Kuikma
Our Kuikma racket catalogue is still growing — check back soon.
Kuikma questions
Why did Decathlon give padel its own brand instead of using Artengo?
Because a single racket-sports label could not serve padel properly. Artengo covered tennis, badminton and table tennis, which pushed its padel line towards beginners and generic designs. Splitting padel out in 2016 let the new brand specialise, build its own development team, and be judged against padel specialists rather than against Decathlon's other rackets.
Does a retailer's own brand make a serious padel racket?
At the top of its range, yes. Kuikma runs its own development centre in Madrid, works with professionals who have competed at tour level, and publishes the construction details of its rackets rather than obscuring them. The cheapest models are built to a price and feel it, but the upper range competes on construction with specialist brands costing considerably more.
What does Kuikma being based in Madrid actually change?
It puts design, testing and players in the same place. Padel's professional game, its coaches and its most demanding club players are concentrated in Spain, and a racket developed there gets feedback that one designed elsewhere does not. Decathlon moved the brand out of France for that reason, and it is the clearest signal that Kuikma was meant to be more than a shelf-filler.
What is the catch with buying Kuikma?
Availability and resale. Kuikma is sold almost exclusively through Decathlon, so it is hard to try alongside rival rackets, hard to find second-hand, and it holds less resale value than the established Spanish names. The rackets themselves are competitive; the ownership experience around them is narrower than with a specialist brand.
About Kuikma
Decathlon had been selling padel rackets since 1996, under Artengo, the label covering all of its racket sports. By the middle of the 2010s that arrangement had become the problem: a brand serving tennis, badminton and table tennis at once was too general for padel, and too focused on beginners to be taken seriously by anyone else.
The response was unusually deliberate for a retailer's own label. In 2016 padel was separated out into its own brand and the team was moved to Madrid — the first time Decathlon had based one of its sports outside France, and an admission that padel could not be designed at arm's length from the country that plays it. A dedicated development centre followed, and the brand launched as Kuikma in 2019.
What that bought was credibility it could not have had otherwise. Kuikma develops and tests in the sport's heartland, and has signed professionals including Maxi Sánchez and Lucía Sainz — players with tour pedigree rather than ambassadors. The result is a line that still starts at prices no specialist can match but now runs up into genuinely competitive territory, with moulds, cores and carbon layups explained rather than hidden behind marketing language.
The trade-off is distribution. Kuikma is sold through Decathlon and effectively nowhere else, so it is rarely stocked beside the brands it competes with and rarely demoed against them. For a player who can get to a store, it remains the most direct route from a beginner's budget to a serious racket without changing brand.