Pickleball business in Vietnam: sell gear, don't open courts

In Q1 2024, pickleball gear on Vietnamese e-commerce platforms brought in VND15 billion. By Q3 2025 the figure was VND357 billion, according to Metric.vn data (a Vietnamese e-commerce analytics provider) cited by VnExpress. Meanwhile, court owners in Hanoi are struggling. In early May 2026, Dân trí reported that the capital's court market is going through a "shake-out", with bad calculations pushing many investors toward losing everything.

Gear sells, courts struggle. If you are planning a pickleball business in Vietnam, that is where to start thinking. There is an old line in business: in a gold rush, the people selling shovels are the ones who reliably get paid. Our view at 126Insights is to hold off on opening a court and start with what players wear. A court is real estate, while apparel is a product you can build a brand on.

Running a pickleball court is closer to real estate than to product work

A court needs land or floor space, a surface, nets, lighting, sometimes a roof, and usually a long lease. The money goes out on day one, before any customer shows up. Once built, the court stays where it is: if a new court opens on the next street with cheaper hourly rates, your regulars have a reason to leave. Space is also hard to find. Dân trí describes one operator who set up a temporary court inside a shopping mall and had to sacrifice the sidelines to make it fit.

In the US, the math is already on paper. According to figures compiled by Johns Design & Consulting and cited by The Dink, an industry blog, average court-rental revenue per court per month over 12 months is about $8,000 at facilities with 10 courts or fewer, about $5,600 at facilities with more than 10, and about $6,400 across all of them. That is revenue, not profit, and it excludes food, drinks and other side income. The Dink also reports that most 10-court facilities in the US pay $30,000 to $50,000 a month in rent. The point worth remembering from that article: at a pickleball club, cost of goods is the rent, and it is due every month whether the courts are busy or empty.

Tuổi Trẻ recently covered an indoor-court franchise chain in the US that is in trouble. According to Inc. magazine, as cited by Tuổi Trẻ, the parent company had guaranteed leases for about 40 franchise locations. IAPPF figures cited by Racket Business show that during 2025 the network grew from 22 to 56 locations, yet only 12 had been open for a full year. When you open sites faster than you collect real data, all the risk lands on the leases you have already signed.

These are US numbers and do not transfer directly to Vietnam. The logic does: a court owner pays for space up front, and that cost does not shrink when the courts are quiet. Our article on Katinat's marketing strategy and its rent costs (Katinat is a fast-growing Vietnamese coffee chain; the post is in Vietnamese) made a similar point: a location is only worth its rent when it does more than hold a spot.

Photo by Frankie Lopez on Unsplash

Pickleball apparel and shoes are growing faster than paddles

The paddle is the first thing people think of when they hear "pickleball gear". But according to Metric.vn data cited by VnExpress International, as of Q3 2025 apparel was up 500% and shoes up 459%. The article says plainly that the real growth is in clothes and shoes, not paddles. For a sense of the market's overall pace, Nhà Đầu Tư reports that pickleball gear on e-commerce platforms reached VND271.9 billion for all of 2024, and VND228.7 billion in Q1 2025 alone.

Why apparel? Here is how we read the data: in Vietnam, pickleball is a sport people like to show off. In the photo before a game and the photo after, the outfit sits in the middle of the frame and the paddle takes up a corner. No survey has measured this, so it is our interpretation, but it fits with apparel and shoes being where growth is strongest. The same logic shows up in the Jollibee reindeer campaign (Jollibee is the fast-food chain; the post is in Vietnamese): when the product is something people photograph, buyers pay for the part that gets seen.

One caution before using these numbers in a plan: the latest platform data in the articles above stops at Q3 2025. Don't assume the growth rate has held until today.

Selling pickleball gear: reselling imported stock is a hard game to win

Where there is money, sellers pile in. According to Nhà Đầu Tư, Vietnamese brands such as Kamito, Facolos, Kingtek, Kaiwin, Zocker, Soxter and Sypik have entered the market. Adidas Vietnam has a dedicated pickleball apparel section on its official site, and Li-Ning Vietnam presents a collection built for the sport.

Prices are low, too. According to VnEconomy, in the first six months of 2025 the platforms sold 2.4 million pickleball products for more than VND510 billion in revenue; divided evenly, that is roughly VND200,000 per item. Data from four platforms, Shopee, TikTok Shop, Lazada and Tiki, also shows the VND350,000 to VND500,000 price band alone brought in more than VND55 billion in the first half of the year (Báo Văn Hoá).

At a few hundred thousand dong per item, someone who imports goods and resells them is left competing almost purely on price, while still paying platform fees. When products look the same, buyers compare prices. The way out is a brand: a name and a look that can be recognized in a photo, giving people who already bought a reason to come back.

Also avoid building a plan on a shaky player count. The figure "16 million Vietnamese play pickleball" is often repeated, but it is an estimate made by multiplying a 16% survey rate by the population, and Tuổi Trẻ analyzed it and questioned the calculation.

If you already own a court, where should the money come from?

A Vietnamese proverb says "buôn có bạn, bán có phường": traders do better with partners, and sellers do better inside a guild. What a court has that an online shop doesn't is real people gathering there every evening. In our view, a court owner who wants to survive should treat the court as a community hub and earn extra from what surrounds it: casual tournaments, team uniforms, a gear counter, drinks. The US figures from Johns Design & Consulting above count only court fees. Side income is where an owner can grow revenue without building another court.

Dân trí's series on pickleball in Hanoi mentions "xé vé" (literally "ticket tearing"), where an intermediary pairs up players and coordinates playing slots (Dân trí). These middlemen earn money by gathering players without owning a court. If outsiders can do that on your court, the owner has an even better position to do it: you know who plays at what hour, which groups play regularly, which group is about to run a tournament. That is a customer list for uniforms and tournament gifts that an online shop would have to pay for with ads.

Starting a pickleball business on a small budget: four steps

If you choose the apparel route, this order lets you spend little before you know whether you are right:

1. Make one small product line: a skirt or shorts, a shirt, a cap, socks, a paddle bag. Few designs, made carefully, photographed right on the court.
2. Consign items at a court's counter and sponsor shirts for casual tournaments. Players see your shirt on someone else and feel the fabric before they see an ad.
3. Partner with playing groups to make uniforms printed with the club's name. Each group is a ready-made bulk order, and each session is a free photo shoot for you.
4. Think about a physical location only after you have sales data: which designs get reordered, which areas order most, which channel brings orders.

Suppose you make shirts for three clubs near your home and one group comes back to order more after a tournament. That signal is worth more than any forecast spreadsheet. The spirit is the same as in our post on selling before you build in product development (in Vietnamese): test the most expensive assumption in the cheapest way. For a pickleball business, the most expensive assumption is usually "enough customers will come to cover the rent."

If this week you are weighing a lease to build a court, do something cheaper first: ask three playing groups near you what they wore at their last tournament, where they bought it, and whether they would want shirts printed with the group's name. The answers will tell you more than an optimistic forecast.