From Pawn To Phenomenon: Ilya Merenzon on Creative Storytelling and Growing a Global Chess Movement
- by The it.com Domains Team
Table of contents
From reimagining 500-year-old traditions to floating his company on the London Stock Exchange, the World Chess CEO Ilya Merenzon explains the creative gambits that turned a classic board game into a modern lifestyle brand.
The Opening
it.com Domains: Let’s start at move one: What first convinced you that chess – an age-old game everyone “knows” – still had an unexplored niche big enough for a new company?
Ilya Merenzon: Despite being 500 years old, chess was behaving like a startup. It had millions of users – but no brand. No platform. No story. It was wildly popular – schools, bars, Twitch – and yet, it felt like an open runway. When we first looked at it, chess was just about to land on smartphones. It defined centuries of thought, but it didn’t have an app icon. That tension – between permanence and total reinvention – was the gap we walked into.
it.com Domains: Before funding or formal plans, how did you capture the emotion of that idea – mood-boards, playlists, sketchbooks? What early signals told you there was a community waiting to be galvanised?
IM: We didn’t know what we had. It felt important, but it was raw – no shape, no center. So we hired Pentagram and asked them to define what chess must look like in the 21st century. And they did. What they gave us was a visual system that sits somewhere between a church, a Nobel Prize, and an esports cup. That was the breakthrough. Suddenly chess wasn’t dusty – it was sacred, serious, and competitive. And right then, we saw the signals: Reddit threads with 5,000 comments, niche YouTubers hitting millions of views, Brooklyn parks packed around boards. Chess was happening. It just needed an altar.
it.com Domains: World Chess events look more like fashion shows than tournaments. What were your visual references when you set that aesthetic?
IM: We wanted consistency and style – something that made the event unmistakably stand out. So we used design not just as decoration, but as strategy. And somewhere along the way, we ended up in a situation where chess wasn’t just catching up to other sports – it was showing them how it should be done.
The Middlegame
it.com Domains: You often talk about “chess as culture.” How did that framing guide your early messaging and pitches?
IM: The pitch was easy. Every decade crowns its icons – the fastest, the strongest, the richest. We’re here to decide who’s the smartest. That was the line. Chess wasn’t just a game, it was the cultural territory of intellect. So we treated it like that from day one. The messaging wasn’t “play now,” it was “join the defining conversation of the decade.” That shift – from sport to symbol – changed everything.
it.com Domains: The first big leap was hosting the 2016 Championship in New York. What was the creative brief to make it feel fresh?
IM: Make it feel like the coolest private club in the world – for a month – where everyone’s invited. That was the brief. No lanyards, no stale branding, no dusty ceremony. We wanted velvet rope energy without the velvet rope. A place where you’d run into a grandmaster, a tech founder, a model, and a kid from Brooklyn all watching the same endgame. Chess deserved an atmosphere. So we built one.
it.com Domains: Many founders struggle with “build it and they will come.” What tactics moved the needle in those early months? What role did storytelling play in shifting public perception?
IM: Chess was already huge. It was like stumbling onto a startup with millions of users but no real product – no brand, no UX, no story. So instead of building from zero, we focused on shaping what was already there. We turned players into characters. We showed backstage. The tension. The rituals. Suddenly it wasn’t just about the moves – it was about the minds. That’s what shifted perception. Chess didn’t need to be reinvented. It needed to be seen.
The Endgame
it.com Domains: World Chess quickly blended offline prestige (FIDE world championships) with digital content. How did your website help bridge those two worlds for fans?
IM: In the book I’m writing, I call this the “velvet rope meets Wi-Fi” problem. Chess had all this inherited gravitas – the World Championship, players in suits, press conferences with bottled water lined up like missiles. And then suddenly, the same audience buying match tickets was also watching Netflix on three screens. The website was the hinge. We streamed the matches like a Netflix show, made the sets shoppable like Supreme drops, and eventually turned it into a place where you could play against someone in Jakarta at 3 a.m. But we didn’t have to work hard – people who play online already built a community, we just had to join the party and actually play by their rules as well.
it.com Domains: If you were starting from scratch today, what one positioning move would you repeat – and what would you do totally differently?
IM: I’d repeat the decision to treat design as strategy, not decoration. That’s in the DNA of World Chess – we worked with Pentagram on the redesign of the pieces, and it’s the reason chess suddenly looked like something you post on Instagram.
What I’d do differently is the order of operations: I would start with digital and let physical orbit around it. In 2016 we still thought clubs and stagecraft were the center of gravity. Now I’d say the phone is the club, and the venue is the afterparty.
it.com Domains: Finally, what advice would you give founders searching for their own underserved niche but worried that the market looks “too traditional to reinvent”? What’s your “opening repertoire” for launching – domain search, MVP, first 100 superfans – when budget is tight but ambition is grand?
IM: This is literally what my book is about: how a game that people assumed was untouchable – old men, Soviet cafeterias, cold coffee – got rebranded into a global startup. If the market feels “too traditional,” it’s probably begging for reinvention. My own repertoire goes like this:
- MVP: build something small but with authority — even if it’s duct-taped together, it should look inevitable.
- First 100 superfans: find them, name them, spoil them. They’re your unpaid marketing department.
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