The Picklr Puts New Facilities on the Map

The Quick Points

🎮 Meta trying to bring mega fun to the metaverse. Playin Games announced today their release of Pickleball One on the Meta Quest (Meta/Facebook’s VR headset). The platform offers a new sports and fitness app that allows pickleball enthusiasts to feed their addiction from home, and bring new people into the sport. We remember playing Wii Tennis when we were younger, and we’ll just say it wasn’t exactly tennis…but still a fun game. So, we’ll wait to make a judgment on it until we have a chance to play. First, we need to find someone with a Meta Quest…

🏀 Spurs ballin’ out. We’ll have more to say on this in the future since there are some cool takeaways in our opinion on other sports continuing to lean into pickleball. However, if you’re in Austin next Tuesday, October 24th, Millbrook Pickleball Club is hosting the San Antonio Spurs event, which will offer open play and music. While Wemby isn’t expected to be in attendance, there will be other people from the org there to come out and meet. If you see us in our Reset hats, come say hi. We’ll be there 🤝.

💰 4 courts, $250k+ per court. This was a great look inside the journey of a former tennis training center converting to a pickleball club. Jon Neeter, of the Santa Monica Pickleball Center, shared some of the struggles and eventual success of creating a community and thriving retail business by going all in on pickleball. Side note: This club website is arguably the most navigable, clean, and compelling one we have come across in a long time. It feels alive and fresh, and has an energy that resembles what you may see and feel in-person.

🏡 Home court advantage. Some fun data was released by Zillow suggesting that New York City listings are up 100% for those that mention pickleball (either on-site or nearby). Nationwide, pickleball mentions are up 64% y/y in Zillow listings.

One Connecticut-based Zillow agent noted:

🔁 Pickleball giving back. Big props to the City of Palatka, FL and the St. Johns River Pickleball Group for putting together boxes of pickleball equipment to be given to local neighborhoods to help facilitate family and community interactions over pickleball. As part of the donation, they’re distributing 45 paddles, 4 portable net systems, and 100 balls, as well as putting on a pizza party for local kids. Let’s keep bringing pickleball into every community to demonstrate what we all know, that it’s not a ‘rich people’ sport’, but one of the best expressions of community amongst strangers of all backgrounds.

What’s on our mind

The Picklr putting more facilities on the map
Well, we thought we were going to finally beat the market to some ‘breaking news’ for once, in announcing that The Picklr sold 30 new franchise locations…then we found out it was released this morning… The latest round of sales brings their total to 110 across the country, with a number having already purchased the real estate and/or are already under construction. We spent some time with Jorge, Austin, and Nick, as they’re in town for a Picklr Formula 1 activation event this weekend, and we remain impressed with their approach and results to date. Among the franchises, they’re in a small group of basically 1 that has years of experience operating multiple facilities with the ability to bring that know-how of the pitfalls, must-haves, and location-specific attributes to new franchisees. While many facilities will need to tailor their programming, pricing, and community building to the local nuances of their region, The Picklr is capable of bringing repeatable concepts to passionate franchise owners in a way that’s difficult for others to compete with. Many of the existing facilities with multiple years and locations under their belt aren’t in the business of selling franchises right now, and often stick to expanding and ‘owning’ their local markets.

And to The Picklr’s credit, we don’t believe they’re blind to the local flavors of pickleball. They recognize that their approach can’t simply end at giving a new franchise owner a PDF of ‘things to do’, and walk away hoping it will be a successful endeavor for all parties (remember: what makes selling these franchises lucrative is that they receive a portion of the gross revenue the franchisee generates). As a result, The Picklr provides continued support across the lifetime of a facility, from real estate identification, to construction, to internal designs, programming, and ancillary amenities (e.g. pro shops, cafes, lockers). Part of this is through The Picklr’s investment in direct personnel who can identify and standardize those best practices for new franchisors to implement, but who also show up on the ground to help get things moving and can be responsive to local nuances that are affecting the initial launch differently in each location.

We don’t believe there will be a winner-take-all in the facility space, as independents have shown their ability to attract and retain loyal pickleball consumers across the country. For some dedicated and passionate entrepreneurs, the task of betting on themselves to build their own unique brand and pickleball offering from the ‘ground-up’ is both exciting and financially lucrative. For some existing corporates like Life Time Fitness and other gym brands we’re hearing about, leaning into pickleball as a new core amenity for its members will both bring in new customers and increase the value (and consequently prices) for existing members, while introducing new courts to supply-constrained markets. For some operators, they’ll be willing to trade some financial upside and creative flexibility in order to jump-start the process of opening courts by becoming franchisees. All can work when you’re early to your market, are disciplined with the real estate costs & capex requirements, and all-in on building something more than just concrete with some lines and a net for a passionate pickleball community.

We’ll get into some of the high-level numbers of The Picklr another day, but we’re excited to see their new franchises get off the ground and start to provide real-time feedback about how repeatable the process they’ve built in Utah is nationally.

Stay tuned and say hi if you run into them at F1 this weekend - probably one of the friendliest and most down-to-earth teams we’ve had the chance to spend time with in pickleball.

It’s raining cats & dogs &…pickleball apparel?
Everyone knows someone with an unmatched obsession for their pet. Unsurprisingly, you can also probably find someone with an unmatched obsession for pickleball. Congratulations, you can now find that special person with an unmatched obsession for both at the same time. Continuing the trend of ever more retail and consumer brands trying their hand at pickleball to get in on the action in their own way, Target is offering pickleball cat & dog costumes for $13 through a boutique retailer Hyde & EEK. And of course, the pickleball aficionados are already predisposed to liking this type of thing…as evidenced by the reviews…

As a fun back of the envelope, how much money could there actually be in pet clothing? Shockingly a lot more than we expected, with one research firm estimating the market in 2021 at $5.2bn, growing at a 4% CAGR. We did a little math for fun and this is what we got to…

Yes, it’s all a little tongue in cheek to estimate that pickleball pet apparel can sell $80mm+ per annum, yet alone think that 100% of pickleball pet owners (assuming rates of pet ownership for pickleball players tracks general U.S. households) will buy something for their dog/cat. However, it’s more another illustration that pickleball’s niche demographic is still an untapped lane for retailers to try their hand at something new ahead of their competitors. Particularly in niche categories for these companies that likely can get product lines designed, manufactured, and distributed at a similar margin profile as their existing offerings, yet could potentially access a new customer segment to cross-sell other items in the future. When it’s not ubiquitous across competitors, it feels worth a try so, long as the pickleball wave keeps rolling.

Breaking Ground

UPDATE: As part of some new work we’re doing, we have a new facilities tracker to go alongside the existing one. This ‘new’ tracker aims to identify all of the private facilities across the country (and not just recently opened). It currently excludes almost all the franchises (e.g. Picklr/ACE). One day we’ll get to including eatertainment facilities and franchises. If you’re a more visual person than a spreadsheet person, you can also check out this interactive map of all the facilities. Let us know if you want to chat or if you have any facilities you know of that we missed (it’s still a work in progress!).

The Reset tracks publicly available court construction data to better understand the locations, costs, and development priorities going into projects across the nation. Our tracker can be found here.

Featured Developments:
Interesting to see pickleball come on the scene in another residential community as an amenity. This time in Dallas’s The Village with The Sandy Pickle. It’s a pretty awesome amenity in our view and would definitely be a draw for us to live in that community, as the Sandy Pickle will feature six pickleball courts and six beach volleyball courts. And as we’ve advocated for months now with cities, these don’t have to be giant money holes for developers and city managers, as the community is offering reservations through Playbypoint for $40/hr, as well as league play. The location will also feature food & beverage offerings.

So on that note, the city of Denton, TX is doing it right, with a new Tennis and Pickleball Center opening with 12 tennis courts and 8 pickleball courts. The facility is reservation-only and offers lessons & some programming. For local residents, the membership costs $125/yr, with $2/hr court reservations for members. The location will also offer a pro shop. Our view is that more cities should lean into this approach like in Columbus, OH.

Best of the Rest:

• The City of Malad, ID unveiled their new pickleball court at City Park. The construction was sponsored by the AARP, Nucor Steel, and a variety of other companies in the area.