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Your point about affordability is a good one. Sponsoring clubs, schools and juniors - even just a handful of them - isn't cheap, and if you're going to make any difference at all, your support needs to be continual and ongoing. Which means that your prices have to have a component built into them which makes giving some equipment away to be a commercially viable option... We are no different in that regard.
We (and really I mean me 🤣) are also pretty fanatical about or product quality too, which jacks the price up. We make all our blades by hand, we only produce blades in small numbers and limited batches, we only use the absolute best quality materials available at the time and we very rarely substitute woods, as in many cases the quality suffers considerably.
So as you can imagine, the vast majority of our our products really aren't cheap. The mid tier products we offer for sale in the UK and Europe start around the 130-150 Euro mark, with our top lines being well in excess of 300 Euro a pop, though to be fair, not all that money goes to us. Taxes, duties, shipping and handling costs and retailer margins feed into those figures an awful lot.
While our products will never be cheap or mass produced, the price premiums we ask also feed into our community support, and we're always looking to ways to make it work better if we possibly can.
The only point I was really looking to make with all this, is that if TT is to progress in markets like the UK or Australia (where we're lagging behind the pack a bit), then there has to be regular ongoing investment into the sport coming from **somewhere**.
If it's not coming from government, or the major TT companies, then where else can it comes from? The way I figure it has to come from a diversified and locally-invested industry base with actual skin in the game, or else from the community itself.
People keep wanting and talking about find a rich patreon or two somewhere, and try to Instill in them a love of table tennis and a desire to give to the sport at grass roots level. Or else they say 'if I had a billion dollars, I'd invest in the game and try to grow it"... It's a beautiful noble gesture on their part, but it's also a pipe dream, and I think we all know that.
All I'm saying is, an alternate approach might be finding somebody who is *already* working at the grass roots level of the game, and is *already* inclined and motivated to give all they can back to the community, and do what you can to give that person a few million to play with, or at least help them a little in gaining access to more funds to pour into the game's future instead.
Of all the approaches I've personally seen suggested so far, rewarding somebody for something they are actually already doing, just seems the most realistic and achievable path.
Please note I'm not saying it has to be me, or us, or Wakkibat. Given its the UK game were discussing, it should really be a UK-based entity. It just needs to be somebody who actually gives a damn, and is willing to head out there, put their own arse on the line, and be a bit proactive about things.
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