Seventeen-year-old Caleb Brokaw has cornered the market for plain, white tennis balls.
The Greenville resident and his father, Roberts, started an Internet company that sells white tennis balls in 2007 and have watched demand for their product grow in unlikely ways.
The enterprising Brokaw, a sophomore at Tatnall and lifelong tennis player, was looking for a business venture that wouldn’t take a huge amount of time, he said. After giving it some thought, he settled on distributing unmarked, white tennis balls.
White and neon yellow are the only two colors of tennis balls permitted in the official rules, Brokaw said, but white tennis balls have become scarce since the yellow variety was popularized in the mid-1980s because the neon color was easier to see on TV.
So Brokaw and his father found a company in Thailand that would produce the balls (they later switched to a Chinese manufacturer), developed a website, WhiteTennisBalls.com, to take orders and started distributing the tennis balls from their home.
Turns out there is a worldwide market for white tennis balls, Brokaw said, and because the produce is so unique, there is no need to spend money advertising.
“You just type on Google ‘white tennis balls’ and we’re the first thing that pops up,” he said.
Fifty-five percent of their customers use the balls for tennis playing, but the remaining purchases are for less obvious uses – 40 percent have been purchased for displays in stores like Ralph Lauren and The Limited and the remaining 5 percent have been used in movies, like Disney’s “Up,” music videos and theatrical productions.
A scene in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” requires a box of tennis balls and theater troupes concerned with authenticity have ordered from Brokaw’s company, since neon yellow wouldn’t have been a color option in the 16th-century, he said.
He’s shipped tennis balls all over the world, from Norway to New Zealand, and said he never expected the business to take off the way it has. But he wants it to stay small enough that it can be a two-man operation, at least for now, he said.
“It’s very relaxed, but it does bring in cash and it is an interesting product that nobody else thought about,” he said.
Scroll down to watch the music video for "Giving Up the Gun" by Vampire Weekend, which uses Brokaw's white tennis balls:
