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These Childhood Friends Spotted a Hole in the Pickleball Market. A Year Later, They’re on Pace for $31 Million in Sales.

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These Childhood Friends Spotted a Hole in the Pickleball Market. A Year Later, They’re on Pace for $31 Million in Sales.

How James Ignatowich and Marwan Abaza built the pro-level pickleball paddle nobody else was making.

James Ignatowich didn’t like his pickleball paddle, even though he was still winning a lot of matches with it. The four-time PPA champion and former world No. 2 player kept calling his friend Marwan Abaza to vent. The two met at a South Florida tennis tournament when they were about 12. Abaza went on to play D1 tennis and now studies computational data science.

Eventually, Ignatowich told him they needed to fix it. They’d talked about going into business together since they were kids, but this is the first company for both. Last September, the pair launched RPM Pickleball with no outside funding. A year later, the pickleball paddle brand is on pace for $31 million in annual sales and brought in $4.5 million last month alone. It has sold more than 35,000 paddles in 100 countries.

The secret to their success? They found a hole in a booming sport. In pickleball, beginners and pros used the same paddles, and those paddles were designed with beginners in mind. Tennis works the other way. Racquet makers design for the best players first. Everyday players then buy the same racquets because they want what the pros use. “We decided to make a paddle that was made for pros,” Ignatowich says.

The founders spend half the year on factory floors in China, where they fine-tune foam densities, heating times and dozens of other small details. They’ve developed multiple patent-pending technologies along the way.


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