How Big Is Fashion's Pickleball Opportunity?

For brands and retailers, is America's fastest-growing sport worth the investment?

America has a case of pickleball fever.

An unlikely hybrid between tennis, ping pong and badminton, the once-obscure racquet game is now the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. More than 36.5 million people played pickleball from August 2021 to August 2022, according to a January report by the Association of Pickleball Professionals. A reported 14% of Americans picked up a paddle at least once in that 12-month period.

Among the remaining 86% of Americans who have yet to make their way onto a pickleball court, there may be some confusion as to what all the fuss is about. But fashion — always quick to hop on that which is buzzy and new — is betting that they'll come around.

A growing legion of high-end retailers have begun stocking glossy, design-forward pickleball sets alongside Jonathan Adler poker decks and Baccarat checker boards. Elsewhere in the fashion ecosystem are brands releasing pickleball lines of their own, as a cheeky, dialed-down take on tenniscore.

Though pickleball is not quite nearing absolute ubiquity, it's not exactly the eccentric activity it was even two years ago. And fashion loves a bandwagon, even if it discreetly jumps off that bandwagon when the trend cycle comes back around. (See: "normcore," which, for about two years, had much of SoHo dressing like "middle-aged, middle-American tourists.") For brands and retailers in the industry, is a phenomenon like pickleball worth the investment?

Before pickleball players started commandeering cities' public tennis courts, it was an accessible, if niche game most popular among older adults. As of 2021, people aged 55 and up comprised its largest population of players, with participants often thriving well into their 80s or older. A 2015 Time profile of Justin Maloof, the chief operating officer of the USA Pickleball Association, even described accounts of people deciding where to retire based on the local pickleball scene.

But the sport is catching on across younger demographics, too, with pickleball's average age now coming in at roughly 38, down from 41 in 2020. This has been good for business: Its signature professional tournament, the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) Tour, has a bevy of sponsors, from financial institutions to alcohol brands; this January, it was acquired by the owner of the National Hockey League's Carolina Hurricanes team.

View the original article to see embedded media.

Among widening circles, pickleball has been described as "easy to learn," "inexpensive" and, most interestingly, "addictive." But what about "stylish"? With its built-in similarities to other country-club-beloved racquet sports like tennis, badminton and squash, it has done well to align itself to their vintage-era visual touchpoints, too — think flippy pleated skirts and polo collars that radiate that whole Hyannis Port, clambake, "summer-as-a-verb" thing.

"It's an easy sport to pick up and get into," says Yang-Yi Goh, a style editor at GQ. "It shares a lot of DNA with tennis, but requires a lot less skill and athleticism to play decently well. In that sense, it's 'Tennis Lite,' allowing folks for whom that whole world and aesthetic might not always have been accessible a chance to partake in all that preppy, sporty energy."

After all, racquet games, and particularly tennis, have long been some of the most stylish sports on the planet. Per Goh, generations of Grand Slam champions — Arthur Ashe, Andre Agassi and, naturally, Serena Williams — have been at the forefront of fashion for decades; Lacoste shirts and Stan Smith sneakers have a cultural footprint that stretches far beyond tennis. Porting over that rich, stylistic heritage to this rising, red-hot racquet sport is, as Goh argues, "a pretty foolproof formula for success."

"When it comes to fashion, riffing on tennis style is endlessly entertaining," adds Jonathan Evans, style director at Esquire. "It's a lot like riffing on preppy style, in that there are a lot of codes — both spoken and unspoken — and playing with those codes, even upending them, is half the reason a lot of folks learn them in the first place."

Such was the impetus behind Nettie, a groovy, Cincinnati-based pickleball brand that's sold at Saks Fifth Avenue, Free People and Dick's Sporting Goods. After watching her now-fiancé's parents erect a makeshift pickleball court in their New York City apartment during quarantine, CEO Catherine Baxter set out to comprehend what, exactly, made the game so compelling.

She soon came to the realization so many players before her had: It brings people of all generations, abilities, and backgrounds together. But when stay-at-home orders lifted and it came time for Baxter to purchase pickleball gear of her own, she saw a gap in the market, sandwiched between $200 performance paddles and the type of goofy recreational equipment that, as she puts it, "looked like a Monster energy drink can."

"I thought, 'Why don't I do a paddle that fits in the middle there, that's still high quality, still accessible in price and, most importantly, still has a sense of style?,'" says Baxter. "Resorts and country clubs and golf clubs — these places that have an aesthetic threshold — were adding pickleball, and I didn't think their clientele was going to be interested in a paddle featuring a dancing pickle."

Enter the Nettie aesthetic, which Baxter describes as "Wonder Bread plus Ralph Lauren plus Björn Borg," complete with an strong nostalgic influence that harkens back to the sport's intergenerational appeal. Palm Springs-era Don Draper (from "Mad Men"'s Season 2 episode, "The Jet Set") was a primary source of design inspiration. It's not difficult to understand why capital-F fashion retailers like Saks bought in.

"Fashion is going to go anywhere there's an audience — and an opportunity to cash in," says Goh. "Just look at the vast number of brands, from underground streetwear labels all the way up to high fashion houses, that rushed to make NFTs the moment they became a thing. With pickleball emerging as one of the fastest-growing sports on the planet, it was only a matter of time before the fashion world attempted to ride the wave."

Outside of blue-chip department stores, the sport has reached fashion and lifestyle brands, too, which are testing the waters with dedicated pickleball ranges of their own.

Last year, both J.Crew and Leanne Ford collaborated with Recess, an Austin-based pickleball gear label, to debut their own respective lines of paddles, accessories and, in the case of J.Crew, pickleball-specific activewear. Norma Kamali included a "Pickleball Dress" in her Spring 2023 collection. Alice + Olivia's own "Pickleball Collection" includes shirts and skirts in punchy floral prints like "Blossom" and "Antique Butterfly," with new pieces launching this spring.

View the original article to see embedded media.

"During the pandemic, the sport really took off, and I was getting a lot of requests from clients and friends to design pickleball looks," says Stacey Bendet, Alice + Olivia's CEO and creative director. "Alice + Olivia is all about having fun, so it was natural for us to bring it to the court."

Despite fanatical momentum that may point to the contrary, pickleball is still on the fringe. Evans says he'd be "more than a little surprised" if we saw a major fashion house dive all the way into the pickleball wave — this year, anyway.

"A more likely scenario, I think, is pickleball-focused brands making inroads into fashion, whether through their core collections or collaborations," he argues.

That's already happening: At Nettie, Baxter has plans to expand the business to become "pickleball first, but not pickleball only." She sees a future in which Nettie's canvas Paddle Bag, made from a heavyweight canvas and produced in partnership with fellow pickleball brand Tangerine, could double as a travel-day tote or a diaper bag — as long as its contents are switched out when it's time to play doubles against grandma and grandpa, that is.

"I'm a believer in letting people enjoy things," says Goh. "If pickleball is all your knees can handle, or it's a nice way to enjoy some quality time with your family, who am I to argue?"

Never miss the latest fashion industry news. Sign up for the Fashionista daily newsletter.