FAYE WEBSTER BUILT A YO-YO EMPIRE FROM A STOCKING STUFFER

A yo-yo arrived in Faye Webster's Christmas stocking sometime before a tour. No instructions, no expectation. Just a stocking stuffer from her mom that would, within a few years, pull together world-ranked yo-yo masters, a 100-person chess bracket co-signed by Tyler, the Creator, and Atlanta's first-ever LiveBall tennis championship. The argument here is simple: Webster has built the most genuinely eccentric recurring cultural event in independent music, and she did it entirely on her own terms, paid for and organized by herself. This is not a brand activation. It is not a sponsored experience. It is a woman who got obsessed with a toy and refused to stop. ## From Zellerbach to Atlanta: How the Invitational Grew in Two Years After a wildly successful ping-pong tournament in 2023, Webster hosted the inaugural Faye Webster YoYo Invitational in Berkeley. The first edition, September 28, 2024, held at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, collided 20-something fans of dreamy indie vocals with the niche competitive yo-yo community. The performance focused on freestyle exhibitions from a dozen award-winning yo-yoers, many of whom had placed in national, international, or world competitions. Faye Webster and Brain Dead put on the event in Berkeley, California, featuring many of the world's top yo-yo players on the big stage combined with musical performances. Nobody was sure what they were watching. Nobody, from Pitchfork to YoYoExpert, seemed sure what Webster had planned. That uncertainty was the whole point. Year two moved the event home. Now called simply the Faye Webster Invitational, spanning two days from October 25 to 26, the event expanded its scope to highlight LiveBall tennis and chess alongside yo-yo. The event opened on October 25 at the Sharon Lester Tennis Center in Piedmont Park with the first-ever Faye Webster LVBL Tennis Championship. People flew in from Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. ## The Chess Bracket That Brought Tyler, the Creator to Atlanta The chess tournament is where the Invitational crossed from niche into genuine cultural conversation. The event brought together 100 competitors in a Swiss-System with knockout format, taking place on the morning of Sunday, October 26 at The Eastern. The event also hosted a yo-yo tourney, tennis tourney, and mini-concert. Tyler, the Creator joined Faye Webster at her Invitational in Atlanta, a weekend built around her real-life hobbies. The chess bracket ended up stealing the show when Tyler, Lionel Boyce, and a few others actually joined in instead of just being guests. Tyler's passion for chess had already made its way into his design work; he created a travel chess set for his Louis Vuitton collaboration, complete with hand-carved pieces. Two chess obsessives, one Atlanta venue, one bracket. That is the connective tissue nobody else is covering: the Invitational is quietly becoming the place where Atlanta's most creative people compete outside their own fields. "At the chess and tennis events, which had nothing to do with music, people were like, 'I don't know you, but thank you for putting this on because I love chess,'" Webster says. That sentence matters. The event is pulling people who have no interest in indie folk. It is building community around competence and curiosity, which is harder than it sounds and almost nobody in music is trying. ## The Pigeon, the Jonny, and Four Custom Yo-Yos Later Webster is not a casual enthusiast with a prop. She is deep in the craft, and the product trail proves it. She designed and produced a personal yo-yo called the Pigeon, named after one of her songs. Collectors on YoYoExpert forums hunt the "Pigeon" collaboration with SF Yoyo and the Faye Webster x Brain Dead Magic yo-yo dubbed the "Hobby Club." These are not merch table impulse buys. They are sought-after throws in a community that takes equipment seriously. The 2025 Invitational debuted Webster's fourth custom yo-yo. Four custom designs across a few years is a product line, not a hobby sidebar. The origin story is deceptively simple. Webster explained in a 2021 interview how she first got into yo-yo: "I just got one for Christmas, just as like a sh*tty stocking stuffer. It was right before we went on tour, so I just brought it not thinking that I'd actually use it every day. It wasn't really until I found other players online and connected with them and actually saw what it could escalate to." The tipping point was a person, not an algorithm. The interest was sparked by meeting competition player Zion Wilson Chambers. "[Chambers] showed me insane tricks I didn't know were possible," Webster recalls. "That was the tipping point. I'll go through phases with things, and I won't stop until it's perfected or I'm totally obsessed with it." Her other hobbies include Pokémon and yo-yo; she has attended the World Yo-Yo Contest. She also attended the World YoYo Contest in Cleveland. This is someone doing the work, not just wearing the aesthetic. ## What the Invitational Actually Proves About Independent Artist Ecosystems Here is where it gets structurally interesting. The Invitational was paid for and organized by Webster herself. No brand co-sign required, no festival infrastructure. Webster performed a few tricks at the Invitational, which she says was her first time yo-yoing on stage. She is still learning in public. That is rare. Webster considers tennis, chess, and yo-yo to be therapeutic activities. "They're all I think about when I'm doing them," she says. The therapeutic framing is not incidental. The Invitational is essentially a structured version of how Webster survives touring: the Atlanta singer has kept yo-yoing amid her rising artistic success, selling yo-yos as concert merch and trying out yo-yo tricks between sets. Compare this to how most artists at Webster's level monetize their personality. They license it. They license their name to a product they do not actually use. Webster is doing the inverse: she uses the product first, gets genuinely good at it, builds a community around it, then makes the product and the event. That sequencing is the reason the yo-yo community respects her. "The event was such a cool way to celebrate yo-yo and the no rules, no winners, non-contest setting led to some amazing performances. Shoutout Faye for being cool and repping yo-yo," wrote one YoYoExpert forum member after the 2024 Berkeley show. The 2025 edition ran alongside her "An Evening with Faye Webster" tour. That tour included a hometown stop at the Atlanta Symphony Hall on October 28, before heading west for shows at Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 1 and Oakland's Paramount Theatre on November 5. Symphony hall one week, yo-yo showcase the next. The range is not a contradiction. It is the whole point of who she is. If the crowd walked into Zellerbach as fans of Webster, they left as new fans of yo-yo. That conversion is the metric that matters. Not ticket sales. Not merch revenue. The fact that a competitive yo-yo forum is posting event recaps because of a singer-songwriter from Atlanta means something has genuinely crossed over. The Invitational is now two years old and already has a format that larger festivals spend decades trying to manufacture: real stakes, real skill, and a host who actually cares about all three disciplines. Expect year three to add a fourth.