Tennis
Tennis players are particular folk. If you’ve reached gift-buying intimacy with a tennis player, you already know this. They care about their racket like its theirs. No weather will keep them off the court. Their backhand has a personality you should probably get to know. Trying to find them a gift should be easier than most - interests can’t really get more specific than this - but then you look online and find a thousand personalised water bottles and towels with monogrammed initials stitched into the corner and realise nothing is going to work.
We built this collection with sweaty hours scrolling through the same old products whenever we tried to find gifts for tennis players, wishing someone would do it better. So we made it ourselves. Everything has been curated by players who aren’t just going off looks. There’s a difference between knowing your thing and loving your thing. Someone who gets on court twice a week needs gear they can move in. Someone who cheers through Wimbledon with a Pimm’s in hand just wants to show off how much they love tennis. We considered both extremes and everything in between, without compromising on quality.
What we wanted were gifts that got it. Products that pay respect to just how seriously people play tennis without being so specialised you’d only understand if you paid a subscription at a country club. Things that work for anyone from the weekend club player perfecting their backhand slice to your mate who treats each Slam like church. Some picks are as practical as they come. Stuff players will use all the time and say they’ll buy themselves next week but actually never will. Some celebrates tennis so much it’s not about court performance at all.
If it felt disposable, we didn’t include it. We didn’t want things that were merely branded with a tennis ball and passed off. That standard is low enough to clear itself. But everything that made the cut into this collection had to earn its keep. Like we’d be giving it to our own friends. If we weren’t confident enough to hand it over ourselves, it didn’t make it. That’s why it’s small. We want to keep it that way.