Editor’s Note:  Caitlin Thompson is the founder and publisher of Racquet Magazine — a cultural tennis publication, platform and movement like no other.

Caitlin and I caught up in Miami Beach on the tail end of ‘Racquet House’ — a quarterly in-person celebration of Racquet, grassroots tennis and its global community.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation here.

Racquet House is state of mind. It’s a roving community where people can walk in the front door of tennis.

On Racquet House.

Cornelius McGrath
Caitlin Thompson. Welcome to Miami, I guess.

Caitlin Thompson

Welcome to the house we’re staying in. Got a little pool, a little Palm tree.

So this is Racquet House?

Racquet House is a little bit of a state of mind, Cornelius. This is not the venue for our event. Our events typically occur at various luxury properties, public tennis courts, and everything in between.

We like to do both the public and private merging together. So we had access to a very glamorous house, which was great. We’ve done a few events at places like that, but also we want to make the tennis portion very accessible to people. So we like to also partner with public tennis facilities and bring people into tennis who maybe don’t have the first idea about how to step into it.

By covering the costs and giving them instruction and making it fun, and wrapping it around either a very high-end real estate experience or something as simple as showing up to the courts down their street, we feel like we can philosophically align.

So this particular house is not Racquet House. This is just where we’re staying for the weekend. Racquet House is, like I said, a state of mind. It’s a roving community where people can walk in the front door of tennis as a sport that is beginning to understand the possibility of what happens when you invite more people in than you did before and how that can change you and the sport for the better.

Wonderfully said. So let’s set the scene. It’s 90 degrees. It’s baking. This might be the hottest podcast I’ve done. I’ve just met you at the Miami Beach Tennis Centre, catching the tail end of Racquet House. This is the third that you’ve done?

This is the fifth that we’ve done. We’ve done one in Palm Springs. We did two in LA. Now Miami. I’m leaving one off. It’ll come back to me. The next one is in London on Arthur road, which, if anyone knows SW19, is a stone’s throw from the All England Club.

We’ll have the backyard, pool, and garden area of a beautiful private home, very close to Wimbledon Village and the tennis tournament. The idea is to really bring communities together. So the idea is that they’re either a cool class of people, a crew of people who live in a place that’s already amazing.

Like when we go and do live podcast taping in London, whether it’s in Shoreditch or at St John’s in the middle of town or, more on the west side. We’re finding people who love art, culture, and love music. They have a tastemaker sort of veracity of authentic viewpoints, but also, they’re voracious in how they consume culture and ideas. London is a very strong tennis community, especially during the fortnight.

And so that collision of people who are maybe the culture people and the people who are training their lens on tennis can overlap if you make a space for them too. And so that’s how we think about where we bring this the manifestation of the pages of Racquet magazine, or an embodiment of sort of the visual language that we’ve developed for more distributed social media channels, like Instagram and other places, or the conversations we have on our podcasts. Those can all collide at a location if there’s a community and sort of a good reason and good timing for them to do that. And so we look at these things as popups that happen where we can sort of offer space and really pull in some naturally occurring things that might not have occurred to people.

So this is your fifth Racquet House. Tell me about your first.

The first one was in Palm Springs at the Dinah Shore Estate, which is a traditional mid-century modern House. There was a private tennis court. There was a pool. There was a pool cabana. And like any Racquet House, what we try to do is a combination of really high-end F&B. We worked with several sponsors, Ciroc, Sergio Tacchini sponsored it. We had a sponsor in the form of Wilson who did all of our on-court activations. We had a few other very generous sponsors – Stella Artois and Jess Lauder. And I’m not trying to rifle off names of brands as much as just to sort of say these were all brands who wanted to be in the tennis space and maybe didn’t have the sort of younger cultural way to do it before we offered it them.

Traditional sponsorship opportunities where you have the Stella Artois logo on a giant billboard at a tennis tournament or paying to be in the background of a TV shot are tried and true methods of getting your brand out there. On the other hand, they’re not high return, storytelling driven mechanisms. And so when we’re putting together Racquet Houses, it’s important for us to work with brands because we don’t charge people to attend them. That’s a huge, crucial component of how we think about them. We want this community to feel like they can step into this. And the cost is something that is very sensitive in the tennis space, because I think wrongly, a lot of people assume it’s all about money and you have to have a private club membership and you have to have the gear and all this stuff.

And the truth is tennis is quite inexpensive. You can play on a public court with two Racquets and a ball. But the opportunity for people to do that and the storytelling around it hasn’t emphasized that anything other than a cloistered country club environ is the way to do it. And I think for us because we don’t charge people to attend because it’s invite-only because we want people from all walks of life in every way – socioeconomically, racially, gender, sexuality—all the stuff.

We want a true reflection of our community who are tastemakers and maybe, in some cases, influential or influencers, but the idea is that they can come and partake of this and share the messaging. Sure. But also we can get it paid for because brands are more than happy to have a really vibrant community embracing or learning about, maybe new product launches that they have or things that feel really authentic to them and us.

And so that’s how we pay for them. We get these sort of relationships built, and we don’t charge people money because we have found that if you charge people money to attend something, you tend to get people with money who are not necessarily reflective of our audience. Tennis has, for a long time been about expense and elite.

And those things are not only not interesting to us, I think they’re déclassé. And gauche, frankly. So, we have wealthy people asking to be put on the list. And they say, “we can pay.” And we say, “oh, are you cool? Are you going to bring the right energy to this? Do you understand what you’re doing? What we’re doing here?” And if the answers are yes, we will absolutely invite anybody. But it’s more about fitting this model of the community that is self-policing at this point and self-referential.

And I think that’s something that I’m really proud that we’ve built because we think about that community, whether we’re programming a Racquet House where there’s on-court activation, food and bev, a place for a brand to have a meeting. We’re recording live podcasts, we’re creating content, and we’re doing a photo shoot. You caught us today at the tail end of a photo shoot, which I’m sure we will talk about. But the idea of this whole thing is that we’re creating the culture. And so, to do that, you need to get the right mix of people who are creators to be part of it, whether they’re attendees or collaborators, or, as in many cases, both.

So, how do you know you’ve been successful? Is it a feeling? And I guess from first to the fifth Racquet House, what have you learned about what works and what doesn’t?

The first one popped off right before the pandemic. We did the first one and then had about an 18-month break because almost no one was convening in person. And so for us, we had a lot of time to think about what looked great but wasn’t actually that great in person. What maybe looked less exciting but was really great in person and how we could get the content that we created in those spaces to be even better. I was unhappy with the first photoshoot we did for the product. I didn’t think it was as good as it could have been. I didn’t think we cast the models right. Just the sort of things that you’re like, “ah, knowing what I know now, how do we do this?”

What we found is a lot of the artifice, and a lot of the sort of constructs people come to us with. Like the first photographer we worked with on that first photoshoot for Sergio Tuchinni in March of 2020. It was a casting agency, and there were models, and they were bussed in, and we spent a lot of money, and there were stylists, and that’s all great. There are some tremendous, tremendous people in this space. The stylist we worked with, Sarah, she’s a fantastic stylist. I would love to work with her again. But the photography wasn’t quite right; the models weren’t quite right. I’m sort of harping on this because the truth is the food and bev portion was awesome.

The party was awesome. Our sponsors were awesome. The court was popping off, whether we had a clinic planned for new tennis players, experienced tennis players or anyone in between. Like there was always action going on. There were always people in the pool, and the coolest people came through. Some boldface names, but also the creative director who’s in from Lacoste from Paris is here, and his crew are chilling by the pool, and they’re going to play a set. Collisions and collaborations and ideas are created. And that is one throughline that we’ve kept that I’m thrilled with. Just from a sort of product standpoint, I think that that the photography was not us. It felt stilted. It was very ‘fashion’ in a way. We found our fans don’t like the artifice.

And so today, when we did a photoshoot with the incredible Molly Crana, we let her and one of our staff, art direct, and it was using the implements of a public tennis court. And it was so much more of us. We had many more sorts of tattoos. Nobody looked airbrushed in a way that I think when people looked too “modely” they don’t play tennis. At least I can tell when you’re watching somebody who’s meant to model sports clothes, and they don’t play the sport. And I think that is an immediate signifier that somebody’s co-opting a community instead of celebrating it. And so what we started doing is casting photo shoots, product ideas, and collaborations from our own community. And today, we have had a friend and a former professional tennis player – who’s now going to be our intern – be the main models of the photoshoot. And that is one concrete example that I can say we’ve really evolved. Our products have gotten better, and the way we produce imagery has gotten better because it’s much more aligned with how we cast it and how we’re using it to further the community’s efforts, ideas, membership, whatever it is.

We make it cool for these players to step into our culture. They want to come because they understand that we’re doing something that has a different dimension.

On Creating Cultural Currency.

What’s the role that the imagery plays? I mean, obviously, there’s a role that it plays on Instagram and just showing people what’s going on. And that it’s real. But the thing that I think you’ve been super smart on, that I haven’t even done yet – and I say that just cause I’ve done this 14 times – is having a for-profit client component be a part of the weekend. I think that’s super smart. Why have you chosen to do the shoot today? Why didn’t it take place tomorrow? Do you want your community around?

100% per cent. We want them in the photos. They are feeling so cool that they get to be part of this. And also, it looks authentic. It doesn’t look like a sound stage, or somebody’s pretend idea of what a tennis court is. No, it’s the public tennis court and some old guys in the background that we put a hat on, and that’s cool because that’s how our community rolls. The way we think about anything experiential is “How are you using art? How are you using design? How are you using storytelling? How are you using all the mediums available to us? How are we connecting this with the print magazine?” How can we not only create something that feels cool at the moment for people who are in attendance – which is a great rate and needs to be important and thoughtful – but also how are we creating a 360 lifespan?

So when we talk about this thing as something that is happening, how can we use that to further our interaction, engagement, excitement, and maybe a product launch? How can we use what happens at the moment to serve the people who are there and demonstrate to people who are not there what they might be missing? Not in a way that you necessarily want them to create FOMO, which you do, but maybe it’s more the client service idea where people are getting impressions and being introduced to a brand that they’d never seen before, like Ghia, which is a non-alcoholic aperitif, which sponsored Racquet House this year. I happened to drink this. My wife got diagnosed with MS about six months ago and doesn’t drink anymore. This is for us like a celebratory adaptogenic cocktail that we crack open at the end of the night.

I don’t drink anymore much because I can’t sleep well. And you know life has moved on for us in a way that when we imbibe, it’s only occasionally. But something like that is something that our community can get behind. Because they’re athletes, whether they’re really good at athletes or at the beginning of their athletic journey, which is not to say we wouldn’t have alcohol sponsors, but this felt like a natural relationship, a natural product. And having it on the court where people are having a nice, elevated spritz after a tennis match feels very on-brand for everyone. They’ve created a Mediterranean lifestyle brand. We have a tennis brand that is all about the lifestyle. And so that works much more than Gatorade, right? What are we gonna do with a bunch of Gatorade on the court besides drink a lot of sugar?

This is really good, by the way.

I know. It’s also a female founder. So I think for us, like thinking about what can we do before the event, what happens during the event, both in person, but also as we communicate externally. A lot of that is as simple as sharing on Instagram. That’s really where that medium takes flight, but also what can we create afterwards? So today we did a photoshoot for a product launch that’s coming in the spring. We’ve done a bunch of content capture that’s going to be released in drips and drabs throughout the rest of the year.

All brand stuff or magazine stuff as well?

Both, both, both. It’s both brand and editorial.

Do you know already what’s going where?

Most of it, we know. But you always want to leave room for the serendipitous. And I think the idea that these events don’t end, they just kind of roll into the next one, right? And the same people tend to come back, but bring their friends or send their friends if they can’t make it. And that is really what we want. We want people asking us, “oh, where’s Racquet House gonna be this year? Can I get invited? Oh, are you guys popping up in Morocco? Because there’s a tournament here. Are you going to be in Paris?” And then we can say this is based on interest, naturally occurring community and sort of the tennis cadence.

This is where it makes sense for us. This is where it’d be fun for us. And also like at the end of the day, like any entrepreneur, I think if you’re not making something for yourself and your friends that they can actually enjoy, you’re missing an opportunity to like really focus group the hell out of a concept. For example – there’s a huge tournament in Cincinnati. Western and Southern Open. All the pros go there. The prize money is huge. They have a great facility. It’s actually gorgeous. It’s on the water. But Cincinnati is not a place where we have many readers and it’s not a place that there’s enough, not again to disparage Cincinnati at all, but like there’s not a naturally occurring community of our people there. And so I would rather go to Rabat where there’s an incredibly picturesque club, where we have some old-timers that we can sip tea with after we play and get some backgammon games going and rent a hotel with a tennis court where all of a sudden that makes sense for us as a lifestyle brand. Our people would rather get on a plane to Morocco than go to Ohio. And no disrespect intended, but I think that’s part of the lifestyle.

And it can shift.

It can shift. Totally. If Ohio becomes really cool because all of a sudden, the rust belt reclamation has happened, and there’s food & bev. Nashville was a kind of nothing burger city when I was a kid, but now it’s come into its own. It’s always been a music city, but now it’s got all these components. And I think Racquet House Nashville makes a lot more sense than Racquet House Atlanta, where tons of people play tennis. But they don’t necessarily read or at least subscribe to Racquet. And so we can kind of use the way that different products sell and where our audience is for a lot of our digital and audio and newsletter content to sort of say like, “ah, I bet if we had one here, we could get people to travel. Or, this one’s a no-brainer because there’s such an existing exciting audience there.” That’s going to really resonate with what we’re doing.

And then what you get, if you focus on those folks, is that you get the tennis people who are curious and come by and want to dip their toes. Right? Like, we don’t have tennis pros there as stunts. We’re not selling their celebrity or access. Right. But about half of the people recognized Christion today. She was an American champion. One of the greatest collegiate players of all time. She’s going to be Racquet’s intern, starting at the end of this month. Christion is a professional player. She made the quarter-finals at the US Open maybe two years ago. She’s awesome. It couldn’t be nicer. Yeah. She showed up to model our watch. Only about half the people knew who she was. The people who did were like, “holy shit, pros on the court with me right now.”

But the point is, we’re not like, “and appearances by Christion, appearances by Benoit Pare, and appearances by Naomi Osaka who came to our last party in LA.” Like that’s not interesting to us, and it’s gauche to be like, “and then what if I sell you a ticket based on you seeing Naomi Osaka, if she doesn’t talk to you, are you going to feel like you were cheated? Are you expecting her to speak or do a dance?” That, to me, is again thinking about how we, for lack of a better word, transact on some of the cultural currency.

We make it cool for these players to step into our culture, and they want to come because they understand that we’re doing something that has a little different dimension. And by the way, the people who really know tennis, which is not all of our audience, but the people who do get the added bonus of being like, “oh, wow, this is an overlap.” That, to me, is what doing a real-life event gives you the opportunity to do. Even more than just getting Naomi Osaka to guest edit one of our issues, which she did last summer or Andrea Petit to write an incredibly great essay, which she does almost every issue we have. Who is our cultural attache, or, you know, um, Stefanos Tsitipas taking photos for us, which he’s done on a couple of occasions. It’s not stunt casting. Stefanos is a good photographer. And he’s got an interesting story to tell. And so we can be the platform. Andrea Perovich is an incredible writer. So we’ve got an incredible platform for her to match up with. We’re not stunt casting anybody, but we are again providing an opportunity for culture and tennis to talk to each other, always. And the House is a manifestation physically of how that can come into effect.

The thing that you cannot replace with money is trust.

On Brand Partner Philosophy.

When you think about building brand partners, is the truest collaboration somebody who can go through the arc of everything you’ve built in your mind?

A hundred percent. That’s a great question. And it’s a very observant one because I think for us, although this is usually a way that brands feel comfortable starting, we don’t necessarily want somebody to be like, “oh, cool. This event, I’ll sponsor it for X amount of dollars.” And then somebody else, you’re gonna get them to sponsor the next one. And then it’s brand soup. And it just ends up feeling like it’s a nightclub with 40 brands on the invitation, right? And that’s fine. That’s the nightclub aesthetic, but it’s not our aesthetic, and it’s not how we like to work. Our relationship with Adidas is very instructive in this way because you obviously we have all these really great editorial vehicles, but they’re so married to the brand and the brand vehicles that we’ve created, that our audience is receptive to both. It doesn’t feel like, “oh, now we’re into the paid portion of the programming. Now it’s the advertisement opposed to the edit.” We’re doing what I hope is really elevated stuff regardless of whether it’s the advertisement or the edit. Like our North star, Tyler Brule, it should feel as rich with story regardless. And so, our ideal way to work with a brand is what we’ve done with Adidas who started hiring us to design some posters.

The classic agency stuff?

Classic agency stuff. But just getting to know them that. Now, we’re about to do our second capsule collaboration with them that will include events. We will have two Racquet Houses with them, I hope next year in the two key markets. We’ve created an entire campaign that not only sells the collaboration, but kind of stakes a claim in the world of tennis that is both very us and where they wanna be. And so there’s a brandcampaign component to that. There is a event experiential component to that. There is a e-commerce component to that because the last capsule we did with them sold out within days. Most of it’s now on Grailed or second party resale sites, and we didn’t make enough. We didn’t make enough for women. We learned tons of stuff about sizing. And before you do something, you just don’t know.

We learned the price sensitivity was not an issue. But we needed to make more of everything and make it dual gender in more obvious ways. I, as well as a lot of women, are comfortable wearing men’s clothes, but just a little bit more in terms of size discrepancy and some of the cuts, make them a little bit more for all bodies, which is great. And that’s what you want to do you wanna learn. So I think for us that is sort of the platonic ideal of how we want to work with brands. Adidas is taking the most risks from a sort of brand standpoint, from a product standpoint, at the moment. And they get holistically that arc that you were talking about is how we work with them now because we’ve learned and tried and trusted. And now it’s this immersive 360 relationship where we have real credibility and the ability to connect with our fans directly. And everybody’s benefiting because they get that authentic connection. They get a really, really cool product launch, which they have to make anyway. And they get an incredibly useful and portable campaign that they can take and put all over any of their channels. It doesn’t have to live only within our ecosystem.

I’ve been thinking about this. Even like a brand like Adidas, where do they go to get the insights that you could give them in an afternoon at MiamiBeach Tennis Center? I mean, they’ve got to go pay a pity penny to Gartner and others for that.

When they know about it. I think a lot of brands are still really stuck in trusting their creative agencies who then turn and call us. So we’ve pretty much stopped working with any creative agencies. Not out of spite, but just you’re being a middle man for no reason. Many brands are corporate, and many brands understand that they’re willing to give up creativity and,d frankly, quality for having like three junior associates on call for them at any time.

Personally, and it’s the reason I started EE, I think creative agencies are out to lunch. The best creatives do not reside in those places. They’ve already gone out to start their own LLCs.

Hundred percent. Or they’re making their own direct to consumer product.

And so I’m assuming much like EE, you just take the best independents you can find and basically build a seal team six?

Hundred percent. And sometimes those are line items in a budget, or sometimes they’re on staff and we have a small staff. But we do keep a creative director on staff for as the point person for all creative projects. He’s usually the point of the spear, whether he’s designing the campaign or not, it’s usually with some input from him or within his aesthetic landscape, which is important for continuity. But also, the thing about creatives is they come to us, they want to create, they’re hungry. They are usually the first people to get anything. They’re the trend seekers, because they inherently know what’s new, what’s fresh. What’s been done before. What’s inspired by what, what’s a distillation of something that is an homage or what’s a rip off of something.

They just have such a keen sense that it’s really wonderful to work with them. And they usually come our way. “Hey, do you have any projects? Hey, I have this idea and that’s great.” And we keep them all on file and keep good relationships with them, but we also use them not indiscriminately but flexibly between editorial and brand. And that’s why they’re so good because they can do both. And they have great aspects of their portfolios that are visual or brand, but they can also go into editorial because they’re storytellers. And I think that’s our standard as opposed to having maybe the biggest names. I couldn’t think of a less useful thing than a creative agency to be honest. And I think the only use for it is if you want to get an email response within 10 minutes from somebody who doesn’t really know anything, but is just sort of being paid to babysit you.

And I think that’s, you know, for all, but the largest brands, they’re already beyond it, but we still see in tennis, tennis has been very corporate and the brands have been very, very slow to adapt. And so we get, “I’m the creative agency working for X financial institution. I’m the creative agency working for Xbeverage.” And it’s sort of like, “we’re already talking to them directly. No, thanks.” I’ve been in enough meetings where we give them ideas and they can’t even execute them correctly. And then you’re just like “this is a waste of everyone’s time and you charged your client for this and we don’t get paid.”

So funny you bring that up. Because the question I was going to ask is was a two sided realization and question. Has a brand gone around you? I just had the first actualexperience of this three weeks ago and it’s a terrible feeling.

Sure. Brand saw one of our designers aesthetics and just went to them directly. But what’s interesting about it is that most people are like, “oh this is Racquet, you know?” That’s cool. I would’ve liked to have cashed their check to be honest. And they could have used our editing frankly and our storytelling because it was just one aspect of it. That’s no hurt feelings because honestly the designer is awesome and she’s deserves all the work she can get. And so I would never wanna be like, “oh you have to cut us in. We made you.” That’s not ever my attitude. It’s more “Yeah, go get it.” But I think when people hire an artist as opposed to a publication, they’re not getting a storyteller, editor, they’re not getting the whole package.

It was like, “oh, this is Racquet, except it doesn’t have any of the cool stuff.” And it’s visually us because it’s a designer we brought into the tennis space, which is great. I’m happy that she gets to work again. I think a lot of people don’t understand what’s valuable and what makes something really good. So it ended up being kind of a flash in the paint campaign that most people assumed was us. As opposed to something that had some legs that you could build on sort of year after year. Which is I think what we would’ve done.

And also the realization part of my question, then they don’t get any of this other stuff. The e-commerce right, the live experience, the activation. No solopreneur can really give that to you. So I feel like that’s a super-smart moat and to be honest when I pitched that idea, I didn’t have those things at my disposal.

Yeah. But I also think you have a great Rolodex and you’re asking thoughtful questions of people, which makes me believe that you inherently see them and understand them in a way that is going to always allow you to ladder up. And so if you needed a seal team six for any kind of job tomorrow, you could have it, right? Like if I said, “oh Cornelius, you actually have to stay in Miami for another week and we need you to put on a retreat, go.” You’d be fantastic. And you can do it. And so I think part of that for the solopreneur, which is a word that I have not heard before, but I should adopt, is this concept that, “oh, you’re actually much bigger than you think you are.” Especially because if you’ve done right by people, if you’ve paid them well, and if you’ve been a straight shooter and you’ve owned your shortcomings and you’ve tried to be direct. The thing that you cannot replace with money is trust.

And I think most people who want to work with us know we’re going to treat them well, pay them well, and it’s gonna be a positive experience. And hopefully the work reflects that both for their own personal portfolio and the happiness of us and the brand that we might be working for. For us I have no problem – both because bigger and we’ve done it – knowing how much we can telescope out if needed to sort of say, “yeah, we don’t have a full events team, but here’s the three people that we work with every time and they’re as fantastic as it gets and they’re total pros and whatever it is.” So I think that’s really crucial. And you only get that if you have, if you pay people well, which I keep stressing, because most people think it’s about connections and it’s about who you know, which is true.

But it’s also about how you make the people who know you feel. Do they like working with you? Are you treating them fairly? Did you pay them on time? Did you give them as much creative license as felt right for you and for them and for the project? Like those things matter. And that accumulated trust is why you can call them and they’ll be like, “well, I was mulling taking something that maybe would’ve paid me more or I was actually gonna do this other thing, but your thing is gonna be fun and I’m gonna enjoy it. And the product’s gonna look great.” Right? And so that to me is actually a sort of secret weapon that a solopreneur has. I should be clear – I am not. I have a business partner. We have a small team now of investor-advisors. I’m not doing this alone. I couldn’t, I don’t have the continents. But, thinking about how I can, or my partner, Dave can quickly text a SWAT team. And these are people who know us, like u, want to do the next thing,g and can’t wait for the next adventure. That to me is irreplaceable. And it also means you can always, you can kind of punch above your weight.

Absolutely. And that’s kind of one of the reasons why I tip my hat because I’ve done this 14 times. Every single time we do a retreat, I hire a photographer. And that’s in addition to the people I’m just meeting naturally. And actually one of the things that I felt has been an artificial ceiling is I know they can take great groups, pictures of the group, but how can I innovate on that further? And I think that’s such a natural collaboration.

The way we’ve thought about using different photography formats, the way you could think about using a photo booth, which is sort of an older idea, but the idea of creating moments where people are gonna wanna be receptive and open and maybe taking photographs and, “oh, he was at one of Cornelius’s events, and she went to a retreat. I can tell because she’s got the X, she’s posing with the Y. The filter looks like X.” Creating that visual language by hiring maybe the same photographer or asking different photographers to do the same sort of thing. I was on a podcast called five to nine. It was about side hustles. This was when I first started the podcast and I was really impressed with their visual aesthetic. They both came from branding and they were both really, really smart.

The first thing they did when I came into the studio to meet with them was they took like a Fuji film, white background of me. I forget what they asked me to pose with. It might have been a neon sticky note, like a post-it with my name. And I was just like, “ah, okay, so now everybody knows it’s your cover art for your podcast.” It’s the Instagram for the link to the episode. It’s the shareable moment that I wanna share. Cause I look good in it, frankly. I don’t look like I’m mid bite of a crudite or somebody’s idea of a posed picture that I’m gonna feel is wildly off brand for me. Yeah. It’s like, “oh, I feel like I’m just being captured at a party.”

And that’s how their podcast made me feel, which is why they got better answers than they would’ve had I felt like stuffy and weird. Like I had to sit for a formal portrait, but it was also a shareable moment that they were using to create a visual aesthetic that goes with their podcast. So just little things like that, where it’s like, “oh, what is on brand for me? And what are people gonna want to take away?” Like one of the sort of silliest but effective concepts was somebody, and I’m not gonna remember who it was, was telling me about the grip and grin wall. You always want to give people the grip and grin wall. It doesn’t have to be like your picture shaking hands with Colin Powell from 1985 because that’s three generations older than me. And I have a sense that I’m probably a generation older than you, but just the idea that like, “oh, what do I get from this to share with other people to show that I did a cool thing? Not in a way that means I’m better than other people or not in a way that makes them necessarily feel FOMO or jealousy, but just the idea like, “hey, I was at this fun thing and look, here’s some pictorial evidence. That to me is worth thinking through.”

And that infrastructure is almost like the working man and women’s media company. Right. And you are delivering on that.

Hundred percent.

Why Miami? It’s because we know the city, we like it. It’s a big tennis city. There’s a lot of Racquet readership here and a lot of art and culture people here. So we do well here. The other reason is because we have a track record with some brands who really want to be here.

On Why Miami.

So why Miami and why now? I saw that you did the Lacoste guide about a year ago. So I’m assuming it was for the last Racquet House. But please tell me how this weekend, this Miami Racquet House, beginning the tournament week, adds to what you’ve already done with Lacoste. In terms of telling a nice narrative story, here’s the visual of the city, which is almost the veins and the artery of the tennis landscape.

A hundred percent. And that’s absolutely right. And unfortunately, the thing we were going to do with Lacoste this year didn’t quite work out. We were going to have this hosted dinner at this mega-mansion for Venus, and it got scrapped because of COVID and things like that. The other thing is an entrepreneur solo, or otherwise, you have not to take that sort of stuff personally; just keep moving forward. Lacoste doesn’t owe us anything. We had a great concept. We discussed it, and hopefully, it’ll work out the next time. And It will, right. Because the intention is there, and we both get each other like brands. But Lacoste has a significant presence in Miami. And so when they hired us last year to do something around this shoe for Medvedev, we created a guide to Miami. That was our pitch. So that it would feel very organically like it was places where you get a significant Lacoste retail presence, like the Webster or UNKNWN, this new shoe store in Wynwood owned by LeBron James, whatever it is. But also the places, the public courts we like to go play on, the cool restaurants we would like to go eat on, and how we experience the city because many people want the sort of insider’s guide to a place. It’s both a travel destination and a way to create your ideal itinerary. And I think for Racquet House here, it makes a lot more sense because we know people at all the tennis clubs. We have a community of people in the food and beverage industry.

It was a phone call away when we wanted to throw a party on Friday night at peach fuzz, a downtown dance party at the freehold in Wynwood. We got all of our people in, and it was a VIP experience. That will look different from the afternoon backgammon and mint tea post-party that we do in Rabat one year because there’s a tennis tournament there. Or the genteel sweating glass of gin and tonic that we’ll do in a backyard in London. But the idea is it is specific to a place. Miami is neon and sparklers, and that’s what we felt like a bit of an obligation to provide. And I think, “Why Miami?” It is because we know the city, we like it. It’s a big tennis city, and there’s a lot of Racquet readership here and a lot of art and culture people here. So we do well here. The other reason is that we have a track record with some brands who want to be here.

And the third reason is because when the Miami open comes, which is beginning tomorrow, it’s a two-week tournament. It’s one of the biggest in the year on the calendar for men and women together. We know the energy and the excitement and the focus on tennis. Like I was talking about, in London during the Fortnite – you can always find people watching or playing tennis in London. But it becomes frenzied during those two weeks in late June, early July. And so that moment is when we know, “ah, okay, this is the moment for this.” Indian Wells in Palm Springs was a very similar vibe. We decided to skip Indian Wells this year because we went to the tournament last fall, and we felt like the vibe wasn’t quite what it should be. We felt like people weren’t travelling out from LA, and those are our people instead of the people who just go to see the tennis. And so we were kinda like, “oh, well, let’s, if we’re going to do one in the spring, let’s do one in Miami instead. I think that’s where the buzz is going to be.” Serena Williams is coming back from an injury. There’s just a little bit more buzz this year about Miami. And we know it’s a city where we can activate, we have a community of people and, similarly to London or New York, like there’s always a crowd of cool people who live there.

So do you feel like your work is done before the tournament, or is it just beginning?

This year we’re not going to be at the tournament very much. Like I have some meetings in the next couple of days. I love watching tennis. So I could literally just go to the tennis centre all day long and watch tennis. I have a wife and a nearly eight-year-old child back in New York. So for us, I try to pick my spots. My business partner has two kids. So he’s got to make choices about how he spends time. But the thing is, a lot of people who come to Racquet House come a day or two early and stay for the duration of the tournament or stay for a couple of days to watch tennis. And so they’re able to do both. And because we do it typically a little bit before the tennis, we get the brands, and we get the players in a way that we might not otherwise.

So by doing it the weekend before, it’s like, “oh, are you gonna go to Miami to watch the early rounds of the tennis on a Monday?” Or are you going to go a couple of days earlier, spend the weekend in Miami, play tennis yourself, maybe go out to some incredible dance parties, have great food and Bev experience somewhere and then go to the tennis afterwards? So it’s an idea of melding this culture and art. There are plenty of people who will sell you a fantasy tennis ticket experience, where if you want to go to Wimbledon, they’ll put you up in a hotel and get your tickets to all the matches. They’ll charter a bus for you that goes straight from the hotel to the front entrance grounds. And that’s great. Many people want to do that.

I don’t think that’s a very contemporary way people want to experience things. They like to curate their own experiences because they tend to be more discriminating than older generations, but there’s still a very, very big audience for people who want to do that. “Get me the tickets, get me the thing. I want to sit and watch tennis. I don’t care what the food is like. I don’t care that I’m staying in a not cool hotel.” And that’s fine; those aren’t our people. Our people do care about all that stuff. And so we don’t feel an obligation to provide them with tickets. They can get their own tickets and see whatever day or match or night session or day session they want. But we can provide the stuff either because we’re curating it or because we know they will find this extra layer of experiential immersion.

And so, with the guide, are you going to go deeper? Because it’s genuinely just a one-pager, figuratively and physically.

We did another one this past summer for Racquet House, New York. And New York was the one I was missing. Can you believe that? We also did it at the ACE hotel. So it wasn’t like a mega-mansion because very few places in New York have a tennis court. So we did it at public courts in Fort Green and the ACE hotel. That was a new location in downtown Brooklyn on Hoyt and Schermerhorn, sort of the intersection of those streets. The guide concept we have always looked at, I’ve already mentioned his name. I told myself I wasn’t going to drop it too many times. Monocle is a playbook of sorts. It’s not a complete playbook for us. We’re a little different, but I know you’re very inspired by Tyler.

A lot of us who sort of understand when you create an ecosystem with a journalistic product magazine, maybe at the centre of it, or maybe as a crucial pillar. But you’ve thought about the entirety of the sensibility and the landscape. You can’t help but applaud and take inspiration. Maybe you like it, perhaps you don’t, but you can’t help but admire the infrastructure of what he’s built, what Tyler Brule has built with Monocle and hearing him talk about going in to travel. The monocle guide to London, the Monocle guide to Paris, the Monocle guide to Marrakech, The Monocle Guide to Hong Kong, the Monocle guide to dining, The monocle guide to Cocktails, right? The monocle guide to design. There’s an endless supply. Once you build that credibility, and once you build that design and visual, and I think editorial sensibility towards somebody. If they trust you, they trust you with everything, and you can’t betray that trust.

You can’t sell them bad things. You can’t inundate them with products that are not up to snuff. You can’t do brand partnerships that don’t feel right. But you can treat that relationship and that trust with the utmost care. And you can extend their universe and how they are thinking about you. So we’ve done it for brands. Initially, we did it as you said for Lacoste last spring for the Miami Open. And then we did a guide to New York in late August because Wilson was opening up a popup store. They wanted very much to reacquaint people with their retail experience. They haven’t typically been very much of a retail brand. They tend to be more of like an equipment high-end performance brand, but they had a capsule collection that was very, very cute.

They collaborated with Kith. It was worn by a few of the players who use Wilson clothing in addition to Wilson equipment. And it was really on brand for us because we had a lot of people like, “oh, did you hear that Kith and Wilson are doing a thing? Oh, did you hear they are popping up in Soho?” And so, we not only created the guide for them, but we created an immersive sort of entertaining space. We curated a lounge at that pop-up store that we decorated with memorabilia, items that we’ve sourced for photoshoots, issues of the magazine, and our book. We had live podcast tapings up there. Billy Jean King – who’s a Wilson athlete – we talked to her about the book, which I also incidentally reviewed in the New York Times.

So just the synergy of that was so good. And so basically, we’ve started to do these for brands because we love doing them. And they’re really fun. The idea is that they roll up into essentially travel guides and then, one day, a completely immersive experience that might maybe lead to physical locations or a travelling band of people. I’m not trying to be in the travel and leisure business, but I look at Rapha as a goal and think about what they’ve done for cycling in various far-flung communities. I can go to the Rapha site and find a ‘cycle along the great wall’ and a community of people to do it in, the merch to do it in, and the content to get excited about it.

People are doing amazingly cool things. You just have to understand how they’re doing it or enough about how it is they’re doing it to say like, “ah, this part of that will work for me. And here’s how I can make it financially sustainable.” As I said, most, most, most importantly, authentic to the people who have been along for the ride and are ever curious about joining. If that is right, it’s just how long your day is and how much time you have to do these projects because they’re great and fun, and I see no end to them.

It tends to play to the basist instincts of how we are treating each other. And that it’s a zero sum game and it’s more about victory than value. And that could not be farther from what I want people who are new to the sport to experience. I want them to experience whether they suck or whether they’re an old hand who’s coming back. I want them to feel like this is fun. I like these people. I’m in a fun place. I’m having a good time. I wanna do this again.

On Tennis As The Bridge.

The guide has just been so overdone. And so the guide to me almost needs a bridge. Like you’ve got the human over here, you’ve got this huge Gorge, and then you’ve got the endpoint. And so, how do you pick them up? And then what paraglider did you pick them up on? And you’re using tennis, and then the bridge is actually the same.

But not everything has that bridge.

No. And that’s actually something I think you have over me.

Entrepreneurialism is a little bit more open.

It’s too broad.

But you know Monocle is also about business. The office is also about business. Courier magazine is also about business, and you don’t feel like any of those flavors. Like we were talking about a visual language that defines the experience of being at one of these retreats. What is the bridge that you’re bringing people across? And I think it can be a number of different things. For Tyler Brule, it’s some vague European ski town lifestyle man who’s maybe gay in his late forties. And that’s not just not Tyler himself, but that’s the person who goes to Gstaad for an executives retreat. That’s not your person. Your person is in Miami, maybe.

Potentially. I’m trying to figure out who that is. And I think that’s one of the things you’ve done really well and not to use just years as an excuse.

You do figure it out.

I think that’s the difference between your six, seven years old and I’m three. It does feel like constant learning, big brother, little sister. In this scenario, big sister, little brother. And I think that’s the magic. So on the piece, though – and this is the one thing that I’m confident about, which is a longer tail game, and I will be honest, it’s not simple – is individuals still need people to do all the stuff you’re telling them to do with each other, which is another thing I think you’re delivering—but not necessarily monetising directly. The community from today. How many people who live in Miami came to the event today and met three to five new tennis friends?

I was talking to a girl who had left. She said, “oh, I wasn’t sure if I was welcome here. Because I just saw it on Instagram because a friend shared it with me, and I stayed for six hours, and now I have three people to play with.”

The value of that is… you can’t quantify it.

I don’t want to quantify it. Not because it’s not important to me; it’s the only thing that’s important to me. But cheapening that by making it transactional takes away the magic of it. And I think maybe that’s a little too head in the clouds, but it’s true. It’s not like, “oh, we did a startup, and it didn’t work, but it was the friends we made along the way.” Like that’s not the story, I’m writing. But I think a lot about if you make it fun and if you make it authentic and the brands paying for it are excited, and it’s something that you would enjoy and go to. Then the part you hope for, but can’t promise, is that people walk away sold on the community.

Yeah, of course, they will subscribe to the magazine or share it or gift it. Or maybe when we have a product that comes out, that’s a new launch, we’ve earned their loyalty in some lifelong way that an ad or a campaign could never have done alone. That’s what I need to transact on. I need them to be lifers, and I think they will be. Most of them are, but what I hope happens, and the best thing possible, is that they find their place in it that doesn’t necessarily need us to be there. And I think that is because the people she’s going to play with are also going to recruit 10 or 15 people, and it’s going to be exponential. And some of those folks will remember that it was us and subscribe and follow and whatever, and that’s great.

But I don’t need to feel like we’ve done something like good. I’ve already kept the lights on by doing other things. And so that’s why I want people to come because they can feel like, “oh, I had a great time. My swag bag was sick—the brands you had. I tried a cool new non-alcoholic aperitif. And then I made friends and had somebody to like to keep me in this sport. Forever. As opposed to like, “I’m going to dabble. I don’t like the community.” Maybe this is too much of a tennis sort of insider thing. But one way that people step into our sport is that the United States tennis association, which is the governing body, which like all governing bodies, is top-heavy, glacial, culturally in the eighties at best, couldn’t be more of a hindrance to the sport.

They have heavily marketed this idea of competition and league play. And so if you’re a newbie, Cornelius, “Hey, we’re going to target you into tennis. Play in a league.” The number of complaints I’ve heard about these leagues. I’ve played in the leagues. They tend to be pretty genial at my level because most people are former collegiate athletes like I am, who recognise that we’re 20 years past our prime and do not take it personally if we’re not winning every match. So it’s fine. But for most people, especially beginners, the only thing they’re learning about is that winning is the only thing that matters. There’s a lot of cheating. There are a lot of cutthroat attitudes.

It tends to play to the basest instincts of how we are treating each other. And that it’s a zero-sum game and it’s more about victory than value. And that could not be farther from what I want people new to the sport to experience. I want them to experience whether they suck or whether they’re an old hand who’s coming back. I want them to feel like this is fun. I like these people. I’m in a fun place. I’m having a good time. I want to do this again. And I don’t need to be the one selling them the clinics or providing them with the experience. But I want them to have that be one of their first experiences or a meaningful experience. And that, to me, means you’re building a tennis fan who’s in it for the right reasons, which is the love of the sport.

Whether they play it well or not, the people they feel are welcoming or stepping into it with them. And as you said, people, people need people. Think one of the many ways this sport has shot itself in the foot by making it feel like, “you have to be very good or you have to enjoy the competitive aspect of the sport. And again, all three of those things are not interesting to me and overdone and oversaturated, and because everyone’s so focused on those things, it means we get to play in the space that exists. That is everywhere else.

I also think one of the things that help you on the memory piece. Because I can tell you the memory is concise, and people can decide almost to erase it, which again goes back to the power of imagery. But one of the things that you have is people playing tennis. It’s almost like a reinforcing Sunday service function as the church. That you’re always going to be able to trade on that’s super powerful.

My favorite person is somebody who came into the Racquet universe and got permission to be into this because they finally saw themselves in it. Maybe they buy a bunch of our stuff. Perhaps they only purchase stuff that occasionally. Perhaps they don’t even buy anything but like hype us up. That’s great for me. And they become the kind of people who like to put a Racquet or two in their bag when they go someplace. Because they’re now going to find the local place, they’ll take a lesson maybe. They’re going to like maybe trying to drop into a live ball if they’re in LA. When we went on my honeymoon in Corsica with my wife, we joined a club for a day for an afternoon for five euros.

And it was in Corsica, and we became members of this kind of derelict club and like met the old guys and some of the older women and like people who just had grown up playing there and were cool. And that was a way cooler experience within Corsica. I don’t want to say it was way cooler than the Michelin star restaurants that we were eating out at on our honeymoon, but it was just as valid, and it was just as cool. My French isn’t great, but we met some friends and had a great time. My wife’s not a great tennis player, but I would’ve rather spent the hour with her making new Corsican friends than I would’ve liked to try a tournament or find some elite training. It’s like, “that’s not what I’m here for.”​

We decide when we charge for things. And when we do, we want it to reflect the quality of what’s made. So that’s why we didn’t make a thousand $20 watches.

On Racquet x Maurice De Mauriac

Absolutely. So look, we’ve got a couple of minutes left. So let’s talk about the photo shoot you did today. I want to make sure I’m getting this name right—Swiss watchmaker. I read a bit of their story with Stan Smith. I think that’s super cool. I know the Stan story. I don’t know your story. So tell me how that relationship has evolved and what today was?

Great questions, and ones I’m very excited to talk about. I think people will be hearing about it here first because we have not made much of this publically.

Awesome.

Because we’ve just sort of teased some photos on the internet, but Maurice de Mauriac is a family-owned three-generation Swiss watchmaking family. They are not luxury watches. They are Sportif watches. They are very, very interested in the Sportif lifestyle. The sports that they love and have relationships with are skiing, which I adore. I’m from Montreal, so that is a no-brainer to me. Ski and tennis have a lot of similarities and a lot of problems, to be honest, about elitism and monoculture and race. But both spots sports I love and both sports theoretically that can be about lifestyle and F1. They love Sportif. So they tend to make watches that are very highly functional within the sports space. They’re meant to be worn while competing. They’re not dainty and super fussy, but they are incredibly well made because they’re Swiss made and made with care and love and all the bells and whistles that you might expect.

So we knew a bit about them because we’d seen the Stan watch, and obviously, we’d helped Stan Smith launch his Rizzoli coffee table book when the “I’m not just a shoe” book came out a couple of years ago. And so we had a good relationship with Adidas and some friends in that world. So, they came to us and said, “Hey, we love what you’re doing. We love tennis. You guys are the only people in tennis doing stuff that feels very contemporary from a media perspective, and we’d love to do something.” And I had had a conversation with a guy called Carlton DeWoody. Carlton runs an incredibly, incredibly cool high minded, aesthetically, very, very on-brand for us design studio called reunion. And reunion mostly does interiors for restaurants and hotels.

If you ever are curious, their Instagram is like a great trip. But you’ve probably been to if you’ve been to like Nashville, LA, New York, or, you know, probably Paris, London, Berlin, I’m guessing you’ve probably been in some of their spaces. Just really, really cool immersive food and Bev things. The attention to detail and the 360 landscape thought process is really evident. And so Carlton and I had been talking. His father was James DeWoody. He’s a famous painter. He’s a really interesting guy. And he and I had been talking because one of our mutual friends was like, “oh, Carlton loves the aesthetics of tennis. I wonder if he should be a Racquet investor.” I wasn’t looking to raise around. So I didn’t press it. I was just like, “Hey, let’s have a chat. Every chat is a possibility to me.”

And I don’t like to pitch because I don’t want to pitch. We’ve only raised money when people have offered it to us. And that’s a luxury that you can have if you don’t need a lot of money because you’re small and don’t want to take the wrong kind of money. But it means that when the right people offer, it’s easy, and when the wrong people offer, it’s also easy to be like, “oh, you’re not actually a good fit for us.” I do it nicely, but I do have to be firm at times. Um, and because you know, these people essentially become your bosses, right? So we were talking, and it occurred to me, “oh, I don’t want his money, nor do I need it because he does some angel investing, and he’s very interested in entrepreneurialism.”

But he was a watch head, and I said, “oh man, it would be so cool to have a tennis watch. What if we did a tennis watch?”And we let the conversation go at the moment because there wasn’t an immediate opportunity, but we knew that there was a shared love. He loved the tennis aesthetics, some of the color palettes, and some of the unexplored facets of the sport that felt like we could really do something fun. And we just became friends with him and co-opted him into the community. And he came to some of our events, and he lives out in the Pacific Palisades and has a cool art and cultural background, heritage from his family, and a community of people. And so he felt right at home within our world and got what we were about, and we developed his friendship.

And so when Maurice de Mauriac called us and said like, “Hey, we like what you’re doing. Do you wanna do a watch?” We thought, “ah, this is how we get Carlton involved.” He’s never designed a watch before. He’s just a fanatical watch fan. And so conversations turned into plans, turned into production, turned into execution. And now we are on the precipice of launching our extremely limited edition but very high price point Swiss watch called the Rallymaster. And Carlton, because he’s got incredible attention to detail, has designed the box. That is a sort of Heather Gray. The watch’s aesthetic is a dusty pink. It’s meant for both or all genders, but it has a specific Racquet look. You can’t mistake it. Our logo is engraved on the front and the back. The rally master typeface is just incredibly specific.

And there are lots of little touches like the second-hand clock travels in 20-second increments, which is the amount of time a server has between when they get the ball in their hand and when they have to step up to the line to serve. Are people going to use it for that? I don’t know, but they can, and it’s cool. And it tells a story, and we can tell a story with it. So today, we had people at Racquet House who had a specific aesthetic. We had Christian, a former WTA player who’s becoming our next intern. We had a boyfriend of a current WTA player who’s a cool looking dude. And we set it at the courts because we thought, “oh, having people laying around the mansion is maybe not going to be the right aesthetic but having people look like they’re playing and kind of lounging and hanging out at the club and not a fancy club, a public club is cool and on brand for us.

And the fact that we had tennis clinics and excitement and people grunting and sweating in the background means it’s real for us. And I don’t expect more than a hundred people to buy this thing because it’s really high price point. And that’s not for everybody. I’m not a person who spends tons of money on watches. But I know at least 50 people who are. And I think it’ll sell out quickly because I think, much like in this Tyler Brule model, as much as we want to be about accessibility and giving people a place to step into things. We decide when we charge for things. And when we do, we want it to reflect the quality of what’s made. So that’s why we didn’t make a thousand $20 watches.

One of Nancy Mitford’s frequent sayings was “the thin edge of the wedge.” And the thin edge of the wedge can be this curated existing collection to get you into that eventuality where brands have rethought the way that they manufacture and release stuff for tennis.

On Hype Releases.

In terms of release, how will you choose how you release that across your mediums?

So obviously, photo and asset creation was a big part of today and yesterday. Benoit Pair – who’s an athlete – will also so be watching. He has a relationship with the watch brand. He’s amazing. He’s like one of my favorite players just because he’s a total maniac on the court. You know that you’re nowhere but at a Benoit Paire match when you’re in a Benoit Paire match, right? It’s a completely absorbing experience. He’s like Nick Kyrgios, whether he wins, hits a drop shot unintelligibly or smashes ten racquets. So he’s a maniac, but he has an incredibly good aesthetic, which is a perfect fit for us and obviously for them. So we obviously have a launch plan. We’re going to drop it like a hype release. Our relationships with places like network or Grailed or some retail partner like UNKWN or the Webster here in Miami or, Hodinkee. All these are going to come into play.

And to be candid, that’s still a little bit in formation. This weekend was about seeing the first prototype of the watch. It looks very, very, very, very, very cool. As I said, the aesthetics are pink and grey. That’s cool. We’re going to update some minor details a little bit, which is probably great, but we’re going to make it the absolute perfection that people who follow our brand and Carlton and Maurice de Mauriac expect. So, you know, it’s more when we release it, which will be the spring, how the visual languages communicated, what the t-shirts and the posters and the things we’ve made with it. And the release plans of essentially a hype release on a couple of select partners and our own retail channels will look will be flexible enough to accommodate the story that we want to tell, but specific. I think exciting enough that we will feel like we’re bottling lightning, and we can do something really special.

We’ve done a couple of collabs before, and they’ve only gotten better and better. They started small, and they’ve gotten bigger and more ambitious. This is a very ambitious project because we made a few, but at a very high price point. I mean, it’s a high price point. It’s $2,000. That’s for a watch, not nothing, but it’s also, I think, for the aspirational folks in our community, not a problem. And for the people who must have everything, not a problem, but again, if you don’t want that, but you want a shirt, the shirt is cool AF, and it’s going to be like 40 bucks. So there, there’s a way that a hype release that we’ve been building up the playbook for will dictate how we want to get people excited and feel like this is the moment.

Because I know they’ll sell out, and then I’ll see them on eBay or Grailed, or one of these places go within six months, which is fine. And that’s what I want. Like you can go and buy some of the rare issues of Racquet on secondhand sites. And they’re a couple of hundred bucks. That’s what I want. I want people to feel like if you didn’t get it at the moment, you could still buy your way in, but we’re going to make you feel the urgency to get it now because it will sell out, and you’ll want to be among the people who gets to touch it and hold it. They used me as a model because I have tattoos around my arms. I think no face was in it. And just having it on my wrist, I was like, “oh wow. I’m not even a watch person. And this is for me.”

That was nice because my business partner is very, very into watches, and he did a ton of heavy lifting on this. Dave Shaftel. He’s the unsung son hero of Racquet because he’s the real reason everything is so cool and perfect. I’m a little bit more like 30,000 feet buzzing around. But again, that’s why we work as a partnership. And because he’s the guy who took all the calls, talked about the bezel stuff with Carlton and got the poster right. And the t-shirt, right. And he’s going to make sure that what the spread in the magazine and the photos we took with all these cool people look like ultimately.

Along with Sapphire Stubbs, who’s doing marketing internally, it’s amazing. So I think part of it is, how does the story dictate what we do? And we know because we’ve gotten to know this community over six years. I think what they will. I don’t want to say what they will bear, but we know where their interests are. And I think we have a good sense of how they would rather have fewer really cool things. Then be sold the same shirt every other week.

Two final questions We’re coming up on the hour. You’ve used the word hype release in every conversation I’ve had with you. So my rule is three strikes, and you’re out. So the question is, what’s a hype release? And how did you do it? And then the question I want to leave you with is, what did you learn this weekend? About yourself, about Racquet, about tennis, about the community?

That second question’s hard. So I’m going to punt on it a little bit and take some time to think about it while I answer your first question. I didn’t realize I’d been using it so often, but I think it’s different from a product rollout that we traditionally see, which is why I’m using that language. I’m grasping for something that describes seizing a storytelling moment and creating a storytelling moment instead of the kind of cadence that generally people expect from product releases. Like I think if, if I’m not a huge streetwear person, but if you all these skate brands have taught us nothing, it’s like whenever they come out with something, it’s brash, it lands, and it is immediate.

There is an immediacy that dictates how we think about it. It feels immediate. It feels like the need for that participation, whether you buy it or just check it out, share it, get excited about it, and look at the photos. And I’ve been trying – not with much success, to be honest – but I’ve been trying when we talk to brand partners within the space who are a little bit more traditional or a little bit more corporate. They think about tennis because they have been focused on the pro game for so long and not the recreational or not the lifestyle. Many people in the Racquet audience don’t even pick up a tennis racquet. I don’t need them to. They read. They consume. Maybe they would come to a Racquet House dinner party. Perhaps they came to our dance party at peach fuzz at the freehold on Friday night but didn’t necessarily wanna get on the tennis court. I want them to feel welcome, but they don’t have to be in our space.

Even though you’re right to note that it is a bridge, it is a sort of transom. One of the things that the tennis traditionalists do is say, “okay, well, we will release this racquet right before the US Open. We’re going to release this collection of clothes four times a year. They’re going to be around the slams. This is what everyone’s going to wear.” But because the slams are staggered weirdly, you see people in the same kit for a really long time in some outfits and then a very short amount of time. Like the grass-court season, it’s a tiny window. And then it goes away.

Even though some of the coolest clothes Palace’s x Adidas collab comes to mind only really has a blip to sit into people’s consciousness. They don’t necessarily do a good job of connecting their sort of seasonal or calendar release of the stories of the tennis tournament because they’ve been lazy, frankly, about tying them to. “Oh, well, everyone’s expecting us to have a new kit for the US Open. So we will have a new kit for the US Open. And what’s the photoshoot going to look like? And we have to capture the asset six months early. We’ve gotta design it two years out and da, da, da.” Some of that you can’t get away from because it’s high-end retail manufacturing, and I’m not about to unstick that wicket. But I do think getting them to be a little bit more nimble, like, “oh, what’s the conversation now? How are we thinking about if you launch a product in the US open timeframe?”

Every single person with a shoe, a Racquet, a kit, et cetera. It’s the most crowded space there is. And I think if you spend a lot of time, especially if you’re somebody with a new-ish product and you look at those matrices where it’s like, “where’s the competition? Where’s the white space? Where’s my opportunity. Where is territory that I can claim?” What you tend to find is like, “oh, well, our people are maybe more interested than most in watching professional tennis, but they don’t necessarily live and die by it the way people buy string do.” Those are people who play all the time, who can list the top 10 professional players at any given moment.

That’s not our crowd. I don’t want them to be. That’s fine. That crowd is taken care of. What I want is for people who are casually interested in it to be still able to buy that Adidas x Palace CoLab, to be still able to find the Sergio Tuchinni x Brain Dead CoLab, to be still able to find that incredible kit that Nike did a couple of years ago, where they brought back a tool that had skeletons playing tennis for Rolan Garros. That was an internal design, not a CoLab, but it was timeless because it pushed the envelope, and you can’t find it anymore. And it doesn’t exist because they didn’t do a good job of product releasing it. They just did it for a few photos for Rolon Garos, and then it disappeared. And so what I wanna try to get these brands to do and, I don’t quite frankly know how to do it, is to sort of saying like, “Hey, think about the cadence of your consumer in a much different way and learn from what these other sports have done successfully, which is to have a baseline of always very cool curated products, have a release schedule that is more geared towards the lifestyle than the professional and have the opportunities to tell the stories, make more sense and drive your campaign as opposed to having to cram something in because the expectation is there.”

And I think it will take a long time for them to do that. We’ve only been able to do it with brands when we collaborate with them. But what I would love to do is say like, “Hey Adidas, you’ve probably had four of the coolest tennis collections in the past decade. Can I have stock enough always to sell them on our site? Hey, Nike, you guys have done like two or three things that I think are really dope, and it doesn’t have to be the big ones. It can be the Lacoste silk city Bruno Mars, seventies throwback Valore moment that they debuted or the stuff they’re doing with Venus and Louis Trotter, like whatever it is. And I don’t want to pretend that I know that much about the design world, but like there are ways in which tennis and apparel have been talking to each other with greater frequency and with greater results in the last five years, but you can’t buy any of it, and you can’t find any of it.

And so, for me, it’s more getting these brands to rethink how they do their releases throughout the year is going to be a tall order. But if we can start by having them understand that there’s never not a demand for a curated selection of past and present. I just read a book. One of Nancy Mitford’s frequent sayings was “the thin edge of the wedge.” And the thin edge of the wedge can be this curated existing collection to get you into that eventuality where they’ve rethought how they manufacture and release stuff for tennis. I don’t think we’re going to get there very soon, but from our perspective, that’s certainly something we’re interested in.

And then what did I learn? I’m still sort of in it, to be honest. So I’m not sure what I learned other than when we were doing programming in Miami. LA people are up at 7 AM. In New York, people get in their hit before they go off to do something else. And in Miami, nobody rolls out of bed before 10 30.

Even on the weekend?

Even on the weekend, especially on the weekend, maybe. We had people at four o’clock, and we were beat trying to get a hit in”. And I was like, we’ve been here since nine. What?” So that was a learning. And also, for me personally, I don’t drink very often, and I cannot see the wrong side of 3:00 AM. So you’re seeing me a little bit more torched than usual.

You’re still on point as usual.

Thank you. Thank you, Cornelius. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, this has been awesome, Caitlin. And I’m excited to do it again.

Thank you. Let’s do it again.