Babolat make the best high-end tennis rackets in the market and have led the market in quality and innovation for generations as a family company. The target audience is club and professionally ranked players. They are passionate about tennis and their brand slogan is ‘Tennis runs in our blood’, an allusion to their passion and the family heritage. Their place as leader in the market is a struggle because they are a small company with a big vision. They do not have Nike’s size or reach and have to fight for their place as leader with smaller budgets.

The brief came from Eric Babolat who wanted to secure the companies position as the most innovative tennis brand. His brief was to find out what was happening on ball impact on the racket head, something that has always been a mystery for coaches and players alike. Most of the competition had been trying to add on devices and Babolat wanted to have the same weight and balance of the best rackets they can make so pro players can use them.

Competitors were investigating plug technology that can be added to a tennis racket. This creates imbalence in the racket. So we decided to create an imbedded system with the same weight and balance of a high-end racket to give the player a perfect playing experience. It has 3 sensors : an accelerometer + a gyroscope for motion analysis + a piezo microphone to analyse ball impact.

Reflecting the Babolat brands DNA : “Tennis runs in our Blood” we created a social, shareable beating ‘Pulse’ that beats according to frequency of game play and changes color and size according to gameplay.

We created the perfect tennis ecosystem; the connected racket, driving a new tennis community with top world players participating in the rankings, and the ultimate mobile and desktop interface for coaches and players alike to better understand their game. These innovations are going to help Babolat stay number one in tennis racket technology. They will change the way people play tennis in the future. Players, coaches, clubs and tournaments will definitely adopt this innovation in order to propulse the game to its next level: connected tennis.

Once the hardware data capturing system had been figured out, the second part of the problem was to create a ‘gamified’ interface capable of showing over 60 pieces of information in a clear concise manner to players and coaches alike and to create a new tennis data center to analyze their game. We also wanted to create a community online that could compare results and allow players to challenge each other to find the right match to improve with better players.