We've been keeping a secret for over a year, and today we finally get to talk about it.
Today we become Club Recess.
Recess Pickleball started as a paddle brand. Pickleball was missing design-first paddles. We later expanded into apparel and accessories, and our community loved that. We saw Recess Pickleball apparel beginning showing up to other courts — tennis, padel — and we wanted to make a world for all of it.
So: Recess Pickleball is now Club Recess. We are making a big push into premium apparel, for all court sports. We have been building Club Recess behind the scenes and we are ready to welcome you to the club.
Meet Melissa
Melissa Parvis is our President and Chief Product Officer. She's been working in product for over 20 years ranging from action sports first, then a decade in men's basics. Club Recess is what she calls her passion project. Active wear is way more than a job. She's been wearing this category her whole adult life and she has opinions about it.
Melissa Parvis, our President & CPO
We sat down and chatted through some of our pressing questions surrounding the move to Club Recess.
What's the core shift from Recess Pickleball to Club Recess?
Recess Pickleball was a brand that was paddle-first and mostly about paddles and accessories. Club Recess is going to be apparel-first, and it's really about the products that we wear.
What does Club Recess mean to you?
Club Recess is for that girl who just wants to go and have fun on the court. She might be good at playing or she might just be meeting up with her friends to have a good time. She might not even be playing at all. She might just be meeting them for coffee afterwards or a cocktail.
Melissa lives this rhythm herself. "I just love working out. Part of it is for my mental health so that I have a great day. I go into the day knowing that I got my workout in. I feel really good about myself. I have the right energy levels to work with a team of people. Then, afterward, it's really fun to go play pickleball with my friends or meet up over at the country club.”
The Fabric
Our new Standards collection, launching June 23, has one thing that we think makes us very special: our fabric.
Melissa knew what she wanted the fabric to feel like before she knew what it was. "Our proprietary fabric is so special. It just hides anything that's unflattering and accentuates anything that is."
That's a deceptively hard brief to execute. And this is where Alex comes in.
Alexandria Felton is our Product Developer and Technical Designer. She's been doing this for over 20 years, since she was a kid staying up past bedtime reading Vogue, begging her mom to buy the next issue. She studied abroad in Italy in college and came back knowing she wanted to spend her life making clothes.
"I knew probably about sixth grade that I wanted to do this," she told me. "I just caught the bug and realized that this was an industry of more than just being a high-end runway fashion designer, that there was so much more to it."
Alex is the person who takes a sketch and turns it into something real. She sources the fabric, manages the trims, handles all the fit and construction, and follows every piece from concept through production. She's the reason the sizing works across the full range. Her and Melissa the reason we have such an incredible fabric in our upcoming Standards Collection.
Before we could design anything, we needed the right foundation. Her and Melissa spent months sourcing and testing until we built a proprietary fabric.
"We've been sourcing and hunting for quite a long time in the development process," Alex told us. "We finally came across this fabric that is really soft and has a great stretch — it has a brushed facing on the exterior and that helps with sheen. So you're not getting that really shiny polyester looking look, it gives a more casual leisure from the court to the spectator."
The brushed exterior is the whole trick. It makes the fabric feel casual, so you can wear it to coffee, while still doing all the technical work underneath. Melissa described the full spec: "It's super soft. It's not shiny at all. It has a nice four-way stretch and it has SPF 30. It's also moisture wicking and antibacterial."
What's coming
We're not showing everything yet. Melissa is very deliberate about the tease.
What we can tell you is that there's a court dress with a built-in bra and a pull-down liner (so you don't have to take the whole thing off). A pleated skirt that Alex called "one of my favorites — it came out so good and looks so stunning on everybody." Shorts in a second performance fabric they developed separately, also with the no-shine brief. The perfect everyday tank that has a built-in bra and can be easily paired with your favorite pair of jeans.
The palette, the full silhouette lineup, the complete Club Recess story all comes June 23.
Make sure you are a part of Club Recess Rewards so you are first on the list to hear all about it.
Club Recess Ringer Tee — the first piece to carry the new name
If you want a taste of the new world before June 23, it's already here. The Club Recess Ringer Tee and the Club Recess Trucker Hat are live right now. They are our first pieces to carry the Club Recess name and are a good introduction into the world we’ve been hard at work building for you.
So, that's it! That’s our version of events. We were a paddle brand. We wanted to make something for our community to show up where they were playing. So we got obsessed with fabric. We hired people who have been doing this for 20 years and care deeply about piping width. And now we make clothes for women who play.
More soon. Welcome to the Club.
