From posting for fun to building a brand, Livvy Dunne shares how NIL transformed her influence into real opportunity in the latest Boardroom Cover Story.
Before NIL, Livvy Dunne was already building something; she just didn’t know what it could become. At LSU, the audience was there, the influence was real, but the opportunity wasn’t. Athletes had visibility without ownership, reach without reward. Looking back, she sums it up plainly in Boardroom’s April Cover Story: “LSU has always had athletes with star power, and they were never able to capitalize off their star power and their NIL.”
As a freshman, she was part of that gap. She was posting, growing, showing up online in a way that felt natural, not strategic. There was no business plan behind it, no long-term play. “I didn’t really care because I just loved to do social media,” she says. The idea that it could turn into something bigger hadn’t fully registered yet.
That changed in 2021, when the rules finally did.
The shift wasn’t immediate in a business sense; it was personal first. For so long, even the smallest perks were off-limits. Then suddenly, they weren’t. “My freshman year, I wasn’t able to take a free sweatshirt,” she says, a detail that now feels almost absurd given what NIL has become. When the rules opened up, that restriction disappeared overnight. And in that moment, the change felt tangible. “And I took that sweatshirt.”
It sounds small, but it marked a turning point, proof that everything was different now. From there, the possibilities expanded quickly. What had once been just a passion started to carry real value. Still, she didn’t rush it. She took her time, learning what this new landscape meant and how to move within it.
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Then came a moment that made it all real. A trip to New York, her own money, a sense of independence that hadn’t existed before NIL. “My first shopping spree in New York was when I, I think I was 19 in 2022,” she says. It wasn’t just about spending; it was about earning, about seeing the direct result of something she had built herself.
“I went to the Christian Lubitan store. I went to the Jimmy Choo store, and I got myself two pairs of shoes.”
For Dunne, NIL wasn’t just a policy change. It was the moment influence turned into agency, and when something she once did for fun became the foundation of a business.
Be sure to catch the full Cover Story conversation with Dunne here.
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