We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alexis Grace. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alexis below.

Hi Alexis, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My husband was looking for a sponsorship opportunity within the pickleball industry but was struggling to find the perfect partnership. We started having conversations with a company based in Europe, who specializes in tennis equipment. The conversation took a wild turn, and instead of becoming a sponsored player, Dylan was offered an opportunity to distribute this companies pickleball equipment in North America. After careful consideration, we determined this wasn’t the path we wanted to take, but it got us thinking “what if we created our own pickleball company”? LIX Pickleball was born.

Alexis, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

LIX Pickleball was created by the Grace family in 2022. We are owned and operated in Colorado. Our mission is to bring unique colors and stunning designs into the pickleball community, while providing a professional quality product that pickleball enthusiasts will fall in love with.

We were introduced to the sport in 2018 while vacationing in Mexico and quickly fell in love with pickleball. The transition into Pickleball was simplified because of our strong tennis background. The love and passion for the sport has motivated us to introduce a new brand of professional grade pickleball paddles that are unique and eye catching.

But what does LIX stand for or mean?

Some people think the company is called L.I.X, saying every letter. Others even think LIX is Roman numerals for the number 59. LIX is actually the last 3 letters of our son’s name, Caylix. It sounds exactly like licks, but it is spelled LIX.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

As small business owners we prepared ourselves for setbacks however we did not consider that every step of the process would have an issue. Some bigger than others but literally everything we touched did not follow the path we intended. This eventually also takes an emotional toll that was more exhausting than expected. Small business is not for the faint of heart and there is only so much preparation that one can do before investing in themselves. If you are considering starting a small business keep your dreams at the forefront but stay flexible to move forward in a different direction than you anticipated.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Marketing is a large part of our business as we are mainly website based. Image is everything. In an attempt to take our first product photos and save money, we rushed to the pickleball courts with our gear and cell phones. We quickly learned that we bit off more than we could chew. The photos we imagined in our mind, were not coming to fruition with our cell phone camera. Luckily, we were able to connect with a professional photographer, as he was playing pickleball on the next court over. I truly think he felt so bad for us, because the photos were coming out terrible. He and his wife took us under their wings and equipped us with an awesome portfolio of photos and knowing that our budget was limited graciously did not accept payment. This is a great example of small business helping small business. We have made lifelong friends.

Contact Info:

• Website: lixpickleball.com
• Instagram: @lixpickleball
• Facebook: LIX pickleball
• Youtube: Lixpickleball4722
• TikTok: @lixpickleball

Image Credits
Joel Hecht-Jhexposures