About

Welcome,

Like most of you that have arrived at this page, I'm a tennis fan. As a lifelong player and devotee to the sport, I spent a lot of my early years absorbing everything I could about playing the game, and obsessing over players, their gear and anything tennis. If it was on TV or in Tennis Magazine (this is pre-internet) I knew about it.

Every day, I parked myself on the tennis court. Starting in my early teens, breaking racquet strings became a daily occurrence (anyone remember the first widebody racquets? they ate strings for breakfast). Needless to say, it became an expensive habit. To cover the cost of stringing one or more racquets a day, I picked up a stringing machine. Exactly like this one:

It worked, but most importantly, it gave me greater access to the sport. Stringing racquets at a local tennis club earned me some free court time during the winter months, but also pocket money to buy the sneakers racquets and string that i need on my tennis journey. 

On a daily basis, stringing confronted me with another issue: heaps and heaps of scrap string, those little or sometimes not so little bits left over when you're done stringing. 

Looking at the pile of strings on the floor around the stringing machine one day, it struck me. Friendship bracelets were popular at the time and so I started to twist some of the strands together to see how they'd look. Held together with scotch tape and twist ties, the first Stringlets were born. The early prototypes got to a point where i could wear them, but they never got to the point of "just right".

And so the Stringlet stood, frozen in time, for almost 20 years. Until one day, I attended a tennis tournament that I had attended in my teens. Amazingly, items from the souvenir kiosks had not changed from the offerings of my youth (jumbo balls, tennis ball keychains and t-shirts). But more importantly, I remembered the childhood feeling of anxiety i had regarding spending what seemed like a lot of money on a souvenir. Prices hadn't dropped and the selection hadn't improved. I thought to myself that it was odd that nothing had changed.

I was determined to change that - I didn't want players to feel the sport was inaccessible to them and I wanted every player to feel that they too were a "tennis fan". This time, I decided to finish what I should have many years earlier, and make the perfect Stringlet as I envisioned it in my mind.

Many years and many iterations later, here we are. Im still working on improving the product and making it something that every fan, player and teammate can enjoy and wear when they want to, something that lets them all say that they are part of the tennis community that we love. I hope it also serves to increase participation in the sport for players and non-player fans alike.