For the first time, 96 children under the age of 14 are being invited from all over Europe by this young Italian tennis apparel company for the finals of the TTK Warriors Tour, a tournament that has been played since 2004 only at the local level. As participation has been growing steadily at the national level, reaching 18,000 youths this year, the winners of the local games will be taken to Rome for a final play-out against 300 Italian children between Dec. 27 and Jan. 6.
The new Rome Warriors Championship will be aired on SuperTennis, a new dedicated Italian channel on the Sky satellite that is broadcasting tennis events and commentary all the time. The channel is sponsored by TTK as well as Lotto, among others.
The participants in the TTK Warriors Tour are basically juniors who are being trained by tennis instructors with whom TTK and its distributors have contracts. These youngsters belong to the so-called TTK Warriors Team, which has included new tennis hopefuls such as Carla Suarez, who made the quarter-finals at the last Roland Garros tournament.
TTK stands for Tennis Teknology (sic). The company has distributors in about 15 foreign countries. A former agent of Tecnifibre was signed up a few months ago to handle the French market. TTK has also just signed a joint venture with an entrepreneur in Florida to launch TTK on the U.S. market from Jan. 30 as a brand connected with Italian glamor.
Spain, where the company set up its own sales subsidiary in 2003, is TTK’s second-largest market. The brand claims to have become one of the three leading tennis apparel brands in Spain (see our Spanish country report). It sponsors the local tennis academy of Emilio Sanchez Vicario, which has trained many champions. Former seventh-best player on the ATP Tour, Sanchez is the tutor of the TTK Warriors Tour.
TTK is a company established in 2001 in the northern town of Udine in 2001 by Marco Sartorello, a passionate amateur tennis player who had previously run a record publishing firm. Specializing in technical tennis clothing, it has grown to reach a turnover of €5 million this year, 12 percent more than in 2007, with an estimated 55 percent market share in the specialized Italian tennis retail sector. TTK does not sell its clothing to the multi-sport chains.
Sartorello has not yet decided whether TTK should continue with an exclusive license for Davis Cup apparel, which it obtained from the International Tennis Federation three years ago, replacing Diadora. TTK played an important role in the latest Davis Cup tournament at Mar de la Plata, next to brands such as Wilson, Hugo Boss, Kia, Rolex and BNP Paribas. It also supplied for the first time its brand-new line of shoes to the umpires, the ball collectors and the other members of the personnel. Known mainly for its very colorful clothing, made at a joint venture factory in Vietnam, TTK has only recently launched its first few models of footwear, made by a contractor in Indonesia (more in the Italian market research report that will come out next Spring).
