Two years ago, three Spaniards – Samuel Rodríguez, Daniel Rodríguez and Jordi Francés – founded a racquet factory in the US – in Waterbury, Connecticut, to be exact. They called it Rayox Sport.
“Samuel told us from the US that pickleball was sweeping the market, and we decided to take a chance on the sport,” the company’s chief in Spain, Daniel Rodríguez, told CMDsport. “Most companies that sell pádel racquets import them from China, but we’ve invested in innovation and development so as to manufacture them ourselves.” Rayox produces one racquet model for pádel and four models for pickleball. Company revenues are undisclosed, but for the full year 2023, they were up by 200 percent year over year. According to Rodríguez, moreover, the plan for this year is to triple those revenues and move 9,000 racquets.
The brand’s pickleball racquets range in price from €82 to €222. Moving 9,000 racquets at an average of, say, €120 per racquet would equate to €1.08 million. The company also sells the aforementioned pádel racquet, accessories and apparel.
About 70 percent of its revenues stem from retail sales, another 20 percent from sales at racquet clubs (about 50 of them at present), and the remaining 10 percent from tournaments and trade fairs. The US aside, Rayox is operating in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Belgium, with plans to expand into the rest of Europe and into Mexico. It maintains a warehouse in Spain and another in Portugal, but 95 percent of its sales take place in the US.
The company’s brightest immediate future, Rodríguez believes, awaits in Spain, where he expects pickleball to take off over the next couple of years. His reasons? Pickleball is social, and its style of play fast, simple and fun. Moreover, he tells CMD, its courts are “considerably cheaper to build than pádel’s” and take up half the space. Besides, “all the businesses that triumph in the US eventually reach Spain.”
Rodríguez believes, in fact, that Spain’s pickleball boom will outstrip pádel’s. In the US, he points out, the number of pickleball players has gone from 5 to 50 million in five years. What Spain needs is institutional investment in the sport, he says, while companies like his must “bring over American players to compete with the locals.”
