Peter Kippax bowled for Yorkshire before he made bats for it.

Peter Kippax, born in Huddersfield in 1940, was a leg-break and googly bowler who played first-class cricket for Yorkshire in 1961 and 1962. His longer career came after: in 1976, the company says, it was “originally started by Peter Kippax,” and it now describes itself as “into our 6th decade.” This year, 2026, is its fiftieth. When he died in January 2017, ESPNcricinfo’s obituary was headlined “Bat-maker and bat beater” — a cricketer’s two lives in four words.

The workshop has moved around West Yorkshire. Living North magazine, profiling the firm in 2024, traced it from Huddersfield to Ossett, to Bradford and finally to Methley, near Leeds, and reported that “Chris took over from his dad in 2000.” Chris Kippax has run the business since.

The brand has been continuous; its companies have not. Companies House records that the original company, Peter Kippax Sports Limited, incorporated in 1979, went into compulsory liquidation after a petition in August 2005 and was dissolved in 2012; Peter Kippax had stepped down as a director at the end of 2004. A new company, Kippax Willow Limited, had been incorporated in November 2004, with Chris Kippax as director and controlling owner, and a separate partnership, Kippax Salix LLP — salix being the Latin for willow — was registered in 2009. We record the sequence plainly; the name has traded throughout.

“We grow our Cricket Bat Willow trees in our own Yorkshire woodlands.”

What sets Kippax apart is the tree. English bat willow is grown “principally within East Anglia,” the Forestry Commission says. Kippax says: “We grow our Cricket Bat Willow trees in our own Yorkshire woodlands and also on privately owned land,” and that its bats are made from “our own clefts grown in the North of England.” It plants “at least 100 new cricket bat willow trees” a year, and fells them when the trunk reaches 55 inches around. J.S. Wright, the Essex grower, says an average mature tree yields around 40 clefts — so a hundred trees a year is, in round numbers, some four thousand clefts, a decade or more from now. Its clefts are dried in a heat-exchanging kiln. Living North reported that it also sells clefts to other bat-makers.

That makes Kippax a grower as well as a maker, and gives it its tagline: “From the Sapling to The Ashes.” The same idea has lately reached the south. In 2026 Hampshire’s Chase was bought by a willow-growing family, which said the “full journey of bat making — from sapling to century” would now sit under one owner. Kippax has made that its message for years. Both firms now share an argument: that the strongest place for a bat-maker to stand is next to the tree.

Growing in Yorkshire also means growing outside the area of the willow’s best-known law. The Watermark Disease (Local Authorities) Order 1974, which lets an officer examine a willow “by cutting into the wood or otherwise” and order an infected tree felled and burned, applies, since a 1992 amendment, in Bedfordshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Wiltshire. Yorkshire is not on the list; the disease, the Forestry Commission notes, has been recognised in Britain since 1924, and “No chemical cure exists.”

“All our bats are made in Yorkshire.”

Kippax’s origin claim is direct: “All our bats are made in Yorkshire, England from the finest grown English willow.” It is one of the plainest statements in this round, and it covers the whole range rather than one model. The company says its WAVEX handle is a patented design; we have not checked the patent, and we report it as Kippax’s claim. It also runs a teamwear partnership with Bear Cricket, another West Yorkshire firm. Even its teamwear partner is a county neighbour, which is the point: the Kippax brand is built on a short, local chain that a customer can follow from the woodland to the workshop.

The economics of the willow make that local chain valuable. 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.” 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 maker that grows its own trees should be less exposed to that market than one that buys every cleft.

Elsewhere, governments ration the wood outright. In Kashmir, home of the cheaper willow MCC had in mind for the backs of laminated bats, 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; only finished bats may go. Kippax’s answer to scarcity is the oldest one: plant more trees.

A cleft takes years to become a bat. The Forestry Commission’s 1936 bulletin on the cricket bat willow, Salix alba var. caerulea, said that a well-tended tree reaches the size bat-makers need “in twelve to eighteen years.” A Yorkshire planting made today will be felled in the 2040s.

A surname, a county and a tree.

Kippax’s brand is a surname and a county. The name is its founder’s; the county is in every line of its copy. Its tagline — “From the Sapling to The Ashes” — is a neat piece of brand writing: it starts with a tree, ends with the most famous contest in the game, and implies that the company is present at both ends. The capital T on “The Ashes” makes sure the reader hears the series, not the fire.

For a design guide, Kippax shows how a small maker can turn its supply chain into its story. Many bat brands talk about willow grades; few can talk about their own trees. When the raw material is scarce, owning it is the strongest claim a maker can make.

For this guide we use a Yorkshire blue and a willow gold with a sturdy serif. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Kippax’s colour values, and nothing of its logo is reproduced.

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