kitchn pickleball club
Daianne Malabanan
BRANDING / CAMPAIGN
kitchn
pickleball club
Pickleball. Not what you pictured.
kitchn /KITCH-in/ is a speculative pickleball club and campaign built around a single cultural insight: everyone thinks they can beat the older player across the net. They’re wrong.
While pickleball is often dismissed as a slow retirement sport, the reality on court is far more competitive, fast-paced, and intimidating than people expect. The project began through interviews, court observations, and first-hand experience playing across Vancouver, where younger players repeatedly underestimated older opponents and lost.
The campaign reframes older players not as the friendly face of a casual community sport, but as the most dangerous people on the court. Built around the tagline “Respect Your Elders,” the campaign flips the stereotype of pickleball as an easy retirement pastime and turns older players into intimidating, highly skilled competitors that younger players constantly underestimate. The line works both as humor and a warning because on the court, experience usually wins.
The visual identity draws from street sport culture, using bold typography, score graphics, and motion-heavy imagery to make pickleball feel competitive, intense, and culturally current. The name kitchn comes from the “kitchen,” the most strategic zone in pickleball where games are often won or lost. It also references the kitchen as a social gathering space, connecting the project back to the court as a modern third place where different generations meet through play.
As third spaces continue to disappear in cities like Vancouver, pickleball has quietly become one of the few places where strangers from different generations still regularly interact. The court becomes a rare social space where competition, banter, and connection happen naturally through play.
The final campaign spans digital, print, and spatial touchpoints designed to reposition pickleball as a contemporary sport culture rather than a retirement pastime. Across the project, the court is presented as a space where generations compete side by side, challenge each other, and connect through the game.
