News

Oct 30, 2024

Pickleball Team Owner Flips Medical Device Fortune to Sports Investing

Ron Saslow wasn’t necessarily looking to change careers. But when he finally listened to one of the many unbidden offers for his medical device business five years ago, it set him on a path to being

Ron Saslow wasn’t necessarily looking to change careers. But when he finally listened to one of the many unbidden offers for his medical device business five years ago, it set him on a path to being at the center of the booming pickleball ecosystem.

“My family was in the medical and dental space for 60 years, and for 30 of those 60 years I ran the company,” Saslow said on a phone call. “I have three boys and they all have interest in other things, and it seemed no one wanted to get into that business.”

For that reason, Saslow, 58, decided in 2019 to sell his family’s dental instruments manufacturing business, HuFriedy, to Cantel Medical. It wasn’t an agonizing decision: “The offer was exceptional-slash-ridiculous,” Saslow says of the $775 million Cantel paid for HuFriedy.

The problem, though, was what to do next. “I consider myself young and have no desire to stop working, and it didn’t take long to look in the mirror and realize … sports and music were the two biggest passions I had,” he said.

They also are areas that interested his sons, all now in their 20s. The result was Thirty-5 Capital, a private equity-style family office he runs with two of his sons. The company now has stakes in at least 10 pickleball businesses, including pro team Chicago Slice, Major League Pickleball, four paddlemakers and player ratings venture DUPR.

Despite his career in medical devices, Saslow wasn’t a neophyte in sports ownership: The executive bought into the Chicago Cubs in 2015. But the formation of Thirty-5 Capital allowed him to combine his love for sports with the expertise he can bring to portfolio businesses in manufacturing and expansion from his HuFriedy days.

“We want to make investments in companies helping them get bigger and better, more global more quickly than they’d be able to do themselves,” Saslow said. “We’re not looking for startup companies. Our sweet spot is early stage.”

The family fund nature of Thirty-5 (not to be confused with Kevin Durant’s 35 Ventures) means Saslow is under no pressure to deploy capital, though he says they aim for multiple investments a year. When the family does invest, it’s at dollar levels many early stage VCs won’t approach—infusions of capital in the $1 million to $9 million range.

Ideal candidates for Thirty-5 have more than $1 million in sales and a high percentage of repeat customers. The firm also wants a product it can understand, where Saslow can see how the product or service can be disruptive. The last general guideline is the presence of founders open to Saslow’s guidance, given his business and manufacturing background. “We’re not just looking to sit back and make investments and let other people do it,” he said.

Thirty-5 doesn’t take outside money, but it will bring investors into portfolio businesses, such as with the Chicago Slice: Cubs general partner Tom Ricketts, TV personality Heidi Klum, tennis great Chris Evert and MLB veteran David Justice headline more than dozen limited partners in the franchise. “We don’t see ourselves as a pickleball company, but we have seen this sleeve in our firm grow pretty dramatically, and we’re now involved in just about every aspect of the sport.”

Besides the Cubs, early investments were in baseball businesses—batmaker Jawbat and player development app Mustard are two—and the firm also has a stake in the Aston Martin F1 team. But not long after the sale of HuFriedy closed, the pandemic struck, and the Saslows did what many others did in the pandemic: They took up pickleball.

“After falling in love with the sport,” Saslow said, “we began looking for a new sleeve of investments that would be tied into pickleball,” believing the game would take off after previously being a niche sport played on the West Coast and in Florida retirement communities. “It doesn’t always turn out that way, but we were correc,t and we found ourselves at the beginning of an industry that was about to explode.”

It’s not news pickleball participation has skyrocketed, growing more than threefold the past three years to count some 35 million Americans as regular players. But unlike other activities that spiked during COVID—bicycling and stationary training like Peloton—pickleball growth hasn’t abated.

“It’s growing faster than any sport has ever grown,” Saslow said. “Maybe snowboarding would be an example of a sport that popped out of nowhere.” But even then pickleball seems superior, with an equal number of men and women playing and a big shift toward younger players in recent years—some 29% of players are 18- to 34-year-olds, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals.

Given the still-emerging nature of the game, Thirty-5 Capital is in the midst of extending its exposure to the sport beyond paddlemakers, teams and leagues. Announced this month is the fruit of an effort to create the first pickleball-specific sneaker. Saslow invested in a golf shoe maker Sqairz, which was looking for capital to expand beyond golf shoes and baseball cleats. They agreed to collaborate on building a pickleball shoe from scratch and give Thirty-5 Capital exclusivity to the pickleball space. The shoe will be marketed under the ProXR brand starting this quarter. It’s the name of one of Saslow’s portfolio businesses best known for grips used on bats, paddles and golf clubs.

“Many of the shoe companies that have tried to repurpose tennis or basketball shoes into the pickleball space have failed miserably. The pickleball community really wants something for them,” he said. “They really believe their sport is different.”

Similarly, Thirty-5 is making a play into the competitive world of athletic wear by helping start Muev, a pickleball apparel brand launched last month. Led by Chris Rork, a veteran of Ralph Lauren, Levi’s and Shaquille O’Neal’s own apparel brand, Muev got “a big investment” from Thirty-5, Saslow said. “We’ll be helping steer the ship and drive the pickleball business using our connections, and eventually we’ll be sponsoring some of our players to launch into the space.”

From his vantage point, Saslow doesn’t see the growth trajectory of pickleball easing for some time. “Within China and India it is growing like crazy. We see a huge expansion over there,” he said, noting the firm has spent much of the past year doing market research and striking up relationships with regional distributors and local pros. “China had one event where a couple of mid-level pros played and not only did hundreds of thousands of people go watch it, but they had 12 million people watching on the stream. The thirst for the sport is just incredible.”

Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia are other growth markets for pickleball, he says. “Growth in the U.S. will eventually taper off; it won’t be 70% every year. The rest-of-the-world catch-up [to the U.S], at least for the next five to 10 years, is going to be ridiculously good.”

Just in case, Thirty-5 is also expanding into domestic U.S. padel—another court sport similar to pickleball that’s popular in Europe—with designs on making rackets, possibly owning a franchise and including padel courts in a Chicago area real estate development the family backs.

“The fun of it all is being involved with sports, for sure,” Saslow said, “but equally, to have left one 60-year family business with my dad and then formed this with the next generation has been a really fun journey.”