Selkirk Sports
Since founding Selkirk Sport in 2014, the Barnes family has built the company into a leading pickleball company while significantly increasing the sport’s popularity. Now Selkirk is looking to expand even further thanks to a $30 million growth capital investment from Bluestone Equity Partners, a New York-based private equity firm.
The deal values Selkirk at approximately $200 million. It is the first time that Selkirk has made external investments.
Selkirk, which produces pickleball paddles, balls, nets, shoes and apparel, is profitable and expects to generate at least $100 million in revenue this year, said Mike Barnes, who is the company’s co-CEO with 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. They started a company in 2009, while they were in high school, that sold equipment and supplies for airsoft, a shooting game similar to paintball. Meanwhile, Jim was a retired firefighter 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 located in Idaho, Washington and Canada. They used the word “sport” in the title instead of “sports” because they wanted to focus solely on pickleball, even though at the time the sport was a niche activity popular among some retirees in Florida and Arizona but far from the mainstream.
“We started playing pickleball before it was cool,” Mike Barnes said. “We told people what we were doing, and they wondered what we were doing with our lives.”
Mike Barnes said the company was initially happy when it could make 25 paddles a day, but as the years went by, Selkirk refined its production process as demand boomed. Since 2019, Selkirk’s revenues have increased 1,900%, according to the company, which it attributes in large part to the sport taking off in the US following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Selkirk now has more than 200 full- and part-time employees. The company has its own research and development department and a media arm that streams competitions and produces educational content, podcasts, shows and documentaries. Selkirk sells its products directly to consumers through its website and through Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Costco, Amazon and other major retailers.
The Barnes family decided last year to seek external capital to finance its growth plans in Asia and other countries and to invest more in its technology and products. Selkirk wanted to partner with one company that would take a minority stake instead of finding multiple investors and giving up control of the company.
Instead of hiring an investment bank, the family worked with an M&A advisor, contacted 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 include global head of basketball and strategic initiatives at IMG and vice president and general counsel of the NBA Development League.
“We’re not just trying to build the biggest 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 similarly to how they did 30 years ago… When we looked at Bluestone, you could see that they’re also on the cutting edge of sports and technology, and so it seemed like a good fit.”
Bluestone invested in Selkirk through Bluestone Capital I, the firm’s debut fund increased $300 million in 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 college sports recruiting software company. Bluestone plans to make additional investments through the fund this year.
Selkirk is Bluestone’s first pickleball portfolio company, but Sharma said he expects Bluestone to make other investments in the sport that complement Selkirk. He added that pickleball has “moved from the trend to a sustainable sport with mass participation.”
The Sports & Fitness Industry Association, founded in 1906, reported in August, pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the US, 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 with both elite players and everyday consumers.” However, as pickleball’s popularity explodes, larger, established companies and investors are starting to get involved in the sport. For example, Nike this month signed Anna Leigh Waters, an 18-year-old who is the top-ranked player in the world.
Still, Sharma compared Selkirk to Titleist, a leading golf manufacturer, in that both companies succeed based on their dedication to just one sport. The Barnes family will continue to serve in their executive roles at Selkirk and lead the company, while Bluestone partner Walker Brumskine will join Selkirk’s board of directors.
“Their motto is, ‘We are pickleball,’ and they certainly are,” Sharma said. “They are hyper-focused on the sport of pickleball and doing it better than anyone else.”
He added: “Part of our investment is for mergers and acquisitions. Because Selkirk is such a strong brand and operating platform within the sport of pickleball, it is a logical place for further investment by Bluestone. That is certainly part of the intent.”
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