There are an awful lot of shoe brands out there, making tennis shoes for the millions of current players, and the millions more joining the sport every year, who need a supportive shoe, with a non-marking sole, that slides on the court surface a bit, but not too much. Most are not particularly attractive, but we buy them anyway because we’ve come to accept a dadcore aesthetic in exchange for a certain amount of longevity and murky technical specs that sound important.
But there are a lot of people—a lot—who come to tennis for the clothing; for the style; for the gestalt as well as the athletic outlet. These are people for whom the on-court look is nearly as important as their win-loss percentage. The kind of people who don’t want to shuffle up to the bench in slides, sit down and tie up some behemoth of a tennis shoe, play in mild pain with shoes that could and do get in the way of great footwork, and move quickly back to the bench to remove the sweaty boxes after every match.
Appearance-focused or not, nearly every seasoned tennis player has played in shoes they wouldn’t want to wear to the parking lot, let alone out for coffee. Most of us have strong preferences: given our druthers, we know what we’d want in a shoe and what we wouldn’t, how we’d like it to feel, wear, and look. But we’re not all starting shoe companies, because that’s hard. We’d have to go up against Nike, adidas, ASICS and On, among other daunting competitors. We’d have to learn a lifetime of shoe knowledge, find distribution networks, forecast fashion trends way ahead, participate in or take advantage of fabric innovations. Find suitable—and ethical—manufacturers, and get involved in the morass that must be global shipping. Somewhere along that line we’d likely a) give up; or b) go under.