Stria didn't set out to make a pickleball shoe. Pickleball players dragged it there. Here's the story of the G1 Pro, the Gabe Tardio signature deal, and a basketball brand betting that the smartest move in pickleball footwear is to listen first.
One day in 2024, a Stria customer placed an order for eight pairs of the same shoe.
This isn't an anomaly. But it is uncommon. So Eric Porter, founder of the Chicago-based footwear brand, did what most curious founders do. He picked up the phone.
As a brand on the rise for its increasingly popular basketball shoes, now worn by over 100 pros, Porter's curiosity was piqued when the customer explained that basketball isn't his sport. He plays pickleball six days a week, had tried Stria's flagship 107 Series basketball shoe on a friend's recommendation, fell in love, and decided to stockpile a few years' worth before the colorway sold out.
He was not a one-off. Customers in Utah, Austin, and Florida had been doing similar things, often with the same explanation. They wanted ankle support. They wanted a locked-in feel. And they had not found a pickleball-specific shoe that gave them either.
That phone call, plus a stack of similar conversations, ultimately led to Gabe Tardio's signature Stria G1 Pro, the company's first dedicated pickleball model and one of the few real signature shoes in a category still figuring out what it wants to be.
Last month, Stria announced its deal with Tardio, the PPA Tour's #2 ranked men's doubles star. At just 20 years old, the Bolivia native has emerged as one of the most promising young talents in the sport, and he's also one of the first pickleball athletes to have a signature shoe.
"They were willing to do anything I wanted on the shoe. The way they came out with samples was super impressive," said Tardio.
"Most companies were just giving me money. Stria had a plan for me. That's why I went their way."
Stria's polished, professional approach was markedly different, offering Tardio more than just a sponsorship, as well as a commitment to c0-designing an innovative shoe built for pickleball – uncommon in a sport filled with cosplaying tennis footwear.
The shoe with basketball DNA but purpose-built for pickleball. Ankle stability, impact absorption, a wide supportive base, and all-day comfort.
Basketball Shoes for Pickleball?
A recent survey of readers of The Dink Newsletter found that 34.5% of pickleball players do not wear pickleball-specific shoes.
That anecdote highlights what the pickleball industry doesn't want to admit: a lot of “pickleball shoes” have felt like slightly rebranded tennis shoes sold into a fast-growing category. Functional, somewhat. Durable, not really. Distinctive, rarely.
Stria’s bet is that pickleball footwear has been missing not just performance features, but a different design philosophy altogether.
That is the core premise behind the G1 Pro, Stria’s new pickleball model and the company’s first real attempt to translate basketball DNA into the sport’s footwear arms race. On its product pages, Stria boasts the shoe's ankle stability, impact absorption, a wide supportive base, and all-day comfort.
"Pickleball just kills shoes a lot faster than tennis does, or any other sport. There's a lot more tension on the shoe," explained Tardio.
"We focused on three things: support, looks, and light weight so you can still be athletic and jump."
The company also positions Tardio not as a conventional endorser, but as the face of a signature model, a framing far more common in basketball than in pickleball.
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Pickleball's Tennis Shoe Identity Crisis
For most of the sport's modern boom, "pickleball shoes" have been tennis shoes with a fresh sticker. The Dink's own 2025 men's pickleball shoe rankings noted that the category is finally getting more competitive, but most contenders still trace their lineage back to clay-court footwear.
The 34.5% of players who don't wear pickleball shoes are not a fringe minority. That's roughly one in three of the people brands keep insisting they're serving.
Pickleball movement isn't borrowed from other sports, so the footwear shouldn't be either.
"Most pickleball shoes are basically a copycat of a tennis shoe. They don't think about the stuff that's different from pickleball," Tardio lamented.
Stria noticed the problem, but approached it from a unique direction. Instead of starting from racquet sports, it started from a basketball brand that already had hundreds of pickleball players repurposing its product to fit their needs.
"Without me even telling them I was thinking about a pickleball shoe, they were already saying they were playing in basketball shoes," Porter said. "Then our retailer, Scheels, was seeing the same spike. The retailer was telling us, too. So we started really talking to people who were playing."
The Crossover Is Less Ridiculous Than It Sounds
Basketball and pickleball share more than people assume. Lateral cuts. Recovery steps. Hard surfaces. A premium on stability without giving up quickness. Anyone who has watched Tardio cook with the snake shot will recognize the kind of footwork basketball shoes are built around.
Our survey showed 10.5% of respondents indicated that basketball shoes are the go-to alternative, predictably trailing tennis at over half of respondents. Basketball beat volleyball, running, walking, and cross-training combined. The narrative that "pickleball players wear tennis shoes" is true but incomplete. Basketball is a clear second.
Porter put it plainly:
"There's a ton of lateral movements that are similar to basketball and pickleball. It's the same tribe of people. We thought it was a great crossover between the two markets."
The language matters here. Stria isn't selling a basketball shoe with new branding. The G1 Pro went through its own four-month design cycle, with different outsole rubber tuned for the meaner concrete of outdoor courts, a wider supportive base, and what Porter calls a "low mid top" silhouette built around the one piece of feedback that came up in nearly every wear test: do not let me roll my ankle.
The wear-testing pool was deliberately broad. Stria put prototypes on 25-year-olds and 55-and-up rec players in roughly equal measure, on the theory that pickleball isn't one demographic. It's two or three at the same time.
"We don't have a target demographic," Porter said. "I'm 30. I'm going to play a different style of pickleball than the 55-year-old dad. So we did a long wear-testing phase across all ages and genders. We're a performance footwear brand. Looks are great, but performance is always the priority."
The shoe with basketball DNA but purpose-built for pickleball. Ankle stability, impact absorption, a wide supportive base, and all-day comfort.
Why the Tardio Signature Is a Bigger Deal Than It Looks
This is the part the rest of the pickleball industry should pay attention to.
Stria didn't just sponsor Gabe Tardio, the No. 1 men's doubles player on the PPA Tour and one half of pickleball's most dominant doubles team. It built him a signature shoe, with a royalty deal, design input, and the kind of structural commitment normally reserved for NBA stars.
"We felt like the top basketball players in the world had their own signature shoes, and a guy of Gabe's stature deserves his," Porter said.
"We thought it was weird that there really wasn't that going on in pickleball."
That framing is a real shift. Even with the wave of new pro paddle deals reshaping 2026, and the Tardio Facolos partnership that itself signaled how fast the gear market is changing, pickleball still mostly trades on logo placements and influencer-style endorsements. Royalty-tied signature footwear deals, where the athlete makes more if the shoe sells more, are a different animal. They reward collaboration, not just visibility.
Porter said Tardio was hands-on through the entire process: sketches, colorway selection, sample testing, and the back-and-forth with manufacturers that decides whether a shoe survives wear-test phases or gets sent back for another upper.
"We want Gabe to have a reason to push that shoe," Porter said. "And he only pushes that shoe if he feels comfortable with it."
Andre Drummond Wants In
In March, Stria announced that two-time NBA All-Star, and current Philadelphia 76ers center, Andre Drummond had joined the Stria family both as an investor and as Creative Director.
Like Tardio, Drummond will have a signature Stria shoe of his own. The structure of the deal is what made it newsworthy. A royalty deal pays per shoe sold. An equity deal pays when the company grows. Drummond bet on the second.
"Ownership means alignment. I believe in Stria because it’s not just another brand, it’s something we’re building from the ground up with intention and experience," explained Drummond.
"My vision is to create products that feel premium, perform at a high level, and still move culture."
The pickleball overlap was not incidental. Porter said Drummond, who lives in Miami in the offseason, had been noticing the sport for a while. His Sixers teammates were running pickleball tournaments. He was watching basketball peers invest in Major League Pickleball. He started asking Porter about Tardio.
"He was asking all these questions about pickleball, even padel," Porter said. "He's like, 'Everywhere I go, people are talking about it.' He's seen a lot of basketball players invest in MLP. That's what intrigued him about our brand: the crossover between basketball and racquet sports."
Drummond's role spans both sides of the company. He weighs in on colorways and design, oversees product direction, and will eventually wear-test his own size 18 G1 Pros. (Stria is making them. He plans to play.)
Porter also said Drummond is lining up basketball friends to put the pickleball shoe in front of, an unusually targeted athlete-marketing channel that most footwear brands cannot replicate.
I’ve played a few times before for fun , but now that I’ve joined Stria and we have the Cooper Flag of pickleball with young phenom Gabe Tardio, I want to take it seriously now so I can challenge him. I'll be playing more this offseason.
The Risk, and the Read
There is a version of this story where Stria's basketball roots feel like cosplay. Pickleball is full of brands that mistook a hot market for a permanent one. A footwear brand entering the space could read as opportunism dressed up in good design language.
The harder fact to get around is that Stria didn't chase pickleball. Pickleball found Stria, and the company built its entry around the specific gap real customers described.
Pickleball is now a 24.3-million-player sport in the United States, up 171.8% in three years. At that scale, every adjacent category gets rebuilt. Paddles. Bags. Eyewear. Now footwear. Most of those rebuilds are noisy. A few are real.
What separates the two is usually some version of the question Porter answered when a customer ordered eight pairs at once: did you actually listen, or did you just notice the market was hot?
Stria's next test is whether the G1 Pro performs at scale, whether new signing Rafa Hewitt helps broaden the player roster, and whether Drummond's creative imprint shows up in the next colorway drop the way it should. There's also a Dink-branded G1 Pro custom in the works, which feels appropriate for a story this much about listening to the people actually playing.
In a sport this crowded, with this much money in play, origin stories still matter. They tell you whether a brand is trying to extract value from pickleball, or whether pickleball forced the brand to evolve.
For Stria, this one might actually be the latter.
Lace Up the G1 Pro
The Stria G1 Pro is available now at striasport.com, built around the three things players asked for most:
- Ankle support that prevents the rolled ankle nobody can afford
- Court-ready comfort for the rec player logging 15 hours a week
- A silhouette that does not look like every other shoe at the kitchen line.
If you've been wearing a tennis shoe, a running shoe, or, yes, a basketball shoe for pickleball, this is the one to try next.
The shoe with basketball DNA but purpose-built for pickleball. Ankle stability, impact absorption, a wide supportive base, and all-day comfort.
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