Slazenger bought the maker of the Don’s bats.

Slazenger began in 1881, when the brothers Ralph and Albert Slazenger, from Manchester, opened a business on Cannon Street in London. It became best known for tennis — its balls have been used at Wimbledon since 1902 — but cricket gave it its most famous name. In 1929 William Sykes, a bat-maker of Horbury in Yorkshire — the county where Kippax now grows its own willow — signed the young Don Bradman to promote a “Don Bradman” autograph bat. During the Second World War — most sources say 1942, some 1940 — Slazenger bought Wm Sykes Ltd, and with it that connection. A local history of Horbury says Bradman used Slazenger bats for all his post-war cricket; we report it as that source’s account.

Ownership then followed the consolidation of British sport. Dunlop bought Slazenger in 1959, and Dunlop Slazenger was sold by the private-equity firm Cinven to Sports Direct in 2004, for a reported £40 million; The Cricketer later summarised it as Mike Ashley having “bought Slazenger for Sports Direct in 2004.” Slazenger’s website today carries the copyright line of Frasers Group, as Sports Direct’s parent is now called. We found no evidence that its cricket range is licensed to another maker; it is sold in-house.

For decades the bats were part of the game’s furniture. The Cricketer, in a 2020 feature on the Slazenger bat’s decline in professional cricket, listed users from Bradman, Hutton and Compton to Sobers, Kanhai, Worrell, Viv Richards, Imran Khan, Allan Lamb, Mark Waugh and Ian Bell. Its model names carried the brand’s mark: Viv Richards used a V500, and Allan Lamb, in 1984, a V12.

“If you had an E on the shoulder of your bat it was always a gun.”

The Cricketer’s piece kept one maker’s name alive. The former Glamorgan batter Steve James told it: “Eric Loxton was the bat maker of Slazenger. If you had an E on the shoulder of your bat it was always a gun… He retired in about 2002, and now the bats are clearly machine-cut.” Mark Waugh remembered visiting “the Slazenger factory in Barnsley.” Those are memories, not a dated history of the factory, and we do not say where the bats are made now. But James’s line captures something brands rarely manage: a single craftsman’s initial, stamped on the shoulder, worked as a quality mark in its own right, alongside the company’s logo on the face — a maker’s signature hidden inside a brand.

Nor does Slazenger. Its current cricket site, as archived in June 2026, says its bats are “Handmade using the highest quality willow,” and announces that it has “re-launched the Slazenger V series… V100, V800, 1000 and VXR.” It specifies the willow — the V1000 uses “English Willow Grade 3, Singapore cane with 3 cork insertions” — but on the pages we read it does not name a country of manufacture. That absence is not evidence of any particular origin, and we draw no conclusion from it. We note it because other makers in this round state their origin in detail.

The professional game has drifted away. The Cricketer named James Anderson, Steven Finn and Jason Roy among recent departures; Roy later appeared as an ambassador for the Sialkot maker CA Sports. Its cricket range is now presented on a website that carries its owner’s name.

Big-name bats have long travelled. A 2019 report on the sports-goods trade of Jalandhar, in India’s Punjab, listed Slazenger among the brands to which the city had exported cricket bats “in its heyday.” That is history, not a statement about today’s bats, and we do not extend it.

English willow and Kashmir willow, side by side.

Slazenger’s range spans both of cricket’s willows: its archived June 2026 catalogue ran from a Kashmir-willow bat at £6.99 to an English Willow Grade 4 at £399.99. That is the whole economics of the bat in one price list. English willow, Salix alba var. caerulea, is a specialist crop grown principally in East Anglia, where the Watermark Disease (Local Authorities) Order 1974 lets an officer examine a tree “by cutting into the wood” and order a diseased one felled and burned. Kashmir willow is a different tree in a different regime: the Jammu and Kashmir Willow (Prohibition on Export and Movement) Act of 2000 bars willow in “sawn, unsawn and unfinished cleft form” from leaving the territory, so only finished bats may go.

The two woods are now meeting inside a single bat. In October 2025 the Marylebone Cricket Club held a conference at Lord’s on a “cricket bat emergency” — “a shortage of willow and spiralling prices” caused by “the reliance on English willow.” It floated a bat with an English-willow face backed by “cheaper and lesser-performing Kashmir willow, or even other woods,” and from 1 October 2026 its new Laws allow laminated bats in open-age cricket, “as part of an attempt to slow the rising costs of bats around the world.”

For a brand that already sells both woods to club and junior players, that rule change may matter more than any professional endorsement.

Two marks that outlived the factory.

Slazenger’s cricket identity rests on two marks. The first is the panther — “the striking panther,” in The Cricketer’s words — which still appears on its bats; the V1000’s specification lists a “White Toe guard with White Panther.” The second is the red V: the classic bats, The Cricketer recalled, had “a bold red V down the back,” and earlier stickers were “green and white.” The relaunched V series takes its name from that mark.

For a design guide, Slazenger is a case of brand equity that outlasted the thing it described. The panther and the V once signalled a particular workshop and a particular maker’s initial on the shoulder. Today they signal heritage, and the company leans on it by reviving the V. Whether the heritage holds depends less on the marks than on the willow behind them.

For this guide we use a red and a pavilion green, nodding to those stickers, with a heavy grotesque. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Slazenger’s colour values, and nothing of its panther or logo is reproduced.

Keep Slazenger’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.