One Year of FLO: What Building a Padel Brand Has Taught Us

One year ago, FLO Padel was little more than an idea, a few rackets and a belief.

The belief was simple:

Padel rackets had become too much about the name and graphics on the outside—and not enough about the ingredients on the inside.

As padel grew, some of the world’s largest sporting brands arrived with enormous marketing budgets, famous professional players and instantly recognisable logos.

Inevitably, those names carried a premium.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Branding has value.

But FLO started by asking a different question:

How much of the price of a racket is actually the racket?

Building FLO Between Pakistan and Britain

FLO could not have started at a more interesting time.

Padel was exploding in Britain while simultaneously beginning its rapid rise in Pakistan.

We found ourselves positioned between those two worlds.

In Britain, we were club players ourselves.

We played several times a week, organised games, lent rackets to friends and listened to players discussing what they liked and disliked about their equipment.

In Pakistan, we were developing relationships with the people actually manufacturing padel rackets.

That combination changed how we looked at the industry.

Most players encounter a racket only once it has been completed.

They see a beautiful graphic, a professional player’s signature, a collection of technology names and a retail price.

Working with manufacturers meant that we started at the other end.

We saw:

• Moulds

• Carbon

• Fibreglass

• EVA foam

• Resins

• Lay-ups

• Weight

• Balance

• Drilling

• Sanding

• Painting

• Finishing

We also saw prototypes that worked beautifully—and prototypes that went directly back to the drawing board.

Once you begin understanding a racket as a combination of materials, construction decisions and compromises, it becomes much harder to think of it simply as a logo.

Why Should a Club Player Pay for the Professional?

The modern padel industry is understandably fascinated by professional players.

A leading player uses a particular racket.

The manufacturer builds a story around it.

The amateur sees that racket and thinks:

That must be the good one.

But the professional and the ordinary club player may have almost nothing in common physically or technically.

A professional player may possess exceptional timing, racket-head speed, strength and technique.

Most club players do not.

A stiff, unforgiving and head-heavy racket might be exceptional in the hands of an elite player—and completely unsuitable for someone playing twice a week after work.

That does not make it a bad racket.

It simply makes it the wrong racket for that particular player.

Yet the club player may still pay a premium partly because a professional’s name and marketing campaign are attached to it.

FLO wanted to turn that logic around.

Instead of asking:

Which professional’s racket do you want?

We would rather ask:

What kind of racket does your game actually need?

Affordable Does Not Have to Mean Basic

This was important to us from the beginning.

FLO did not want to become another expensive padel brand.

We wanted to keep rackets affordable while giving ordinary players more choice—not less.

Traditionally, greater customisation means greater expense.

We want to challenge that.

Our relationship with Pakistani manufacturing has allowed us to get closer to how rackets are made, which decisions influence their performance and where meaningful choices can be introduced.

That creates an opportunity.

Instead of spending heavily to make a logo appear more valuable, we can direct more of our effort towards making the racket more appropriate for the person holding it.

A club player should not necessarily need to spend £300 or £400 to access good materials and a suitable specification.

And affordable should not mean:

Here is the cheap racket. Take it or leave it.

We want affordable to mean access to meaningful choice:

• Different moulds

• Different foams

• Different face materials

• Different weights

• Different balances

• Different levels of stiffness

• Different playing characteristics

• Eventually, different visual treatments

Custom manufacturing will naturally involve practical limits and may cost more than selecting a standard retail racket.

But it should not become another excuse to turn useful choices into an inaccessible luxury.

Choice should not belong only to professional players.

The Most Personal Tool in the Bag

A racket is not like a shirt or cap.

You feel every ball through it.

After hundreds of hours on court, players develop remarkably personal preferences.

One player wants a softer impact.

Another wants stiffness.

One player dislikes weight towards the head.

Another wants precisely that.

One needs assistance generating depth and power.

Another already produces enough power and desperately wants control.

Some players cannot explain any of this technically.

They simply pick up a racket, hit ten balls and say:

“I like this.”

That feeling matters.

After our first year, FLO increasingly believes that the racket should be treated as the most personal piece of equipment in a player’s bag.

So why are ordinary players usually given so little control over how theirs is selected or made?

From Selling Rackets to Helping Players Build Them

This may be the biggest change in FLO after our first year.

We began as a relatively conventional racket brand:

Develop good rackets.

Give them names.

Create attractive designs.

Explain who they are for.

Sell them.

We still want to develop and sell FLO rackets.

But increasingly, we believe the more interesting future lies in helping players understand and personalise their equipment.

Rather than saying:

Here are six FLO rackets. Choose one.

We want to begin with the player.

How quickly do you swing?

How often do you play?

Which racket are you using now?

What do you like about it?

What would you change?

Do you struggle to generate depth or power?

Do you want greater control?

Do you prefer a soft or firm impact?

Do you experience uncomfortable vibration?

Do you prefer weight towards the head or closer to your hand?

Once those questions have been considered, we can begin discussing the ingredients.

Perhaps a player needs fibreglass rather than a stiffer carbon construction.

Perhaps they need soft EVA rather than hard EVA.

Perhaps a round mould rather than a diamond.

Perhaps a lighter racket rather than one approaching 375 grams.

The important question stops being:

Which FLO racket should I buy?

It becomes:

What racket should I be playing with?

Less Graphics. More Ingredients.

That may be the simplest way to explain where FLO is going.

The conventional racket conversation often starts with the finished product:

Which brand?

Which model?

Which professional uses it?

What does it look like?

We want to start underneath the paint.

Which foam?

Which face material?

Which mould?

What weight?

What balance?

How firm?

How does the combination actually feel?

The graphic still matters. We love beautiful rackets.

But perhaps the graphic should be one of the final decisions a player makes, rather than the first.

Choose the ingredients.

Build the racket.

Then make it beautiful.

Why We Are Building FLO Lab

If we are going to talk seriously about racket ingredients, we also need to understand them.

That is why we are developing FLO Lab.

We want to investigate characteristics players genuinely experience, including:

• Weight

• Balance

• Rebound behaviour

• Face response

• Sweet-spot behaviour

• Vibration

• Differences between foam and construction systems

We then want to connect those measurements with what players actually feel on court.

Because numbers without players are not enough.

And marketing claims without testing are not enough either.

Not every playing characteristic can be reduced to one laboratory figure. Players have different techniques, physical abilities and preferences.

But measurement can help us ask better questions, compare constructions more carefully and separate repeatable differences from assumptions.

Factory. Lab. Court.

After one year, this is the FLO model beginning to emerge.

Pakistan gives us the factory.

Working closely with Pakistani manufacturers helps us understand how rackets are constructed and gives us the flexibility to experiment with different materials and configurations.

FLO Lab gives us evidence.

Testing allows us to investigate what changing those ingredients may actually do.

Britain gives us the court.

Our local padel community gives us ordinary players playing ordinary matches, making ordinary mistakes and providing brutally useful feedback.

Factory. Lab. Court.

And the player sits in the middle.

Each part answers a different question.

The factory tells us what can be made.

The laboratory helps us investigate what changed.

The court tells us whether that change actually helps the player.

A Padel Brand Should Play Padel

There is one other thing we feel strongly about after our first year.

The people running a padel brand should play padel.

Not occasionally for marketing photographs.

Actually play.

Lose matches.

Mis-hit overheads.

Break rackets.

Need a fourth player at the last minute.

Become frustrated with their equipment.

Sit around after matches discussing why one racket feels fantastic and another feels terrible.

That is where you begin understanding the club player.

FLO does not want to observe padel from a boardroom.

We want to remain on the court.

We want our owners, ambassadors, designers and partners to stay close to the game because FLO was never created simply because someone noticed a growing sports market.

It was created because we love playing padel.

One Year Later

FLO remains tiny compared with the global names dominating the racket wall.

That is okay.

In fact, being small has given us something enormously valuable:

We can still change the model.

We started by trying to make good FLO rackets at affordable prices.

One year later, the ambition is becoming clearer.

We want to help club players understand what is inside their rackets.

We want to give them access to more suitable configurations.

We want to use FLO Lab to investigate what those choices change.

We want to use our relationship with Pakistani manufacturers to make customisation practical.

And, crucially, we want to pursue this without turning customisation into another reason to charge an enormous premium.

The global brands have professional players, enormous marketing budgets and internationally recognised logos.

FLO does not need to beat them at that game.

We can play a different one.

Less money spent buying the name.

More choice in what goes inside the racket.

Less focus on who uses it on the professional tour.

More focus on the person actually holding it.

Perhaps FLO will never be just another padel brand.

We do not particularly want it to be.

We want to remain close to the factories that make the equipment, close to the communities that play with it and close enough to the court that we never forget who we are building it for.

After our first year, the idea behind FLO has become simpler:

Make padel equipment more understandable.

Make customisation more accessible.

Keep it affordable.

Give club players more choice.

And, above everything else:

Keep playing the game.

Because FLO is not a logo looking for a sport.

FLO came from the sport.