Today we’d like to introduce you to Heidi Block

Hi Heidi, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

Like many ideas, Play-PKL was born out of my frustration with the existing options when I learned to play pickleball in the summer of 2021. I couldn’t find any relatable brands or good content about the sport, and the only apparel were goofy graphic t-shirts. A lot of the people I saw playing pickleball were wearing athleisure brands but nothing that was designed for pickleball.

As a lifelong brand builder with a focus on innovation, I immediately saw the opportunity to create a great American brand with beautiful, high quality, functional apparel and accessories built for the sport. But my background was in over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, not apparel, so it took awhile to understand the process of developing clothing and to find business partners who could bring my ideas to life.

We launched the website in the fall of 2022 with branded paddles and balls and some basic educational content. We followed that with social media content and great accessories in Q1 2023, and by that summer we had launched our first line of men’s and women’s apparel, designed for pickleball, with high quality fabrics and beautiful prints.

One year later, we are still in building mode but we are on a great upward trajectory. We began offering wholesale to pickleball retailers in Q1 2024 and got a huge win when the world’s largest pickleball facility in Naples, Florida brought in our men’s and women’s lines and our tote bags. We now have multiple retail customers in New Jersey, New York and Florida and our online sales are growing steadily month over month.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

Never a smooth road! The biggest struggles have definitely been in the apparel development process because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. My first manufacturing partner was a small knit shop in the Garment District in New York, who had little to no experience with sports apparel and couldn’t execute the sublimation and placement prints the designs called for. Because they didn’t have garment printing experience, they led me to select a fabric that didn’t hold prints well. Eventually I found my way to a more appropriate partner in California, but there have been issues with them, too. For example, I have raised heat transfers on my garments to give them a high end look, but many of them were not properly applied in the beginning and were already falling off when I received them. Then they got the application process down, but a whole batch of skorts came in with burn marks from applying too MUCH heat.

Another struggle has been driving sales on my website. There’s just so much noise and competition for shoppers’ attention that it has taken much longer than I expected to start seeing conversions on the site. And finding a digital media partner who could support me at a reasonable cost wasn’t easy either…I cycled through a few resources before finding one that worked for us.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

I’ve spent my whole career building brands and launching innovation. I know how to identify the white space in a market and build a brand that meets that need. I know how to craft a message that resonates with consumers and how to deliver it where the customer is. I also know how to develop and source a product and get it into the marketplace.

One of the skills I was most known for in my professional marketing career, was creative problem-solving. I found new ways to do things that no one else had thought of and, as a result, many of the products I launched over the years were breakthrough innovations in the categories where they competed.

All of that know-how translated very well when I decided to launch Play-PKL. Even though it is a completely different industry, I’m still able to use all of those skills to help me build my brand, think differently and tell a compelling brand story to my pickleball audience.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://play-pkl.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/play_pkl/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PlayPKL1
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@play-pkl?si=OdYqOgqJI5h3S4dh