Building a Performance Pickleball Brand and Scaling Through Amazon with Kyle Goguen

Kyle Goguen says the origin of Carbon Pickleball belongs largely to his childhood friend and co-founder, Garrett Gosselin. Before the pandemic, Garrett was a sommelier. After being laid off, he began playing pickleball “seven days a week,” eventually entering professional events and noticing that the equipment industry was not treating the sport seriously. Existing paddles used cheap materials, bright or “kooky” colors, and designs that looked as though they were intended for casual or older players. Garrett, who Goguen describes as a tinkerer and inventor, designed a sleek black paddle with a carbon-fiber face for his own tournament use. Other players repeatedly asked how they could buy one. Garrett then approached Goguen, who already had business experience, and asked whether there was a real opportunity. Goguen checked Amazon and Google keyword trends, analyzed the industry, margins, and broader economics, and concluded that pickleball demand was clearly accelerating. He agreed to become Garrett’s partner, and they officially started Carbon in August 2021. The host compares their early position in pickleball to his own early experience in podcasting, saying both became mainstream only after they had already been working in relatively uncrowded fields. They briefly discuss the movie The Dink: Goguen says it is entertaining but not an accurate representation of real pickleball, comparing it unfavorably with the stronger sports comedy Dodgeball.

Before Carbon, Goguen spent roughly eight or nine years building Pawstruck, an e-commerce business selling dog treats and dog chews. He started it immediately after graduating from college in 2014, abandoning a job he had already lined up after discussing the idea with partners. His parents supported the decision, and the company gave him nearly a decade of practice in the parts of business that later transferred directly to Carbon. Goguen says Pawstruck taught him through repeated mistakes how to grow a company, hire and manage a team, and operate a digitally native business selling through both a company website and marketplaces. Those lessons applied to Carbon from its first day. The businesses had different brands, customers, and price points, but the underlying concepts of product development, marketing, operations, and marketplace selling were largely the same. The host asks when Goguen first knew Carbon would work, especially because the company began with two childhood friends, a garage operation, and a sport whose future growth was not guaranteed. Goguen says the realization came during Carbon’s first year, much earlier than it did at Pawstruck. The company could not keep its initial paddles in stock because manufacturing capacity and the supply chain had not caught up with demand. Customers were effectively pre-ordering everything the company could produce, while Garrett shipped orders from his garage. Goguen calls this the first time he had unmistakably experienced product-market fit: customers clearly wanted the product and were actively clamoring to obtain it.

Goguen says Amazon gave Carbon access to a large, loyal customer base that specifically wants Prime shipping and the other conveniences Amazon provides. His principle is to place Carbon products wherever customers are already looking, rather than relying only on Carbon’s website or retail. Once Carbon launched on Amazon, sales improved substantially because the company reached shoppers it would not otherwise have reached. He identifies Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon network as another major advantage. Carbon can send inventory to one or a few facilities, after which Amazon distributes it among many fulfillment centers and delivers products in roughly one to two days with free shipping. Goguen says this can scale almost indefinitely without Carbon having to lease additional warehouse space or hire more warehouse employees. That allows the team to concentrate on product development, marketing, and other activities that directly move the brand forward. Among Amazon’s growth tools, Goguen singles out deal opportunities as especially effective. Carbon’s paddles are premium products at premium prices and might not appear to be impulse purchases, but promotions around major holidays have successfully put paddles into new customers’ hands. Those buyers can then discover the broader brand and purchase related products such as bags and eyewear. The paddles have been the strongest performers during these deal periods, functioning as the entry point for repeat purchases.

The conversation turns to international growth and the difficulty a small Southern California company would normally face in selling globally. Goguen says Amazon makes expansion easier by allowing Carbon to extend an existing operational system into new marketplaces. Canada was the first logical destination after the U.S. business was established because the customer demographics are similar. Carbon placed inventory in Amazon’s Canadian fulfillment centers and was able to mirror its existing listings and products. The host jokes that Canada has a shorter outdoor pickleball season, and Goguen responds that indoor facilities may make the sport especially attractive during winter. The discussion then covers Carbon’s more recent work on Japan, where the company has not launched yet but is actively preparing. The team has used AI tools to translate its product listings into Japanese, but Goguen says it does not trust itself or AI to produce final Japanese copy. Instead, pickleball players in Japan connected through Carbon’s ambassador program are proofreading the listings. They also discuss the company name and logo. Carbon writes its brand name as “CRBN,” and Goguen says customers in Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines tended to refer to it as “CRBN,” possibly because “carbon” is harder to pronounce in markets where English is a second language. He is satisfied as long as customers remember the four letters. Carbon had recently visited those countries during a March world tour.

The host raises the tension between product innovation and customer consistency. A customer may love a specific Carbon paddle and become frustrated if it breaks and the exact model is no longer available. Goguen says continual research and development has nevertheless been central to Carbon’s identity, particularly because Garrett’s focus has always been inventing and improving products. For Carbon, new product development drives sales, marketing, and the wider business engine. Goguen argues that pickleball is unusually open to meaningful innovation because its current popularity is relatively new. Technology and competition are compressing a large amount of development into a short period, and the sport has not yet reached a stable equipment peak. Carbon helped lead the move toward carbon-fiber-faced paddles, and it later developed True Foam, described as the first 100% foam-core paddle approved for tournament play. He says that construction became an industry norm, with other brands also pursuing similar research and development. He contrasts pickleball with mature sporting-goods categories where annual improvements may be mostly marketing. The host uses golf drivers as an example, suggesting that it is implausible for a driver to gain another ten yards every year. Goguen agrees with the broader point: unlike those mature categories, pickleball still has room for product changes that genuinely improve performance. Carbon’s advantage, he says, comes from being made by people who actually play the sport and understand what players want.

Asked what he would tell aspiring entrepreneurs with a product idea, Goguen gives two main recommendations. First, make the jump and sell on Amazon. Because Amazon has so many customers, he can think of very few product businesses that should not consider the marketplace. Second, sellers must treat Amazon as equally important to their own website. Listing a product and crossing one’s fingers is not enough; sellers need to research the platform, promote strategically, manage listings actively, and learn from peers and educational sources such as YouTube. He says Amazon’s support extends beyond ordinary support tickets. Sellers can attend events such as Amazon Accelerate, meet Amazon employees in person, and gain exposure to beta features. Carbon also uses an account-management program that provides a direct representative to help plan annual goals and resolve problems. After more than a decade selling on Amazon across Pawstruck and Carbon, Goguen says Amazon increasingly recognizes how important third-party sellers are and is trying to partner with them. One feature he plans to bring back from Accelerate is Amazon’s newly announced connection to AI tools. Carbon uses Claude, and Goguen says an Amazon plugin or MCP server can connect Claude directly to Seller Central. The team can then pull Amazon data and run analyses within its Claude environment. He had tested it that morning and had already contacted the team so they could investigate its uses. Goguen summarizes Carbon’s success as “authenticity and commitment to progressing the sport.” Seeing customers use Carbon paddles at courts around the world remains especially satisfying because, unlike the private experience of giving a dog a chew, he can directly see people enjoying the product. His final advice is to sell wherever customers shop—on the company website, Amazon, and in retail—because the priority is getting the product in front of customers, not worrying about which channel they use.