogue and GQ, for instance, featured her last month in a spread related to the Met Gala.

The collection with Nike includes single-leg leggings like the ones that Ms. Wilson popularized in the W.N.B.A., made in hot pink, and a hot pink sweatshirt with satin-lined hood (because her mother got tired of seeing her wearing a bonnet at the airport, Ms. Wilson said).

When she went on tour last year for her book, “Dear Black Girls,” her team approached the designer Sergio Hudson, who has dressed Michelle Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Beyoncé, Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez, to outfit her.

He knew Ms. Wilson was stylish, and he liked the idea of supporting a W.N.B.A. player, especially one from his home state, South Carolina.

“When I saw her walk out in the first outfit we made for her, I was like, ‘This girl is a star,’” Mr. Hudson said.

“At that time it wasn’t how it is now,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago, but it’s like overnight things have shifted and the W.N.B.A. girls are prime celebrities, and everybody wants to dress them.”