Behind Trophy Daughter is a story shaped by sport, family, ambition, and a personal approach to fashion. Founded after a journey from competitive soccer to design, the brand creates pieces for women who know their worth and dress with intention. In this interview, its founder reflects on the experiences that shaped her, the meaning behind the name, and her vision for a modern wardrobe built around quality, confidence, and individuality.
By Kinsley Ah-Chion
Photographed along the sunlit shores of Cannes, Samantha Bruder White, Founder and CEO of Trophy Daughter, wears a floral Zimmermann gown paired with a Swarovski bracelet by Oliver Weber and a diamond ring by Janet Heller Fine Jewelry.
1. For those discovering Trophy Daughter for the first time, tell us about the brand. How did it all begin, and who is the Trophy Daughter woman you create for?
It all began when I was a young girl. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it felt like my world was falling apart. Soccer was already a huge part of my life. My two sisters played competitively as well, and between practice, private training, and traveling for games, the sport consumed most of my time. I remember telling my mom that I thought I should stop playing so I could spend more time with her. Her answer is something that has fueled me ever since. She said: “Watching you play soccer brings me so much joy. Never give up.” And even through treatment, she never missed a single game.
During that time, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who helped take care of us. She taught me how to sew. I watched her spend countless hours knitting beautiful scarves and garments. That is when my love for design and fashion first began, quietly, in those afternoons, while the rest of the world felt uncertain.
My mom ended up beating cancer. And I ended up earning a full ride to USC to play soccer. By the end of my senior year, my parents sat me down and asked about my next steps. My older sister was going to be a doctor. My younger sister was going into investment banking. What are you going to do? My answer was simple: I am a Trophy Daughter.
Soccer had been my entire identity for as long as I could remember. I had spent decades trying to be the best player I could be. When that chapter closed, it was terrifying, but I knew I had to find my next passion, or better yet, fuel a different fire. That fire was fashion. And Trophy Daughter was the only name it could ever have.
Trophy Daughter was created for the woman who does not need a job title to know who she is or what she is worth. She understands that what she puts on her body matters and it should make her feel confident and proud to be exactly who she is.
2. Your story begins with a background in competitive soccer. How did being an athlete shape the woman and ultimately the founder you became?
Being an athlete taught me one thing above everything else: that results come from follow-through. Not from talent alone, not from being naturally gifted, but from showing up every single day and doing the work even when no one is watching. I trained through an entire pandemic without taking a single week off. I was just wired that way. Discipline was never something I had to find. It was something the sport built into me before I even understood what it was.
Playing D1 soccer at USC and winning a national championship were incredible achievements, but what those years actually gave me was a standard. A standard for how hard you work, how much you care, and what it means to truly commit to something. When I stepped away from the sport and into building Trophy Daughter, I brought all of that with me. The ability to stay focused on a long game. The threshold for discomfort. The understanding that the vision you have on day one is only as good as the follow-through it takes to get there.
Athletics also taught me something quieter: that identity is not the same as achievement. I was a soccer player for nineteen years. I won. I competed. I gave everything I had. And then it was over, and I had to figure out who I was without it. That experience is actually at the heart of Trophy Daughter. The brand exists for women who understand that who you are runs deeper than what you do. I lived that lesson on a soccer field before I ever put it into words.
Dress: Zimmermann
3. What has been the most challenging part of building Trophy Daughter and what has been the most exciting or rewarding part of the journey so far?
The most challenging part has been doing all of it at once. Finding the right manufacturers is a longer and lonelier process than anyone tells you. There is no roadmap, and getting it wrong costs you everything you care about in the product. At the same time I have been learning to tell this brand’s story to a new generation on platforms like TikTok, where the rules are completely different and the storytelling has to be immediate and real. And I did all of it while becoming a mother. My son was born in February 2025 and I launched Trophy Daughter in December 2025. There was no perfect time to do any of it. There never is. You just decide and you go.
But the most rewarding part, and this is something I feel deeply, is knowing that I am creating clothing that is not hindering a woman’s health. I grew up in sports performance wear. My entire athletic life was spent in synthetic fabrics. In my senior year of college I was diagnosed with PCOS and Hashimoto’s, and it completely changed the way I looked at everything I was putting on my body. I started reading labels differently. I started understanding how certain fibers interact with hormones, with the endocrine system, with how a woman actually feels in her skin.
What I found was that this conversation is almost never happening in fashion. So many of us go the extra mile to eat well, exercise, and supplement ourselves to feel our best and then go and put on a 100% polyester sweatshirt. I wanted to create the clothing I could not always find. Our loungewear is 100% cotton, and as we move into the contemporary space I want to continue reaching for materials that are good for your body wherever possible. It is not a trend for me. It is personal. And I think that is exactly the kind of thing a brand should be built on.
4. The name Trophy Daughter immediately creates a strong image. What does being a “Trophy Daughter” mean to you personally?
Growing up in such a highly competitive household, with three sisters who were all high achievers in their own right, there was always this unspoken pressure, this deep and very real need to become something great. I think a lot of people carry that. The desire to make something of yourself, not just for your own sake but for the people who raised you and sacrificed for you and believed in you before you believed in yourself.
The name actually came out of a dinner. I said the words “Trophy Daughter” in this sly, joking way, the kind of thing you say and everyone laughs and moves on. But I did not move on. I sat with it and I realized what I had actually said. And I knew immediately that I could not let it go.
To me, being a Trophy Daughter means becoming a woman your parents could be proud of, not because of what you do, but because of who you are and the way you carry yourself through the world. It is about character. It is about how you treat people, how you show up, how you follow through on what you say you are going to do. The trophy is not an award. It is the person you choose to become.
5. There is an interesting tension in the name: achievement and ambition on one side, femininity and softness on the other. Was that contrast intentional?
It was not intentional. It was just true. As an athlete I spent so many years wanting to be the strongest, the fastest, the loudest one on the field. That competitiveness grew a very masculine side of me. I was driven and physical and completely focused on performance. But the moment I stepped off the field, I was out shopping with my mom in skirts and dresses, going to high tea, loving every so-called girly thing there is.
Those two sides of me were never in conflict. They just lived side by side, which I think is actually the most honest thing about Trophy Daughter. The brand holds that same tension because I do. A woman can be fierce and soft, driven and feminine, ambitious and completely at ease, all at once.
By Trophy Daughter
6. Do you think women today are redefining what success and ambition can look like? How does Trophy Daughter fit into that conversation?
Absolutely. I think what is shifting is that success is becoming more personal and less prescribed. Women are no longer measuring themselves against one universal definition. A woman who walks away from a career to raise her family is redefining success. A woman who builds a brand from scratch while raising a newborn is redefining it. I lived that. I launched Trophy Daughter ten months after having my son, not because the timing was perfect, but because I had something real to say and I was not going to wait.
Trophy Daughter was not born from a business plan. It came from a diagnosis, from afternoons spent at my grandmother’s side learning to sew, from a line said at a dinner table that I could not let go of. That is what ambition looks like when it is truly yours. And that is exactly the woman this brand is for. The one who has stopped waiting for permission to define what her success looks like.
7. What do you want a woman to feel when she puts on a Trophy Daughter piece?
My mom really inspires me when I think about this. It can be the most casual day and she walks in looking completely put together, not because she is trying to impress anyone, but because that is just who she is. She never dresses down for the occasion. She always shows up as herself. Watching her growing up, I understood something about getting dressed that I could not fully articulate until now: the women who look the best are almost always the ones dressing entirely for themselves.
I want women to wear Trophy Daughter and feel confident in who they are and proud of where they came from. Not performing, not dressing for a room, just completely at ease in their own skin.
And I think our contemporary collection launching this November will bring that feeling to life in a whole new way. I want the Trophy Daughter community to experience what this brand means beyond loungewear and see what it looks like when that same intention moves into elevated, contemporary pieces. That is a moment I have been building toward and I cannot wait for people to see it.
8. Trophy Daughter describes itself as transforming comfort into quiet luxury. What does “quiet luxury” mean to you beyond the trend itself?
Trends come and go. Quiet luxury as a moment will pass like everything else does. But what it points to is something that does not pass: the desire to own fewer, better things. Pieces that earn their place in your wardrobe and carry you through your life. That is not a trend. That is a standard.
I am not interested in making something you wear for a season. I want to make the piece you reach for ten years from now. That commitment starts with what the fabric actually is. Materials that last, that soften with wear, that improve over time. That is what I want Trophy Daughter to be, something that gets better the longer you have it.
9. Your pieces are deliberately understated, yet they have a distinct identity. How do you create something recognizable without relying heavily on logos or obvious branding?
Through proportion and feeling. A Trophy Daughter piece should make a woman feel a specific way: grounded, considered, a little untouchable. That feeling is what becomes recognizable over time. It is not something you can put on a label. It lives in how the fabric moves, in where the seam sits, in a silhouette that is just slightly more elevated than what you expected. When you can make someone feel something consistently across different pieces and different seasons, that is the identity. Everything else is just branding.
10. The brand feels polished and sensual, but never overly provocative. How do you define femininity within the world of Trophy Daughter?
Femininity in the world of Trophy Daughter goes back to the same place everything does: being who you are and being confident in that. Every woman who wears Trophy Daughter wears it differently, within her own style and her own life. That is not a problem to solve. That is exactly the point. That individuality is what makes her unique.
I do not think femininity is a look. It is not a silhouette or a heel height or how much skin you show. It is the confidence of a woman who has decided who she is and is not looking for anyone’s approval of it. Being feminine is being strong. It is knowing your worth. It is less about how you look and more about how you feel. That is the woman Trophy Daughter is for.
Dress: Zimmermann
11. How much of your own personality and personal style can we find in Trophy Daughter’s collections?
A lot, and I think you will really see that come through in the upcoming collections, which I am genuinely so excited about. The contemporary pieces dropping this fall are what my sisters would steal from my closet. That has always been my personal test. My sisters and I have shared clothes our whole lives, so if something is not good enough to be taken, it is not good enough to exist.
The loungewear came from a different place. It was about taking something I live in every day and making it in a better fiber, with more intention behind it. Simple as that. It was the beginning. The contemporary collection is where you really start to see my full point of view come through, and we are just getting started.
12. What has been the most important lesson you have learned since launching Trophy Daughter?
That you cannot do this alone. Finding the right people, the right manufacturers, the right support matters more than I ever expected. You have to trust the people around you and build carefully.
And that done is better than perfect. I launched ten months after having my son. I did not wait for the right moment. I just started. The right moment does not come. You create it.
13. Looking internationally, what would global growth mean for Trophy Daughter? Where do you see the brand in five years?
It would mean so much to be recognized globally, to grow the community and find more Trophy Daughters. That woman exists everywhere. She is not defined by where she lives but by how she carries herself and the fact that she has always known her worth.
In five years I want Trophy Daughter to be a fully realized contemporary label with a community of women around the world who share the same values: dressing with intention, investing in pieces that last, and never needing a title to define who they are. We are just getting started and I genuinely cannot wait for what comes next.
14. And finally, complete the sentence: “A Trophy Daughter is a woman who…”
“…doesn’t need a job title to know who she is or what she is worth. What she puts on her body matters and it should make her feel confident and proud to be exactly who she is.”
Credits
Brand @trophydaughterofficial Trophy Daughter
Founder Samantha Bruder White @samanthabruderwhite
Mohamed Ahmed – Photographer @mohamed_vivid
Dio Coelho – Hair and Makeup @diocoelhomua
Zimmermann – Dress @zimmermann
Adele Khalilzade @khalilzadele producer
PR Mariia Borovenska @mariborovenskaya