Fake Pickleball Paddles Are Flooding the Market—and Hurting the Game’s Future

Inside the pickleball paddle black market that’s confusing consumers, costing brands, and undermining the sport’s ability to innovate

CRBN spent nearly two years perfecting TruFoam , the sport’s first mainstream foam-core pickleball paddle—a bonafide technical breakthrough that helped set the stage for many brands to follow suit.

Almost immediately, the fakes came pouring in.

Within weeks of the TruFoam launch in early 2025, lookalikes started popping up across online marketplaces like Alibaba, Temu, and Facebook, some for as little as $17. None of them were real. Not even close.

But they sure looked like it.

This is the pickleball paddle black market—where knockoffs flourish, intellectual property gets trampled, and innovation pays the price.

“When factories and brands start trying to copy you within weeks of launch, it’s a sign you’ve done something meaningful,” says CRBN Co-Founder Kyle Goguen.

“In some ways, it’s flattering—but more than anything, it’s frustrating.” Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but for a growing list of pickleball paddle brands, it's become a real – and expensive – problem.

Counterfeits, clones and knockoffs The murky world of imitation paddles isn't new, but it's proliferated in the past few years, paralleling pickleball's meteoric rise in popularity in the US and around the world.

Call them clones or counterfeits or knockoffs. By any name, they're attempting to pass as the real thing. Some mimic the design of name-brand p... FULL ARTICLE FOUND ON: https://www.thedinkpickleball.com/fake-pickleball-paddles-are-flooding-the-market-and-hurting-the-games-future/