Franklin Malaysia Just Put Jimmy Liong’s Name on the Label—And the Timing Isn’t an Accident
Most athlete sponsorships in pickleball still work the same predictable way: a brand hands its player some stock kit, slaps a logo on it, and calls it a partnership. Franklin Malaysia has just done something rather more deliberate. On 6 August, the brand launched the Jimmy Liong Blackout Edition, a two-piece collection—one performance tee, one lifestyle tee—carrying Liong’s actual signature rather than simply the Franklin badge. It’s a proper signature line, not a generic ambassador drop, and the timing behind it tells its own story.
A day after the collection landed, Liong and doubles partner Shi Sheng knocked out the No. 5 seed at the MB Ho Chi Minh City Open, capping a run that had already included straight-games wins in both the Singles and Doubles Round of 16 the day before. Franklin followed the launch with a “Focus Cam” highlight reel pulled from that same tournament, meaning Liong’s form on court and his new apparel line ended up sitting side by side in the brand’s feed within days of each other. This is exactly the kind of alignment that only happens when a genuine result and a marketing calendar happen to land in the same week.
This Wasn’t Manufactured Momentum
What makes the timing feel earned rather than engineered is that Liong’s season has actually been building toward this. Back on 3 July, he beat Grayson Goldin in a Round of 16 upset, an early sign that his week-to-week form was genuinely capable of troubling established international players. Three weeks later, on 24 July, he carried that momentum through a strong singles run at the Leapmotor Singapore Open.
It hasn’t been an unbroken streak, either. Liong dropped out in the quarterfinals in early July, the sort of dip that keeps a season honest. That inconsistency is precisely what makes the current stretch feel like a real peak rather than a highlight reel stitched together after the fact to justify a product launch.
A Bigger Shift Than One Collection
Signature apparel isn’t new to sport generally. Tennis has had its Roger Federer lines for years. Badminton has its Lin Dan collections, and padel is already building out its own pro-signature products across Europe. Pickleball is starting to trend that way, with its biggest stars getting the honour. And for Malaysian pickleball fans and younger players following the domestic scene, seeing a local athlete’s name on a proper Franklin-branded collection is a genuinely new kind of visibility, and nothing quite like it has existed for a Malaysian competitor at this level before.
In other words, Jimmy Liong getting his own line is a pretty big deal.
The Blackout Edition is available now through Franklin’s online store and its physical showroom. For Franklin Malaysia, it marks the clearest step yet toward building an athlete-driven product line anchored to a specific, currently competing player rather than a static brand face. For Liong, it’s the kind of institutional recognition that Malaysian pickleball’s competitive players have been working toward as the sport’s domestic infrastructure keeps maturing around them.
The bigger signal here isn’t really about one collection of T-shirts. It’s that brands operating in Malaysia are starting to treat individual competitive athletes as worth genuine investment, rather than as interchangeable faces for a marketing campaign—and that shift will likely matter a great deal more, over time, than anything currently sitting on Franklin’s shelves.
