DILLY LIFE PICKLEBALL BRAND LAUNCHED BY MENSWEAR VETERANS

A few years ago, when my mother-in-law said she’d joined a pickleball team in her 55+ community, I was pretty sure she was pulling my leg. “What? Does the winner get a pastrami sandwich on the side?” Little did I know that she was already onto the next big trend in sports, now complete with big-money player endorsements, major leagues, and must-have equipment and apparel.

Ken Giddon, of retailer Rothmans, and Brian Guttman, of shirting brand Jeremy Argyle, have jumped into this emerging market sneaker-clad feet first, launching their debut pickleball collection, Dilly Life.

I’ve only played pickleball once myself, so I had to ask: Is “dilly” some fancy pickleball move (like a “googly” in cricket?), or was it just a riff on dill pickles? Guttman assured me that it was the latter. “We spent as much time coming up with the name as we did the collection,” joked Giddon (both assuring me that it was not true).

“We wanted something that encapsulated what we were about,” said Guttman. We wanted it to be fun and to engage our creativity.” Giddon added, “We don’t take ourselves too seriously; this sport is all about fun.”

Guttman explained, “We’d been friends for a long time through Jeremy Argyle and Rothmans. We’ve worked together on many business strategies and concepts and even invested together in companies over the years. This isn’t the first idea we‘ve fleshed out, but it is the first one we’ve moved forward on. We had the retail and manufacturing backgrounds, so it seemed natural to apply them to this fast-moving sport.”

“We both play pickleball, too,” added Giddon. “We wanted it to be authentic: designed by pickleball players, for pickleball players.”

I asked the duo if there was anything about the Dilly Life collection designed specifically for the sport. As I suspected, pockets are outsized to fit the sport’s roughly three-inch-diameter hard plastic balls. Otherwise, performance features, including UV protection (since the game is played outside), moisture wicking, and odor absorption, are key. They spent time talking to professional and amateur players, grandparents to grandkids, and the overwhelming ask was for clothes unique to pickleball—not golf or tennis or gym clothes—and that would be fun. “Apres-pickle” is also crucial to the collection’s design since the sport is very social. Pieces retail for $38 to $118.

“People like to grab a cocktail afterward and talk about the sport,” said Guttman, “and they love talking about it, so we wanted the clothes to be conversation starters.”

The product officially launches this Saturday, April 13^th, at renowned pickleball outfitters Rothmans Scarsdale and Rothmans Union Square and online at DillyLife.com.  

So what’s the plan? Giddon says, “The wholesale plan isn’t completely mapped out since the project and the sport itself are so new. Are we talking about specific specialty stores? Greengrass? What excites us is that there’s so much opportunity and promise. This is the ‘Wild West.’  Although we see being in some fine men’s specialty stores and maybe in some clubs and some websites, we don’t even know what the landscape will look like within a few months, let alone years. We’re open to looking at partnerships.”

As we spoke, somebody texted Giddon asking if he had an international distributor. “We’re constantly getting texts from people who want to help out with this.”

Hey, if anybody needs me this afternoon, don’t bother me…I’ll be on the phone with my mother-in-law to see what else she and her friends are up to.