In the summer of 2021, Ivan and his wife Tomoko left Tokyo for the forests and mountain air of Karuizawa. What began as a search for a quieter rhythm soon became a new home — and the beginning of something neither of them had planned.
By 2023, drawing on more than thirty years of experience in tennis and pickleball, Ivan began bringing people together on the court. He started simply: volunteering his time, coaching one player at a time. Word travelled quietly through the community, friends brought friends, and within eighteen months the Karuizawa Pickleball Club had grown from a handful of players into a community of nearly 300 members — one of Japan's most diverse and active pickleball communities, built entirely through connection rather than campaign.
What the community revealed, however, was a gap. Quality pickleball equipment in Japan was scarce, and the imported brands available at the time lacked both the consistency and the aesthetic sensibility to reflect what the community was becoming. EVERYDAY SOCIAL® was founded to change that. Rooted in Japanese craft and informed by decades of court experience, the brand set out to create equipment and apparel worthy of the people playing with it — not just branded tools, but objects that belong to the community they came from.
From the beginning, EVERYDAY SOCIAL® has grown the way the club did — through trust, through word of mouth, through the quiet loyalty of people who found something worth believing in. No big campaigns. No noise. Just a community that knows the difference between something made with care and something made for convenience.
What started in a small mountain town is now Japan's first designer pickleball brand to find its footing on the global stage — carried there not by advertising or loud endorsements, but by the people who play with it.
Ivan, Founder — EVERYDAY SOCIAL®
