Wimbledon Rosa Tennis Racquet

kevin qmto

Hall of Fame
I thought most of the Wimbledon models were co-developed with Prince, so would it have been their OEM in Taiwan?
And here I thought they were just clones of Prince models lol. And I thought Prince used Kunnan for a lot of their manufacturing needs as well? If not I’ve gotten very confused.
 

Sanglier

Professional
It is indeed a Kunnan brand, which Lo licensed from the namesake organization. The brand was run by Malcolm Bash, who previously worked as a VP of product development at Prince. Bash was the man that Lo had to impress in order to get the Prince contract years earlier. He had a reputation for being demanding, so much so that the Taiwanese even suspected that he harbored some sort of prejudice towards them. It was quite ironic therefore that he joined Kunnan after leaving Prince.

The highly productive/lucrative Prince-Kunnan symbiosis was smooth-sailing for a number of years, until someone at PK ran an ad boasting that PK frames were produced by the same factory that made all those Prince racquets, causing Prince to suspend the contract; which pushed Kunnan to the edge of insolvency. The Taiwanese government intervened thru a massive cash infusion that saved Kunnan, but also paved the way for his spectacular downfall years alter, because Lo had more money than sense at that point and became a victim of his own hyper-inflated confidence, egged on by many others who were similarly afflicted by "irrational exuberance". Towards the end of his run, Lo completely neglected the tennis end of his business, because the amount of money involved there was negligible relative to what he was making - and eventually losing - on his other projects.
 

Grafil Injection

Hall of Fame
And here I thought they were just clones of Prince models lol. And I thought Prince used Kunnan for a lot of their manufacturing needs as well? If not I’ve gotten very confused.
There were at least two runs of official Wimbledon rackets (probably many woods too), one early 80s, one early 90s. The former were individual rackets often using boron, the latter were very similar if not identical to various 90s Prince models.
 
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