In nearly every category where the factory has taken over, the makers dedicated to the craft have built a market of their own: craft beer, $28.0 billion a year;¹ craft spirits, $7.6 billion;² tequila’s super-premium tier, about $3 billion;³ and the same story in skillets, knives and outdoor gear. For things made by hand, the research is specific: people see a handmade object as carrying its maker’s love, and they value it most as a gift for someone close.⁴

Sport runs on the same split. The performance giants sell what the game measures, leaving space for meaning brands to emerge. Rapha (sold for £200 million),⁹ Malbon (approaching $100 million a year)¹⁰ and Tracksmith (about $25 million a year)¹⁴ have excelled at finding what the game means and carrying that meaning to the people who play it for love. Soccer, played by nearly as many Americans as golf, has neither a craft ball nor a meaning brand. Hayworth is both.

We make soccer balls stitched by hand in Monguí, Colombia, a village that has made them by hand since 1932. With no advertising, the ball is on Soccer.com’s Best Soccer Balls of 2026, stocked by the two largest soccer retailers in the country, and rated 4.98 by 57 owners. It took 152 prototypes to get here. Today it sells 8 to 10 balls a month on its own.

Craft brands have always spent their first money the same way: to make the thing, then to sell it. Sierra Nevada borrowed about $50,000 to build the brewery.⁵ Field Company pre-sold its first skillets to more than 12,000 people.⁶ Tecovas’s early round went to marketing, its team and its product line.⁷ Hayworth has already done the first part: the ball is made, and the people who find it buy it. This raise does the second. It tells people the ball exists, and builds the line they will buy.

We are raising on standard SAFE terms. The first jumpstarts marketing and builds the first Makers and Heritage stock: creators, films, press and ads, enough to put the ball in front of of the right people, enough times to sell soccer balls. The other is assessed at the end of year one against the plan’s three cases. What has to be true for the answer, and the month we will know each part, is tested in the model.

This raise carries Hayworth across the threshold of its first horizon, proving that people want a craft soccer ball, and into its second: the ballmakers who defined the category. The company is being built for the third: to become the meaning brand of American soccer.

Sport moves between two states of mind. The first is flow, where the player disappears into the task. Focus narrows to the moment in front of them, and decisions arrive as instinct rather than thought. It is the closest a person comes to losing themselves. Flow is where performance lives.

The second is awareness, the moment the self comes back. The player steps outside the game and sees where they are, what they are doing, and why they have given so much of their life to it. Flow is what we do. Awareness is why. And awareness is where a person decides the game is part of who they are.

Every sports brand serves both states. What separates them is which one comes first. Performance brands start with the what: the faster boot, the lighter frame, the win. Their meaning follows, borrowed from the people who win in them. A boot means something because a star scored in it.

Meaning brands start with the why. They serve the serious amateur, the person who plays for love rather than a living. Psychologists call what that person is looking for social identity: the part of who we are that comes from the people we stand among.⁸ In sport it has a simpler name, belonging. Meaning brands give the serious amateur a place to belong among people who play for the same reasons. Their gear still has to perform, because the serious amateur takes the game seriously. But performance is the price of entry, not the reason anyone buys.

Belonging is not a niche. Rapha showed what the seat is worth: it sold for £200 million in 2017 and still turns over about £96 million a year.⁹ And once one brand opens the seat, others follow it through.

Malbon opened golf’s in 2017 and is now approaching $100 million a year.¹⁰ Behind it came a wave. Good Good did more than $40 million in 2025, most of it apparel.¹¹ Bogey Bros went from $6,000 of seed money to an expected $22 million in 2025.¹² Eastside Golf grew to $4 million and drew investment from the PGA of America’s own venture arm.¹³ Together, golf’s meaning brands now sell more than $150 million a year, and investors have put more than $80 million behind them.

Running followed the same path. Tracksmith opened the lane in 2014 and does an estimated $25 million a year.¹⁴ Satisfy doubled its revenue to about €11 million and raised €11 million more to chase €100 million.¹⁵ Bandit has raised more than $30 million.¹⁶ Dozens of smaller brands now fill the running shelf. In both sports, the first brand through the door is still the largest.

Soccer has none. In soccer, performance brands have swallowed the market whole. Adidas sold €24.8 billion of product in 2025, and its performance business grew 39% in the first half of 2026, led by football.¹⁷ Nike and Adidas are so good at selling flow that the sport seems to have forgotten the other state exists. Nobody in American soccer speaks to the player looking for belonging: the others who play the way they do, and for the same reasons.

The players are already here. Around 25 million Americans now play soccer, a record, close to the 29.1 million who play golf on a course.¹⁸ The lane is wide open.

And the moment is now. In the summer of 2026 the World Cup came to America for the first time since 1994. Outdoor soccer reached a record 16.8 million players in 2025, up 15.8% in a single year, and the fastest growth is among adults: players aged 35 to 44 are up 118% since 2018, and 45 to 54 up 247%. Another 15.2 million Americans who do not play say they intend to within the year.¹⁹ The generation that grew up with the game is coming back to it as adults, looking for a way to belong.

The soccer ball shows why no one has entered it. A ball cannot borrow meaning the way a boot does. On the field it belongs to everyone, so nobody wins in a ball, and it is replaced so often that meaning never has time to build. Made only for flow, it vanishes into the game, and its meaning vanishes with it. When the game stops, there is nothing in your hands worth looking at. It came out of a bag, and it goes back in.

Yet the ball is the only thing the game requires. A player alone needs a ball and nothing else. So do twenty-two players in a full-sided game. It is where soccer comes to mean something to one person, and where it comes to mean something between them. Both kinds of meaning, who you are and who you belong with, start with the ball.

Hayworth exists to give the ball back its meaning. We make it for the moment the game stops and the player looks down: stitched by hand, by one maker, worth seeing, and made to become part of the person who holds it.

The ball is where Hayworth begins, not where it ends. A ball with meaning is the foundation, and on it we build what American soccer has never had: an identity of its own.

People pay for three things in a handmade object: the maker’s care,²⁰ the visible hours,²¹ and a real place with a real history.²² All three come from the making. A factory cannot replicate these.

Hayworth Athletic LLC is based in Austin, Texas. Every ball is stitched by hand at Good Stitch SAS in Monguí, a ballmaking village high in the Colombian Andes, in a workshop the founder built with his small team there. Up to three hours of hand-stitching go into each ball, and the craft is learned through training and repetition, under the eye of master ballmakers. Hand-stitching is a craft most of the industry gave up, and Monguí kept it. The 152 prototypes it took to reach the No. 152 are knowledge that now lives in one workshop. That is the moat. There will never be a machine-made Hayworth ball.

Every series costs about the same to make. The Makers Series carries a presentation box at about $25, against $5 for the others.

Why these prices. Hayworth’s prices are not high for a craft object. Across categories, craft sells for roughly two to three times its factory equivalent: craft beer earns almost twice its share of the market in dollars,¹ handmade goods sell for about 78% more than manufactured ones,²³ and a hand-laced Nokona glove costs two to three times a factory glove.²⁴ The No. 152 at $135 sits at three to four times a factory ball. The Heritage and Makers balls sit at the top of that range, where the finest craft objects in every category live.

Around 25 million Americans play soccer, indoors or out. Only basketball is clearly larger, and SFIA’s 2026 report names outdoor soccer among the three team sports that led America’s record year, beside basketball and baseball.²⁷

The plan does not try to reach all of them. It chooses a crowd inside the overlap that this year’s budget can reach about times each, and grows the crowd as the budget grows.²⁹ Four kinds of buyer live there:³⁰

How the budget reaches them is section 5.

Today the company sells about balls a month with no marketing at all. This plan intends to sell balls in year one, of revenue, through four avenues. Each is counted its own way, and none borrows from another.

The downside assumes the marketing performs below every funded launch brand on record. The base sits at the bottom of the market’s observed range. The upside is that range’s middle, still under what the nearest craft parallel did in its first year. The market’s range, and the parallels, are in the market check in section 5.

We are raising . Investors hear the numbers every quarter, the good and the bad. The that arrives at close goes mostly to marketing; the other is assessed at the end of year one.

What the marketing buys

The budget includes the person who runs it. Of the , pays a fractional CMO to run the marketing, and , a month, pays for the tools the marketing runs on. The remaining buys the attention.

The of media buys attention in five stages, from the first time someone sees the ball to the ball they bring in for someone else.³¹

The company still shows a year-one operating loss of because the workshop and administration, a year, are paid whether or not a ball sells. Every stage, rate and dollar can be changed in the model.

The market’s check on this math. Brands at this stage spend 25 to 60 percent of revenue on marketing while they buy their first customers, which is $1.67 to $4.00 of sales for each marketing dollar; below about back per dollar, funded brands stop being fundable. Tecovas, the nearest craft-object parallel, sold $1 million of handmade boots in its first year. The meaning brands this plan follows ran leaner still: Good Good built its audience with content in place of ad spend, and Bogey Bros turned $6,000 of seed money into a $22 million business. This plan’s downside assumes back per dollar, ; the base assumes , .³²

What has to be true for every number here, and the month each part is known, is tested in the model.

The economics of one ball are the plan’s strongest number. The blend of five prices averages a ball, and a ball costs all in, tariff included, so each sale leaves : a margin, at the top of the 50 to 70 percent range typical of direct brands, before any scale.⁴⁷ The one thin line is wholesale, about at the door price; the doors earn their place by putting the ball in people’s hands, not by their margin.

The company’s fixed costs are a month, the workshop and administration together, with no founder salary. At a ball, balls a month pay those fixed costs. Add year two’s marketing and the number rises to about a month: the target, computed in the model. Today the company sells 8 to 10 balls a month with no marketing at all; the base case below sells in year one, about a month.⁴⁶

Figures are rounded to be spoken; columns may not foot to the dollar. Exact figures are in the model.

The average price runs higher in the downside because the Makers and Heritage releases are made in fixed numbers, so they weigh more when fewer everyday balls sell.

In the downside, years two and three spend only what cash allows: marketing is cut to hold at least of cash, with a floor for the ads and content that keep the company visible. In year three even the floor dips below the cash line, and the case ends the third year at without drawing the second .

* Revenue per ball is a blend of five prices, direct, Heritage, Makers, at a tournament, wholesale, and moves with the mix. A ball costs about all in: $25 made in Monguí, $6 freight to Austin by air, $5 box, $10 shipping, and of tariff, carried as if the ball is caught by the 2026 surcharge on Colombian goods. The exact figures, tariff line included, are in the model. Once there is enough stock to ship by sea, freight falls by $3 to $4 a ball. Founder salary is excluded. Year one runs November 2026 to October 2027.

Every figure here follows the model’s plan settings. Change them in the model.

Why would anyone pay $135 for a soccer ball?
For the same reason people pay six times more for a Field Company skillet than a Lodge. A handmade object is understood to carry its maker’s care, so people value it more and choose it first when the gift is for someone they love. Nobody needs a craft soccer ball, so every sale is desire. That is the moat, and 57 owners rating it 4.98 is the early evidence.

What stops Nike or Adidas from making one?
Nothing stops them making one. Selling it is another matter. Their ball business is the match ball and the bag: standardized, bought by the dozen, replaced every season. A ball one person keeps for years is the opposite of that model, and a hand-stitched ball carrying a factory’s name would not be believed. The skill is scarce as well: Monguí has stitched balls by hand since 1932, a craft the rest of the industry gave up.

Who else makes premium or hand-stitched balls?
Two kinds of maker. Cheap hand-stitched balls come out of Sialkot, Pakistan, sold as commodities with no maker named. Art and novelty balls, such as 12p’s limited run of 1,000, sell as objects to display rather than to play. No one sells a hand-stitched ball as a player’s own.

Why not sell to clubs and teams?
We tried, with about a thousand coaches. Team balls sell for about $13 each in packs, many clubs are bound to sponsor deals, and even at $80 a ball they could not buy. Hayworth sells to people, one ball at a time. Coaches matter as voices, not buyers.

What if the creators do not post, or their posts do not sell?
Then the downside case happens, and the plan says what it looks like: about balls in year one and in the bank at year end. The plan assumes of seeded creators post, inside the 30 to 50 percent seeding programs report. Ad money follows only posts that have already paid for themselves, and the first quarter’s readings move the budget to whatever sold.

What if the workshop has a bad year?
It is the plan’s largest concentration: one workshop, in one village. Three things protect it. The workshop is paid in full at any volume, so the stitchers stay through slow months. Production runs ahead of sales, and of stock is built at close. And the craft belongs to the village, practiced in Monguí since 1932.

What about tariffs?
In July 2026 the United States placed a 12.5 percent surcharge on Colombian goods. Whether the soccer ball’s own tariff line is caught by it is still being confirmed with a customs broker. The plan does not wait for the answer: every figure here carries a ball as if the ball is caught. If the broker confirms an exclusion, every margin in the plan improves. A legal challenge to the surcharge was filed the day it took effect, and our entry records are kept clean for a refund claim if it falls.⁴⁹

What happens to the second ?
It is assessed at the end of year one against the plan’s three cases and the real numbers: balls sold, which lanes sold them, cash on hand, and what the company owns that it did not before. In the base and upside cases it funds year two. In the downside it is not drawn.

Why is there no founder salary?
Because every dollar of this raise goes to proving demand. The founder takes no salary in this plan.

Is this a ball company or an apparel company?
A ball company first, for as long as it takes the game to accept us as master ballmakers. Section 7 shows why the ball comes first, and why the company is being built for what comes after it.

The three-year plan does not earn back the . Why invest?
Because the investment does not buy the next three years’ income. It buys a percentage of what Hayworth is worth once those years prove the machine works. Every brand in this plan’s lane was built the same way: Tecovas raised over $100 million on its way to $250 million a year, and golf’s meaning brands took $80 million of investor money to build $150 million a year of sales.⁵⁰ Those investors were paid by ownership, not by early profits. What the three years prove is the machine: revenue to in the upside, profit from year two, in the bank, no more capital needed, and the slope still rising at the close. The downside caps the risk: it never draws the second and still ends the third year solvent. Bounded loss, a documented lane, and a company built for the horizon where the return lives.