Custom Ball Manufacturing: Our History of Ball Development for Unique Applications

When it comes to specialist ball manufacturing, one question drives our innovation: “Can you make a ball to meet our unique specifications?” Whether it’s weight, compression, bounce, size, shape or even materials and surface properties like prints, we’ve been answering that question since 1936. We’ve created custom balls for sports, games, awareness campaigns and other applications you might never imagine.

Beyond Standard Tennis Balls: A Legacy of Innovations!

While we're known for our traditional tennis balls, what is perhaps less well-known is that we also have many decades of expertise in custom ball development. Over nearly 90 years, we've partnered with inventors, sports innovators, charities, and companies to manufacture balls with unique specifications that simply don't exist anywhere else. In particular, Price plays a continuing major role in supporting and developing balls for minority sports like racketball/squash57, wallball and Eton fives, helping bolster and support these scenes towards greater popularity and accessibility.

In the early days of racketball when the sport was still getting on its feet, players and associations required balls with particular weight distributions and compression ratings that differed from standard squash balls. The British Racketball Association quickly realised that the balls they imported were too lively and inconsistent from batch to batch, calling upon Price to produce a slower, more consistent ball. Price, as Britain’s only dedicated ball developer and producer, rose to this challenge, developing the balls that became the official balls for racketball; the competitive Black Double Dot for the expert player, and the Blue Racketball, suitable for casual and recreational play, which was a touch slower. More recently The World Squash Federation approached us again to design a competition speed ball with a lower bounce for tournament racketball/squash 57 play, resulting in our WSF approved Excel ball.

In the area of pickleball, Price has also made custom developments. As pickleball's popularity exploded, so did noise complaints from residential areas. We worked on developing quieter pickleball options, exploring materials and construction methods to successfully reduce the distinctive "pop" sound while maintaining playability and durability standards required for competitive play.

Price plays a continued major role in the game of Eton Fives (see top image), a traditional handball game that started on the chapel walls of Britain’s most elite private school, now finding popularity more widely. We continue to provide the Fives Association with all their balls, this year with a set of bespoke golden balls to celebration their centenary. More locally, we aid our nearby stické enthusiasts at Hartham Park in Corsham with bespoke balls for their real tennis style game. Throughout the world there are only 3 courts, making this probably the most niche sport we support!

Over the years, we've become a trusted manufacturer for many minority sports like these, understanding that preserving these games requires maintaining authentic ball characteristics to historical specifications, that modern mass production often simply can't accommodate.

Our Unusual Designs Beyond Traditional Sports

New Games, Custom Designs and White Labelling: One example of a completely new sport Price has designed balls for is “Bishball”. The team behind this on-the-go social game needed balls for their innovative social target game, they came to us with specific requirements. Bishball is a fast-paced, tactical team sport played around a central base where players use up to three alternating hits to return the ball onto the top section. The game demands balls with precise bounce characteristics, consistent flight paths, and durability to withstand repeated impacts on the specialised base surface. For this, Bishball came to us for our classic Red75 tennis ball design, which provided the right combination of bounce, weight, and responsiveness for both serving and rally play. Covered in a beautiful bespoke turquoise felt and branded with their logo the Bishball was ready for launch!

Another example of our work is our ball development for the dynamic team at The Art of Pingpong, who needed the perfect ball for their high-end beach padel set. Their bat and ball game needed a bespoke ball that was based on our traditional racketballs but fine tuned over the course of feedback rounds to ensure the balls had the exact bounce and feel upon-hit that the team wanted. Such custom designs are one of our fortes, and we are willing and able to tune, reverse engineer or tweak any existing ball design to your needs.

We don’t just tune existing designs, though. We can also manufacture totally custom designs based on your specifications. We handled all the ball development for the original Swingball game, one of the world’s most beloved garden games. Creating a ball and swivel attachment that could withstand constant rope tension, repeated paddle strikes, and outdoor conditions while maintaining consistent performance required innovative thinking. As anyone who’s played the game before knows, the Price of Bath tennis ball design is the star of the show and remarkably durable!

Awareness Campaign Balls: Making a Difference: One of our most meaningful projects involved manufacturing oddly-shaped balls for testicular cancer awareness campaigns. These unusual balls served a serious purpose: starting conversations and raising awareness. Custom ball manufacturing can be about more than sports—it can support important health initiative campaigns.

Sustainable Seed-Dispersing Tennis Balls: For an Australian project focused on environmental sustainability, we manufactured tennis balls containing seeds. As players used these balls, they dispersed native seeds, combining sport with ecological restoration. This project showcases how custom ball manufacturing can address environmental concerns while maintaining functionality, as well as our ability to make custom cores and fillings for your projects.

Custom Ball Manufacturing Capabilities

So what can we actually customise? Nearly everything:

Weight Specifications: Heavier balls for specific training applications; Lighter balls for junior sports or accessibility; Precise weight distributions for flight characteristics

Compression and Hardness: Softer balls for safety or noise reduction; Harder balls for durability and performance; Custom compression ratings for specific sports.

Bounce Characteristics: Higher bounce for fast-paced games; Lower bounce for controlled play; Dead balls for specific training purposes

Size and Shape: Non-standard diameters; Unusual shapes for specialty uses; Oversized or undersized variants.

Materials and Construction: Sustainable and eco-friendly materials; Specialised rubber mixes; Custom cloth colours; Potential for unusual core materials

Our Signature Prints: Print logos or custom text on your tennis balls.

Why Choose Price’s Custom Ball Manufacturing?

Whether you're inventing a new sport, adapting an existing game, supporting a charitable cause, creating musical instruments, or solving a unique problem, standard balls often won't work. Custom manufacturing allows you to specify exactly what you need.

Our decades of experience mean we understand the science behind ball behaviour: how weight affects flight, how compression impacts bounce, how materials determine durability, and how construction methods influence performance. Furthermore, at Price we are able to make balls to custom specifications on smaller batches that larger factories in the Far East simply cannot.

Do you have a project that requires custom ball specifications? Whether you need balls that are heavier, lighter, softer, harder, higher bouncing, lower bouncing, or something completely unprecedented, we'd love to hear about it.

With nearly 90 years of manufacturing expertise and a track record of bringing unusual ball concepts to life, Price of Bath is your partner in custom ball innovation.

Please email us at sam@priceofbath.com today to discuss your custom ball manufacturing needs.