Serena Williams Reveals Why Inner Beauty Is 'Super Important' While Celebrating Wyn Beauty Milestone (Exclusive)

As Serena Williams marks one year as a beauty entrepreneur, the WYN Beauty creator is sharing the sources of her confidence.

When it comes to feeling beautiful, Williams says she has her parents to thank for the constant reinforcement.

"I feel like being in the public eye and growing up literally in front of a camera and playing sports in front of millions of people just takes a lot of confidence that you just have to have inside of yourself," she tells PEOPLE exclusively at a Shopify mobile pop-up event for the brand in Los Angeles on Friday, April 11.

"I feel early on my parents always taught me that 'you are beautiful' and 'you are gorgeous,' and I kind of just always lived with that," Williams adds. "I think inner beauty is super important, and that it's more important than anything else."

The 23-time Grand Slam winner shared that one lesson she's learned from founding WYN Beauty is persistence.

"It takes a lot of resilience," she says. "I feel like I knew I had that because of my sports background, but I feel like now I have that even more, because I'm really resilient as a founder, as an entrepreneur and understanding of the time and dedication that goes into building a brand."

The Shopify partnership comes as Wyn Beauty enters its second year. When the tennis icon debuted the brand with its "Wyn chartreuse" hue, she told PEOPLE how the venture stayed true to her and her career.

“I thought the tennis ball green packaging... made sense and is authentic to my story," Williams says. "[The color] represents a lot of energy to me when you’re holding it in your hands. It means a lot to me because I will always love tennis.”

The pop up will feature a shade-matching station where fans can find their skin tint color among her 36 offerings. In 2024, Williams told PEOPLE how important it was to her to create an inclusive shade range.

“When I would travel to places 20 years ago before 40 shades of foundation existed, I had to be the biggest advocate for my makeup. I couldn’t rely on makeup artists to have my color, and I had to learn how to do my own makeup,” she shared. “ I never found a skin tint that I truly loved and actually worked, so I knew I needed to create something.” 

Williams naturally stocks her makeup bag with her own innovations. But if she has to choose her MVPs, she calls on her Nothing to See Concealer for dark circles from "dealing with all these kids" and her Taking Shape Brow Shading Pencil which has a spoolie for grooming on one end. "I love my brows. They're always untamed, like wild! So I try to tame them a little bit.

As for what fans can look forward to from WYN Beauty down the line, William says, "We just want to elevate a lot of our products." Each product — like the award-winning Big Vision Lengthening & Defining Tube Mascara and Glideline Longwear Eye Pencil — will get their moment to shine.

"We have so many wonderful things," William says of WYN, noting that she and the minds behind the company plan to "really single [the products] out and talk about how special they are."