A father, a son and a ball they wanted to improve.

Baden Sports is an American ball company based in Kent, Washington, south-east of Seattle. Its current website says the business was founded in 1979, describes it as owned by the third generation of the founding family, and names the founder as E.C. Schindler, who started it with his son, Michael Schindler. The company says the two were dissatisfied with the balls then on the market, set out to learn every detail of how a ball is made, and tested their own designs until they were producing balls they considered better in quality and value.

Older versions of the website tell the same start in different words. An “About Baden” page from 2006, preserved by the Internet Archive, called Baden Sports, Inc. an independent, family-owned company that entered the athletic ball market in 1979 to meet a need for higher-quality products, and gave the address of its world headquarters as Federal Way, Washington. A 2011 version of the site repeated the 1979 date and the family-owned description. The current about page gives Kent as the company’s location, and in 2015 the Sitka radio station KCAW described Baden as a Seattle-based sports equipment manufacturer.

The name has needed explaining. The 2011 website carried a pronunciation note under the heading “How do you say it, anyway?!”, reporting that people had tried “BAY-den” and “BAD-den” and that the correct form is “BAH-den”. The current about page puts the same pronunciation in brackets in its opening sentence. In 2011 the site also wrote the name with a circumflex, as Bâden Sports, in its page title.

Basketball stands at the start of the company’s own history. Baden says it created a women’s-sized basketball, which it says the NCAA adopted in 1984, and its 2006 and 2011 pages described a patented ball construction it called Cushion Control Technology. From basketball the range spread, by the company’s account, to volleyball, soccer, football, baseball and softball, and the company now also sells Axe baseball and softball bats, which it describes as ergonomic. Its stated mission today is to create products that athletes love.

Official balls, licences and a tribal venture.

The company lists official-ball agreements mainly with school and coaching associations. Its current “Official Ball” page lists its Perfection Elite basketball as the official ball of associations including the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) and the state high school bodies of Hawaii, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It lists its Perfection volleyball with associations in states including Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri, and soccer and football balls with several of the same bodies. The company also runs an NAIA collection of volleyball products with member pricing for NAIA institutions.

Licensing has been a second route. In 2006 and again in 2011 the company described itself as executive licensee and exclusive supplier of the Harlem Globetrotters, as the official ball of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee, and as a licensee of the Collegiate Licensing Company. The same pages said it produced promotional balls for professional teams including the Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers, Los Angeles Lakers and Chicago Bulls. The 2006 page named the basketball coaches Pat Summitt and Bob Knight as endorsers, and the volleyball coaches Mick Haley and Rich Luenemann among those using its balls.

A different kind of partnership began in Alaska. On 5 June 2015 KCAW, the public radio station in Sitka, reported a new brand called Tribal Sports, created by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and Baden Sports as a joint venture announced in Sitka earlier that month. The plan, KCAW reported, was for baseballs and basketballs used in schools around Alaska to carry the Tribal Sports name, with the brand also to be marketed nationally. Its general manager, Lawrence Spottedbird, told the station that local young people would sit on an advisory board with a voice in business decisions, and that part of the proceeds would help fund youth travel for sport and other activities.

Baden was the plaintiff in a case against the Japanese ball maker Molten and its U.S. arm, decided in the federal district court in Seattle in January 2008 and on appeal at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in February 2009.

The company called itself independent and family-owned in 2006 and 2011, and today describes itself as a third-generation family business in Kent.

Design and documentation.

A ball or stick brand is read at very close range and in motion, so its identity has to work at small sizes and on curved or narrow surfaces. On a ball, the name is usually printed or stamped onto the cover, often with a model name and a number that lets players tell one ball from another; on felt, leather or synthetic panels the mark has to survive wear, mud and repeated impact.

Packaging carries much of the rest. Balls sold in sets often come in pressurised cans or in tubes and boxes, and the label on that container — its colour, the name and the lettering — is often what a buyer sees first in a shop, long before the ball itself is handled.

Stick and racket equipment adds another surface. Heads, shafts and handles carry logos, model names and sometimes moulded lettering, and those marks are shaped to fit narrow frames and plastic parts.

Each guide that follows sets out what can be checked about a brand — who founded it, who owns it now and how its marks have appeared — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that needs a pronunciation guide.

The Baden identity begins with a word the company itself says people pronounce in different ways. It has addressed that on its own website: in 2011 as a note asking how people say the name, and today as a bracketed “pronounced BAH-den” in the opening line of its about page. The spelled-out vowel sits alongside the name wherever the company introduces itself.

Slogans carry the rest of the company’s voice. Its 2006 and 2011 websites set the slogan “Passion for a Better Game” with a trademark symbol, and the current about page returns to that phrase as a section heading and frames the company’s approach as a question: how to make the game better for the player. The company says it does not make “me too” products and starts each new product by analysing every component of the ball.

Product names sit on the ball beside the company name. The official-ball page groups the range under Perfection, with Perfection Elite for basketball, Perfection for volleyball and a Perfection Thermo soccer ball, alongside a Lexum volleyball; the bats are sold as Axe. The company’s official-ball list pairs each line name with a model code, such as BX7E for the basketball and VX5EC for the volleyball.

The clearest documented piece of design connected with Baden is not a Baden mark at all. KCAW reported in 2015 that the Tribal Sports logo, created for the joint venture with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, shows a hand with a pointed index finger in a traditional Northwest Coast formline design, and that it was made by the Tlingit and Aleut artist Nicholas Galanin.

For a design guide, Baden shows how a family ball company can make a hard-to-say name part of its identity, and how school and coaching associations rather than professional leagues can carry a brand onto the court. Compare it with Wilson, the American sporting-goods name, and Tachikara, the Tokyo volleyball maker. For this guide we use court navy, leather tan and gym white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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