Wilson’s New Airless Basketball Costs $2,500, But It Will Sell Out In Seconds
Source: Fast Company, Jesus Diaz
Photo: Courtesy of Wilson
The price tag for the 3D-printed ball is staggering, but there are fewer than 200 available.
Fewer than 200 Wilson Airless Gen1 basketballs will exist in the world. The first commercial version of Wilson’s Basketball that Doesn’t Need To Be Inflated Because It’s Already Full of Holes will cost $2,500. And, no, there are no extra zeroes in that price. The airless basketball is available Feb. 16 exclusively from Wilson’s website, and I suspect they will all be gone in seconds.
There’s a few reasons why the price is so huge and the number is so limited, and most of them come down to manufacturing challenges, explains Nadine Lippa, Wilson’s Innovation Manager. Wilson worked on the Airless prototype for years before first showing it off at the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend. The 3D-printed prototype featured a latticed pattern of hundred of hexagonal holes. There was no inflated bladder inside to help the ball bounce; instead, its shape and materials allowed it to bounce like any other ball, minus the air.
Lippa’s team had to transform the 3D-printed ball from a prototype into a consumer product, while using largely the same tools. “We’re still using the same printer, we’re still using the same type of smoothing and dyeing,” she says. To scale up, Wilson brought some of the ball’s production into a third-party external facility.
The new ball will have the same architecture as the prototype, but with a few refinements to allow for the bigger production run. “We have created some holes in the channels of the ball, which are like the black stripe that you would see around a conventional basketball,” she says, adding that the holes will release the powder gathered during the printing process. “Adding those holes, it can be more easily removed,” she says.
The Airless ball will come in three colors: black, a broken leather hue, and an “undyed” off-white, which is the natural color of the polymer used in the printing process. The balls will also have a customization panel that, in addition to bearing a Wilson logo, will identify each ball individually as part of a limited run.
A COLLECTIBLE ITEM FOR BASKETBALL LOVERS AND NERDS
According to David Picioski, Wilson’s Director of Partnerships & Collaborations, this exclusivity factor was a necessity that has been turned to an advantage. “We feel like the amount that we have currently is really suitable for us and Nadine and the R&D team,” he says. As they grow the product with future generations, he says Wilson will likely be able to increase the production. But until the technology catches up, it’s going to be a very expensive product, which automatically leads to a very specific type of potential buyer.
“We’ve thought a lot about this and we feel like the target audience for this product is a confluence of a few different groups,” Picioski says. The first is sports fans who love basketball. Then there’s collectors, specifically. “We see this a ton with art, with fashion, with sneakers . . . People who really enjoy limited-edition, rare products and love to be in this very small minority of people who can actually own them,” he says. Finally, he sees this ball appealing to tech enthusiasts, who covet the latest innovations in technology and engineering. “There’s all these new inventions and creations that come out every year, and there’s always this group of folks who want to be the first to get their hands on it,” he says.
The rest of us will have to wait—probably a long time. Lippa says the 3D-printing industry and the sports industry are both still learning how to scale from making one prototype ball to hundreds. Plus, she adds, it’s unclear how well the Airless will perform in a real sports scenario. Despite having tested it hundreds of thousands of times in the lab, the ball has yet to be treated like any other ball that’s just hanging around the gym.
“From a technical standpoint, we still don’t have a full grasp on how they would perform in that setting,” she says. “Any material scientist would say the best way to test a product is put it out in the field and hear back from the people that are actually using it.”
We will see what happens in a year or so. I can’t wait to get my hands on one and see how amazing that first bounce of such a strange and counterintuitive object is. And, as Picioski tells me, that’s what they want, too. To start bouncing this ball in the real world. “We look forward to creating this new audience and then growing it, nurturing it, iteration over iteration, as we look to develop the ball and make it even bigger,” he says. “This is just gen one.”