Since founding Selkirk Sport in 2014, the Barnes family has turned the company into a leading firm in pickleball just as the sport’s popularity has significantly increased. Now, Selkirk is looking to expand even further thanks to a $30 million growth equity investment from Bluestone Equity Partners, a New York-based private equity firm.
The deal values Selkirk at about $200 million. It is the first time Selkirk has taken any outside investment.
Selkirk, which manufactures pickleball paddles, balls, nets, shoes and apparel, is profitable and expects to generate at least $100 million in revenue this year, according to Mike Barnes, who is the company’s co-CEO alongside his brother, Rob Barnes. Their father, Jim, is Selkirk’s president, while their youngest brother, Tom, is director of research and development. Mike and Rob are 31 and 33 years old, respectively, while Tom is 29.
The family launched Selkirk 12 years ago after Mike and Rob started playing pickleball and noticed there weren’t many established brands in the sport. At the time, Mike and Rob were already entrepreneurs, having started a company in 2009 when they were in high school that sold equipment and supplies for airsoft, a shooting game similar to paintball. Meanwhile, Jim was a retired fireman who moved his family from Los Angeles to Idaho a few years earlier. Jim previously worked as a plumber and built two houses, so he worked on the manufacturing and production side of Selkirk, which is vertically integrated and still makes all of its products in the United States.
The Barnes family named the company after the Selkirk Mountains, which are in Idaho, Washington and Canada. They used the word “sport” in the title instead of “sports” because they wanted to focus exclusively on pickleball even though the sport back then was a niche activity popular among some retirees in Florida and Arizona but far from the mainstream.
“We got into pickleball before it was cool,” Mike Barnes said. “We’d tell people what we were in, and they were wondering what we were doing with our lives.”
Mike Barnes said in the early days the company was happy when it could make 25 paddles a day, but as the years have passed, Selkirk has refined its manufacturing process as demand has exploded. Since 2019, Selkirk’s revenue has increased by 1,900%, according to the company, which it attributes in large part to the sport taking off across the U.S. after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Selkirk now has more than 200 full- and part-time employees. The company has its own research and development division and a media arm that streams matches and produces educational content, podcasts, shows and documentaries. Selkirk sells its products direct-to-consumer through its website as well as via Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Costco, Amazon and other major retailers.
The Barnes family last year decided to seek outside capital to fund its growth plans in Asia and other countries and invest more in its technology and products. Selkirk wanted to partner with one company that would take a minority stake rather than seek multiple investors and give up control of the company.
Instead of hiring an investment bank, the family worked with a mergers and acquisitions advisor, reached out to several major investors directly and had numerous conversations before settling on Bluestone, which invests in sports, media and technology companies. Bluestone was founded in 2023 by Bobby Sharma, a veteran investor and sports executive whose previous roles included global head of basketball and strategic initiatives at IMG and vice president and general counsel for the NBA Development League.
“We’re not only trying to build the largest pickleball company,” Mike Barnes said. “We’re trying to build a world class sports company from an infrastructure process. In our minds, we’re building the next generation of how sporting goods companies can operate because a lot of them, whether you look at tennis or golf, operate very similar to how they did 30 years ago…When we looked at Bluestone, you could tell that they’re also on the cutting edge of sports and technology, and so it seemed like a great fit.”
Bluestone invested in Selkirk through Bluestone Capital I, the firm’s debut fund that raised $300 million of capital from pension funds and other institutional investors. Bluestone Capital I has made nine investments since launching in 2023, including Volo, an operator of sports leagues, tournaments and events, and Scorability, a software company for college sports recruiting. Bluestone plans on making additional investments through the fund this year.
Selkirk is Bluestone’s first pickleball portfolio company, but Sharma said he expects that Bluestone will make other investments in the sport that complement Selkirk. He added that pickleball has “crossed from trend into an enduring, mass participation sport.”
The Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which was founded in 1906, reported in August that pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the U.S., with participation increasing 14.7% in the first half of last year.
Sharma said that “pickleball was very attractive to us” and that Selkirk is “a brand that resonates both with the elite players and everyday consumers.” However, as pickleball’s popularity explodes, larger, established companies and investors are starting to get into the sports. For instance, Nike this month signed a contract with Anna Leigh Waters, an 18-year-old who is the top ranked player in the world.
Still, Sharma compared Selkirk with Titleist, a leading golf manufacturer, in that both companies succeed based on their commitment to just one sport. The Barnes family will still serve in their executive roles at Selkirk and run the company, while Bluestone partner Walker Brumskine will join Selkirk’s board of directors.
“Their motto is, ‘We are pickleball,’ and they are very much so,” Sharma said. “They’re hyper-focused on the sport of pickleball and doing it better than anybody else.”
He added: “Part of our investment is intended to go towards (mergers and acquisitions). Selkirk being such a strong brand and operating platform within the sport of pickleball makes it a logical place for further investments by Bluestone to go into and through. That’s certainly part of the intention.”