When SPORTIME asked me to launch a pickleball vertical, there was no playbook.
Pickleball was exploding nationally, but most clubs were treating it like a footnote to tennis: a line item, not a brand. My job was to change that, and to build something that could scale across 200+ courts without falling apart. Here’s what I learned…
Start with the positioning, not the logo.
The temptation on any brand launch is to jump straight into aesthetics. Colors, fonts, logo concepts. I get it, it’s the fun part. But the first question I asked wasn’t “what should this look like?” It was “who is this for, and what do they believe about the sport?”
Pickleball players skew older than tennis players but younger than the stereotype suggests. They’re community-driven, competitive but accessible, and deeply social. That insight shaped everything: the tone of our copy, the imagery we chose, the events we promoted first. The visual identity came after we knew what we were trying to say.
Build for scale from day one.
One of the biggest mistakes in brand launches is designing for the current state. We had a handful of courts at launch. The roadmap called for 200+. That meant the brand system couldn’t rely on location-specific customization for every single asset. I built templated collateral, including event flyers, social graphics, and signage formats, that any location could populate without breaking the visual language.
This sounds obvious in theory. In practice, it requires discipline. Every time you make a one-off exception, like a custom color for one club or a different font treatment for one event, you chip away at the system’s integrity.
What actually scaled: the identity system.
The logo, color palette, and typography I developed held up across tournaments, gift cards, holiday promotions, and partner activations. Locations could execute independently without needing design support for every post.
What didn’t scale as cleanly: the content strategy.
Social content requires local knowledge: which courts are busy, which events are drawing crowds, which pros are worth featuring. Centralizing that was harder than centralizing design assets. We eventually built a hybrid model where I handled templates and strategy, and location managers contributed raw content.
The metric that surprised me.
Within the first year, membership inquiries rose 10%. That might not sound dramatic, but for a brand-new vertical with no marketing history, it validated the positioning. People weren’t just signing up for pickleball. They were signing up for SPORTIME Pickleball, which meant the brand was doing its job.
If you’re launching a new vertical or product line, the lesson is this: don’t treat it like a campaign. Treat it like a brand. Give it a real identity, build for the future state, and let the system do the work.
