Chase dates itself twice, and both dates are true.

Chase’s own strapline is a two-part history: “Established 1996 | reimagined 2007.” The first date is the brand’s; the second is its owners’. “Since 1996, from our workshop in the heart of the Hampshire countryside,” the company says, it has made bats in Hampshire. In 2007 it changed hands: “Having acquired the company from England cricket legend Robin Smith, Dan’s vision was…” — Dan being Dan Swaine, who with his wife Julie ran the business for the next eighteen years.

We are careful with the Smith connection. Chase says it was acquired from the former England batter; it does not say he founded it, and we do not either. The company that trades today, Chase Cricket Limited, was incorporated on 17 October 2007, with Dan Swaine as a director from that day and Julie Swaine from 2009.

The workshop sits in a converted calving barn on a farm at Dummer, near Basingstoke. Chase says it was “the first company in the UK” to have its pads and gloves tested and certified under the mandatory safety rules introduced in 2021 — its claim. It sponsors a roster that, on its 2026 page, includes the England international Alice Davidson-Richards, the England Men’s Mixed Disability player Anthony Clapham and several county players, many of them women.

“From sapling to century — under a single ownership.”

The brand’s newest chapter is about the tree. On 30 April 2026, Chase announced “a new era”: the business had been bought by “master willow grower Rory Waterer,” whose family, it said, had “100 years of willow growing at Wyvols Court Farm.” The announcement put the logic in one sentence: “For the first time, the full journey of bat making — from sapling to century — will sit under a single ownership.” Dan Swaine stays on as master bat-maker and managing director, so the hands that make the bats have not changed.

The register gives the legal date. From 25 November 2025, Companies House records, Chase Cricket Limited has been controlled by Wyvols Court Farm Holdings Limited; the Swaines ceased to be controlling owners that day, and three members of the Waterer family became directors. The company’s registered office moved to Wyvols Court Farm, at Swallowfield, near Reading. The deal was done in November and announced in April — in Chase’s thirtieth year.

It is an unusual direction for a takeover. Usually a brand buys its suppliers; here a willow grower bought a bat brand. Chase’s own announcement makes the logic plain: it is about owning the whole journey, from the tree onwards, at a time when the wood itself is the scarce thing.

Southeast English willow, twine from Glasgow, stickers from High Wycombe.

Chase is precise about its materials. Its bats, it says, are made “from the finest willow, grown in the southeast of England,” and it manufactures “on site at our cricket bat workshop in Hampshire.” It goes further than most makers in listing its supply chain: “We source all the materials, except for the handle, from the UK… the twine is purchased from Glasgow and the sticker decals are manufactured in High Wycombe.” That is about as complete an origin statement as a cricket bat can carry; even the sticker has a postcode.

English bat willow, Salix alba var. caerulea, is mostly grown in East Anglia, under one of sport’s oddest laws. The Watermark Disease (Local Authorities) Order 1974 lets an officer examine a willow “by cutting into the wood or otherwise” and order an infected tree cut down, its branches destroyed “by fire at the premises.” The bacterial disease that stains the timber has been recognised since 1924, and the Forestry Commission notes that “No chemical cure exists.” Since a 1992 amendment, the order’s schedule has named six counties — Bedfordshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Wiltshire. Berkshire, where the Waterers farm at Swallowfield, is not among them, but disease and felling are a grower’s risks wherever the trees stand, and now they are a bat brand’s risks too.

The wider market explains the move. 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” — and its new Laws, in force from 1 October 2026, allow laminated bats in open-age cricket “as part of an attempt to slow the rising costs of bats around the world.” A brand with its own trees should have a hedge against that inflation that most makers lack.

The arithmetic of a tree shows why. J.S. Wright, the Essex grower, says an average mature willow yields around 40 clefts, and that its felling licences require replanting — “typically 100 plants per hectare” — with ten years of maintenance. Elsewhere the wood is rationed by law: Jammu and Kashmir’s Willow Act of 2000 bars unfinished willow clefts from leaving the territory, so that only finished bats may go. Whoever owns the trees owns the most important part of the bat.

A short name and a new story to tell.

Chase’s name is short and active — a verb as much as a noun, well suited to a sport in which a batting side chases a target. Its new owners have given it a second line to go with “Established 1996 | reimagined 2007”: the phrase “from sapling to century,” which joins the growing of a tree to the scoring of a hundred. It is a tagline in all but name, and it does what Kippax’s “From the Sapling to The Ashes” does in Yorkshire: it makes the tree part of the brand.

For a design guide, Chase is a lesson in specificity. Its strongest brand assets are not a logo or a colour but a set of facts — a barn in Hampshire, willow from the southeast, twine from Glasgow, decals from High Wycombe, and now a farm that grows the trees. Specific claims are hard to fake and easy to believe.

We could not verify Chase’s own colours, so for this guide we use a deep purple and a pale lilac with a bold grotesque. These are an unofficial interpretation, and nothing of its logo is reproduced.

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