I've made a few blades for pros, not many. It's not that interesting actually, if the player is sponsored then he cannot advertise he is using my blade, and I can't do it too, so it does nothing other than inflate my ego 😅. I've also made some repairs and handle swaps for pros.
You have several levels of pro, and by pro I mean someone who earns something in return for playing. The reality is that most pros know very little about equipment, because they simply don't care. They play with whatever is put in their hand since a young age, and many only start messing with equipment changes at an adult stage. A pro looks at equipment differently from us, for them it's a tool to do their job, so what they want is reliability. They don't even want to think about that stuff, if they miss a point they don't want to look at their racket thinking something was off. Of course there are exceptions, we have a little bit of everything, but this is true for most low/mid tier pros.
When Marcos first moved to Tibhar he was playing with a M. Maze since a young age. They built a blade for him but he continued using his trusty old blade. He only changed after he moved to Butterfly, and I believe he still continued using it for a while. For an elite player, the decision of moving to another brand has very little to do with equipment. There are many ways around that. Don't forget that this is still a business, and money is what moves both sides. For a player like Hugo, it's also important to support his career, and also start preparing for when he retires. He seems interested in moving TT forwards in Brazil, and maybe Joola aligns itself, and supports his view. As for his blade and rubbers, you can never really trust what a pro is using. In tennis they paint frames to make them look like other ones, in TT we make handle swaps. He can continue using his blade until they build him something that he likes. He will adapt, don't worry. Rubbers too, this was told to me by a pro, he was using an old generation rubber that he preferred, but the printing on the top sheet was from a newer model that had just came out and they wanted to sell. They also get their rubbers boosted from the factory. So, forget about what pros use, it's all marketing and very easy to deceive, do what's best for you.
In the case of Anders, he has a blade with his name on it, why would he say he is using something else? Does he not want to make money?! Maybe he even used it for a while but had a change of heart, not that the blade is bad or anything, it happens... Maybe the brand already had this composition destined for this type of marketing and decided to use his name and he played along...
And there isn't this magical forest where all the special wood for TT blades grows. Apart from Hinoki, namely Kiso Hinoki, which you can select the boards with a tighter grain, wood is wood. Of course there's crappy wood, but there's not magical wood. Butterfly has pretty good Limba, and I really doubt they change the source of that Limba for pro blades, it's all about material selection. They select what they need (in terms of density and grain), from their current batch. Better quality components does not always translate to a higher quality product. There are good blades with crappy materials, and vice-versa. And a higher quality product does not necessarily mean a better blade for that player, it's all about personal preference, so it's all very subjective. If a pro gets a blade with his name, but he likes to play with a 95g head heavy blade, that will never sell, so of course they have to tweak the composition to make it commercially feasible.
