PB5star Hitting the Road to Showcase Its Ground-Up Engineered Pickleball Shoes

I am often asked, since I write for a business-focused magazine in Forbes, what the best way is to break into the pickleball industry, to take advantage of the money and attention coming into the sport. The answer can be different depending on whether the person asking is a 22-yr old with no resources except for sweat equity (perfect for a coaching business), versus someone with access to capital who can start up something more substantial (a paddle company or an apparel company). I even wrote up a case study for a graduate level textbook on entrepreneurship a couple years ago, laying out one avenue into the industry (by starting up an indoor facility).

One market segment that rarely comes to mind as a pickleball startup is Shoes. The barrier to entry for a shoe wear company is pretty stiff; it’s simultaneously a niche industry that requires a ton of existing experience and relationships, but also one that requires access to significant capital to finance startup, engineering, and initial production costs. So, when the opportunity arose to interview Chris Gallagher, the Founder and CEO of PB5star, the industry’s first pickleball-forward shoe company, I was fascinated to hear more.

The evolution of the pickleball shoe industry has taken a predictable pathway. Since a huge percentage of people come to pickleball from tennis, when it came time to buy shoes, they return to their tennis roots and go with a tennis-first brand. Certainly this was the case with me, and I wore a major tennis brand of shoes to play for years. The early days of pickleball saw a mix of outdoor and indoor play, on varying surfaces, and these generic tennis shoes proved decent on some surfaces but inadequate on others. We’re now to the point of standardization of surfaces on most pickleball courts, which means brands can engineer to hard courts and the specific movements inherent to pickleball.

Once pickleball started to take off, we began to see brands who made their bones in non-tennis sports (golf or running) create “pickleball” shoes for sale. We also saw entries from more casual brands try to capture the “culture” side of the industry, creating shoes that looked good but may not have been the best for the sport. Now we’re starting to see pickleball-centric brands add footwear to attempt to vertically integrate, straying away from their bread and butter lines and offering what is often a quick-to-market, ill designed product.

Nowhere did we see a ground-up design of a shoe specifically built and engineered for Pickleball’s specific movements until PB5star.

Origin of the PB5star Concept

CEO and Founder Chris Gallagher has driven the company to heights very quickly for a manufacturing startup.

PB5Star

Gallagher’s pathway into this industry pulls from a 40+ year career in footwear. After starting his career on the retail/wholesale side of the shop, he pivoted into manufacturing in the early 2000s, serving as President and CEO of the Vionic Group. After selling the brand to Caleres in 2018, one may have thought Gallagher could have retired. In fact, he was living in Palm Beach and hitting the pickleball courts, as a semi-retired Floridian may do. That’s when he had an epiphany.

To quote Gallagher, “I’m down at the pickleball courts and [the sport is] exploding. I’m basically just seeing people turn up in their tennis or running shoes and I figured, with my background and experience with biomechanics, why not build a shoe that’s actually specifically designed for the sport rather than just repurposing a shoe not made for the sport?”

He continues, “I thought I could create something that gave a custom design, more stability, and more support to the foot of players, and hopefully prevent some injuries as well.”

As my wife (a serial entrepreneur herself) says, ‘Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.’

Building in Tech from the Ground Floor

The shoe is engineered to withstand the rigors of high-level pickleball.

PB5star

So Gallagher opened up the Rolodex (for you Gen Z types, that’s the way we used to organize our business cards) and got to work. “I called in some of my old executives from Vionic to begin to work on marketing, digital design, finance and sales.” However, the thing that Gallagher worked on early that made this start-up rather unique was an ERP system designed to be available from the get-go. “We put in a platform that could enable instant infrastructure that would enable us to not only launch, but then get to scale quickly.”

I found this facet fascinating. PB5star was preparing, from its inception, to be able to handle the kind of large-scale wholesale orders that accompany big-box store sales contracts, instead of building like a typical mom-and-pop store. If you’re selling into Dicks Sporting Goods nationwide, they’re going to hit you with a massive order to stock hundreds of stores. This is why, for example, when you go to a store like Dicks or Walmart there’s generally only a couple of pickleball paddle brands, and they’re from the largest vendors (Wilson, Head, Joola, Franklin). Only these companies are geared to deliver at the scale that’s needed for mass marketing.

Gallagher noted that his prior company went through a $6M conversion to upgrade its logistical software, “so I thought, why not do it up front.” They were planning on being a multi-million dollar brand from day one, not hoping they’d grow into that capability.

It’s not just a modern ERP running the back-end that makes PB5star advanced from an IT perspective, the team was also quick to bring AI into marketing and operations, early enough that it’s now baked into how they run. Says Gallagher, “Using AI well early on has let us operate efficiently without needing a big team behind every function. That’s not customer-facing — our customer service is still real people — but it means the people we do have can move faster and cover more ground.” He’s quick to add that running lean has its own costs: “Looking like a bigger brand with a small team means everyone wears more hats than they would somewhere else. That’s the trade-off. It’s not free.” Two years onward, with the pace AI has moved across the industry, even pickleball itself, where DUPR recently rolled out AI-enhanced video analysis for ratings, that early bet looks smart in hindsight.

Engineering with Formula One in mind

In addition to the investment in getting the company going, Gallagher invested heavily into the engineering and biomechanics of the shoe. He drew from an industry that seems to come up frequently in pickleball discussions: Formula One. Gallagher is an F-1 fan, and took some inspiration from his experiences watching the F-1 product, which relies heavily on technology to glean advantages between teams and cars.

Gallagher describes the company’s approach to engineering. “I wanted to create something that hadn’t been done before by building the shoe in parts. We’ve built the outsole in seven different pieces, not two or three pieces. So when you move around the court, each part of the shoe moves independently, Then there’s stability built in, like the chassis of a car. Inside where the foot goes, the heel counter wraps around the back of the heel and holds you in place. So the shoe from a stability perspective is about stopping the movement within the s hoe, which is what creates the medical issues that you have.”

He continues, “We also created something we call an Outrigger, on the forefoot lateral side, which helps stop you from moving or going over your ankles, if you like. So we’ve built in some real technology. The overall product is called Dynamic Stability Assist (DSA), kind of borrowed that from the car industry. We trademarked that, and then we built all our technology around it.”

Leveraging Existing Networks and Experiences in China

In addition to a long chat with Gallagher, we were joined by his business partner and long-time shoe industry veteran Darren Tucker. We returned to the concept of “barriers to entry” for new companies, and had a conversation about how quickly PB5star could go from concept to manufacturing. Said Gallagher, “through Vionic, Darren and I built our own factories in China. In the shoe business, often times factories might make four or five different brands, but we built a factory that only built our shoes. And we’re actually now using that same factory to make PB5. And Darren is our partner in China.”

Tucker’s connections made this happen. He described the origins of PB5’s factory. “When Chris came to us, we started out with a request for 5,000 pairs, and it was hard for us to place it in any existing factory. So we just started to build our own cell, and as they continued to grow we just kept that factory growing, so now we have this pretty big footprint in China. We were able to really hit the ground running, even though we’re not big players.”

This established relationship not only allowed PB5 to get going faster, it cuts costs. Gallagher explained, “In today’s world, there are too many middlemen in from the concept to the delivery to the customer. We have with tariffs and the cost of shipping and customer acquisition and all that sort of stuff. So what we’ve got now is almost like a factory to consumer direct model. It allows us to deliver a shoe at $129 that’s really the quality of a $200 shoe.”

Sponsorships, Style, and Substance

My son swiping my PB5star merch for himself. No better endorsement than a teenager wanting Dad’s stuff.

Todd Boss

Now that PB5star is established, the company has begun expanding its marketing and sales campaigns and is showing up across the sport at nearly every level. This year, they were the official Shoe sponsor of the Pickleball Slam event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel, they’re a season-long collegiate sponsor of the APP, an activation partner at PPA’s World’s/Nationals in Dallas, a sponsor at Celebrity Pickleball events, and will be on-site at USA Pickleball Nationals in San Diego this November, alongside support of dozens of local tournaments and several philanthropy events.

Individual players wear the shoe too, Bobbi Oshiro, a top APP pro, is one — but Gallagher is quick to point out that the pro and tournament game isn’t where the company’s attention is centered. “We support the top of the sport because it matters, and because we want to be around the best players and coaches,” Gallagher said. “But most of our customers aren’t chasing a pro career. They’re playing in a rec league on a Tuesday night. That’s who we build for, and that’s who we want to spend time with.”

For Gallagher, these relationships also go both directions. “Pros and the players who are out there four, five times a week tell us things about how a shoe performs that we’d never catch in a lab. That feedback goes straight back into product.”

That instinct, supporting the sport broadly while staying focused on the everyday player, is part of what’s behind PB5star’s newest initiative: a cross-country trip built entirely around meeting recreational players where they play.

The Pickleball Route

This August, PB5 will hit the road on what it calls The Pickleball Route—a two-week drive from Palm Beach Gardens to Santa Monica, stopping in pickleball communities across the country. Equal parts customer research and relationship building, the trip reflects the company’s belief that the closer you stay to the people playing the game, the better the product gets.

Gallagher said the initiative reflects how PB5star approaches marketing: the people responsible for building the brand should spend time with the people they’re building it for. “We were moving one of our event vehicles to the West Coast anyway. Instead of shipping it, we saw an opportunity to spend two weeks on the road, stopping wherever people are playing pickleball. We’ll learn more from a morning at a local club than we will from months of survey data.”

It’s a grassroots approach for a company that could just as easily run the numbers from a dashboard. “You can’t learn what a shoe actually needs from a spreadsheet,” Gallagher said. “You learn it by watching someone play in it.” He’s also candid about looking forward to the trip itself. “Every town plays a little differently — the courts, the rivalries, the pre-match rituals. Our team is genuinely excited to see all of that firsthand, not just read about it in a report.”

PB5star Road Trip — Estimated Dates & Stops

Aug 12 — FLL → Naples → St. Pete
Aug 13 — The Villages -> Destin
Aug 14 — Destin → New Orleans
Aug 15 — New Orleans → Houston
Aug 16 — Houston→ Bastrop→ Austin
Aug 17 — Austin
Aug 18 — Austin → Waco → Dallas
Aug 19 — Dallas
Aug 20 — Dallas → Fort Worth → (TBD)
Aug 21 — (TBD)→ Santa Fe
Aug 22 — Santa Fe → Flagstaff
Aug 23 — Flagstaff → Sedona → Scottsdale
Aug 24 — Scottsdale → Palm Desert → Santa Monica
Aug 25 — Santa Monica
Aug 26 — Santa Monica → Newport Beach area

PB5star products are available at its website, as well as with partners like Nordstroms, Macy’s, and Amazon, where they just launched earlier in 2026.

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