Indoor pickleball is taking off, with more and more brands and franchises popping up across the globe. At the forefront is The Picklr, an indoor pickleball franchise launched in 2020 by best friends Austin Wood and Jorge Barragan. The brand has nine locations open and 300 sold in the U.S., with deals planned for Canada and Australia as well.
In this Q&A, Wood shares the origin story of The Picklr, the challenges of scaling a franchise and the company’s innovative use of technology to enhance the player experience.
Tell me a bit about The Picklr’s origin story.
My really good friend, Jorge, and I have been friends since high school. I’ve always been in kind of the sales industry. I helped get a company started with my father-in-law, selling and renting surgical lasers across the country. I did that for 11 years. Jorge was kind of from a sales background as well, but more on the software side.
In 2018 we started playing a lot of pickleball together, playing in tournaments and going on date nights with our wives. In 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, obviously the pickleball courts just got flooded at the parks. So, when we would go on date nights, we would go to the park, and we would only be able to get two games in because there was so many people who wanted to play. You’d have to jump off the court, get back in line and you could only get a couple games in. We were like, ‘We’re getting babysitters and we can’t even play pickleball more than a few times. There’s got to be a better way.”
In 2020, Jorge decided to go the entrepreneur route. He started a paddle company and then with that, kind of got into this indoor pickleball space. So, he gave me a call one day and said, “We should start an indoor pickleball facility.” And before he can even finish, I said, “I’m in. Let’s go.” And we created The Picklr.
A couple weeks later, we signed our first lease and then opened our first location. A couple months after that, we really felt like we had created something special. We started working on, how do we do this bigger than just one location? And that’s what we’ve been working on the last three years, is making this a nationwide and international company.
Is it safe to safe this venture has exceeded expectations?
It has exceeded our expectations and honestly, it’s very humbling. When you’re doing the franchise side, you have a lot of people who are coming in who are investing in this dream. They’re investing in our business by putting money into their own locations, and really creating this opportunity for them to leave the corporate world and start their own business. Or we have a lot of franchisees that have Planet Fitness clubs, Orangetheory, Crumbl or other franchise concepts. It’s humbling for them join this journey with us and be a part of bringing pickleball across the country.
Tell me a little bit more about what makes you stand out as a franchisor and some of the support you provide to franchisees.
There are a handful of competitors that are also franchising indoor locations across the country. I don’t have anything bad to say about them at all. But I think the really big differentiating factor between us and them is that Jorge and I have been doing this for three years. We have nine locations open. Most of our competition have one or two locations open, and a lot of those are with one or two franchisees. We have seven corporate stores open, so we’ve spent three years really developing and understanding this business in this industry.
And that’s what you really see when you look at The Picklr — is that from every aspect of the business, we have a full team. We have a full understanding. We have a full playbook. This is not something where we’re asking franchisees to come figure this out with us. We already have a very strong foundation.
What have been some of the biggest learning lessons from this venture?
Some of the biggest lessons have been just understanding data and really making decisions based off of true demographics and all the things that go into making a club very successful. There’s a lot of theories out there in the indoor pickleball space. But we really like to be a data-driven company. We like to test stuff, get the data, and then come back and say, “This is actually what the data is showing, and this is why it works, and this is something we can copy and repeat across the whole country.” Some of those early decisions of us testing and trialing stuff, we didn’t have the data because we had to go figure it out and see what worked and what didn’t. That was from programming to real estate to understanding what rent rates work from what lighting is the best, what is the best court surface material, what’s the best process. All those things were tested and tried over seven locations.
The Picklr appeals to a wide range of demographics. Was that intentional?
Yes. When you look back, especially back to 2020 when we started developing The Picklr and the brand, pickleball was kind of on the cheesier side, playing off the word pickle, which is still great and still part of the pickleball culture. But there’s definitely this movement of pickleball appealing to millennials, which is now the largest demographic. It’s a sport that started with retirees and that has now gone backwards. It keeps getting younger. Right now, the top demographic is 18 to 35, and so we wanted to make a brand that was appealing to all ages. We got away from kind of the cheesiness of pickleball, and really show what the sport is. It’s a very competitive, welcoming and social sport. We like to have the fun aspect, but we also wanted to bring a more professional, more sophisticated brand to pickleball. And that’s where we developed The Picklr and everything you see inside those four walls.
You mentioned Jorge had a software, tech background too. Is that another key advantage for franchisees is having that sophisticated tech stack?
Absolutely. Jorge has brought a lot of expertise since Day On. We’ve really built The Picklr kind of as a tech company where we’re utilizing a lot of technology for customer retention, or for the overall app and software experience for our users. We have gone through a few different versions of that to now we have our own app on the App Store, and we’re always perfecting on the software side.
We’re about to launch an AI partnership that’s exclusive to The Picklr, where members can have an amazing experience with AI and being able to track ball placement and really perfect their game. They’ll be able to see stats of how many shots they’re hitting in a certain spot, and as they do different drills with a ball machine, they can really start to hone in their skills, really start to see how they’re progressing with AI. Technology is important to us and has been from the beginning because of Jorge’s background.
What are your growth plans?
Obviously the growth has been phenomenal and been a fun experience to see how many people are excited about pickleball and about joining The Picklr. Right now, we have over 300 sold locations in the U.S. Those will open over a course of five to six years. By the end of the year, we’ll be somewhere near 410 to 450 sold. That’s kind of the trend we’re at right now. We’re about to close deals in Canada and Australia, which is great. We are excited to grow internationally, but definitely have big growth planned for here in the U.S.
As far as selling locations, it really comes down to opening locations. That’s where you will really start to see the brand grow across the country, as people get to experience The Picklr. We have nine open now. We have two more grand openings planned, so that’ll put us at 11, and then we’re hoping to be somewhere in like the 45 to 50 range by the end of the year. By Q4 we’ll almost have a club opening every single week, which is going to be exciting. We’re shooting to have 50 locations open by the end of the year and obviously over 400 sold as we continue to grow.
