You told me you’re talking to the racquet sports side about putting two reps into Thailand. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Not about the reps, but about what this market actually needs, and why I’d like to be part of it.
Small numbers, and that is exactly what makes it interesting: a market this size can be covered entirely, by hand, in a year. You cannot do that anywhere in Europe.
Bangkok, Phuket and Koh Samui hold 33 of the 51 clubs: two thirds of the market in three places. I live in one of them and work in all three.
Head is already here in every way that matters on paper. The name is known, the full current range sits on Supersports shelves, Coello’s signature racquet is in stock.
What’s missing is anyone to talk about it. No demo programme, no presence on court, no relationship with a single coach.
And the sentence I hear every week, from players and coaches alike: you can’t try a racquet in Thailand.
Nobody lets you hit one before you pay, and nobody qualified tells you which one fits your game. So people buy what they saw on television.
Those ~200 coaches are the whole game, and not one of them is spoken for. Not by Head, not by Nox, not by Babolat.
Which is why I don’t think this is a rep’s job. A rep takes orders and checks a shelf.
What this market needs is someone who genuinely loves the product and the sport, who’s on court with the coaches every week, who understands what’s at stake, and who will go a long way past a job description. An entrepreneur, not a headcount line.
Two things make it urgent rather than merely available. Babolat is the only brand actually building something here: a dedicated Thai site, a Supersports listing. Give it eighteen months and the coaches are theirs.
And the price only goes one way: converting a coach today costs a racquet and two days of training. In 2029 it costs a sponsorship contract.
Head isn’t a sports brand that happens to make equipment. It’s an engineering company that happens to be in sport.
Howard Head was an aeronautical engineer, and the first thing the company built, in 1950, was a ski made the way an aircraft wing is made. The logo is still the tip of that ski.
The proposition hasn’t changed since: the frame does something measurable, and it’s the engineering that does it.
That isn’t heritage I’d be reciting. In a market where nobody can try anything, it’s the only argument that actually works, because a technical claim you can feel on court beats one you can only read on a shelf.
So, concretely, what I’d be carrying:
Head’s problem in Thailand isn’t that the story is weak. It’s that nobody is telling it.
I play every day. FIP-ranked, around two hours on court, head coach, and the author of my own teaching method.
When I put a racquet in a coach’s hand and explain what it does, it lands, because it’s a player talking to a player, not a salesman reading a spec sheet.
And I’ve spent fifteen years making brands live. Every single part of this job is something I have already been paid to do:
That’s the combination: someone who loves the sport enough to be on court at seven in the morning, and who has already built the commercial machine that turns that into a market.
Planting flags and taking share is what I have done for fifteen years, across three different industries, and it is the part of the work I actually enjoy.
I’m not looking for a job description. I’m looking for a territory and the freedom to go after it.
Palaestra is a padel teaching company. One Method for players and coaches, an app, and premium experiences where progress accelerates.
Clients come from Singapore, London, New York and Dubai. We run in Bali, Samui, Phuket and Dubai, with Singapore next.
The core of what I’m building is a network of trained, certified coaches, assessed on how they teach rather than how they play, trained in one method, and judged on their players’ progress. I’m financing it myself.
Head needs coaches who can explain a racquet. I train coaches to explain the game. The two are the same job, from opposite ends.
And it already runs. The app went live on 5 October:
Which creates something nobody in padel retail does: a racquet recommendation tied to a measured profile: weight, balance and shape matched against a player’s actual swing, level and test results, by a coach trained to read them.
An experience is also the best racquet-selling moment in this sport. A player hits for a week, coached and filmed and measured, and pays around €2,976 to do it.
Retail gets ninety seconds in a shopping mall. We get thirty hours and a diagnosis. Every racquet in their hand that week is a racquet they will buy.
So this isn’t me asking Head for something. There’s an adventure already underway here, and Head would be the natural brand inside it: demo fleets at every camp, an Academy running on a method and an app that already exist, coaches certified across Asia, and content from real improving players rather than a studio.
€100K collected this year, landing around €120K, built on €13K of advertising and no outside capital. 7,000 padel contacts across six markets. 5.0 on Google. 20% of clients have already come back.
The pre-season demo day: you get sized up, you take the gear out for thirty minutes, you compare, and you buy before the season.
Head runs the best version of that event in the world, on snow. Nothing about it belongs to winter. Nobody has brought it to padel in Asia.
So: a Saturday in Samui for the 2027 range. Koh Phangan coaches brought across.
Mini-tournaments through the afternoon, thirty-minute test slots, an exhibition to close. Head balls on every court, Head grips and overgrips in every hand, all weekend.
And every line gets a face: a pair of coaches the local players already know and already watch, chosen because the racquet genuinely matches how they play:
On the racks, everything: Extreme One, which is the most asked-for racquet on our courts and should be the volume line of the weekend; Radical for versatility; and the women’s range on its own rack with its own test slot. 47% of padel players are women, and most walls in Asia are still merchandised as if they weren’t.
A spectator watches a coach they know play with one specific racquet, then hits it themselves for half an hour. The whole range becomes legible in one afternoon.
Eight coaches publicly wearing a Head line, because they chose it. The entry cost is eight racquets.
Then the same Saturday in Bangkok and Phuket, three or four times a year, and it stops being an event and becomes a circuit.
Everything above is the ground war: club by club, coach by coach. There is a second movement that costs almost nothing today and multiplies all of it: the Thailand Padel Association.
It is a young body, and like the coaches, nobody has claimed it. What a real partnership would give Head:
And the window is the same as it is for the coaches: at this stage of the sport here, that partnership costs equipment and attention, not a budget line. In five years it costs money, and it may already be taken.
It also repeats. Federations across Southeast Asia are at exactly the same point: young, under-resourced, unclaimed.
Thailand would be the template, and it has to be built as a partnership rather than a sponsorship line, because an institution is not an account.
One Saturday is an event. What turns it into a market is the boring part, done relentlessly: a demo fleet circulating between clubs on a calendar, and the same club visit every single time:
It’s a protocol, which means the two reps can be trained on it.
Twelve months of that buys:
40%
of every regular player in the country will have hit a Head racquet inside twelve months. That’s only possible because this market is small enough to cover by hand, and it is the reason to do it now.
None of it needs Thai, because the clubs here are foreign-owned. The two reps take Supersports and the provinces. Somebody takes the clubs, the coaches and the region.
And Thailand isn’t where this stops. For the first time, more new padel clubs are opening in Asia than in Europe: 39% of them, with courts up 95% in ten months, €232M spent in Indonesia alone.
Thailand is simply small enough to prove the method with numbers instead of arguments.
That’s what I see, and that’s how I’d go at it.
I’m not asking you for anything. But if the racquet side opens a role in Thailand and you want someone who will go all in on it (someone who plays, who knows the clubs and the coaches by name, and who has built commercial operations from nothing before), you have my profile.
I’d like to see Head take this market.
Florent Prelot · Palaestra · 4 November 2026