Each year at Wimbledon, tennis’s most iconic tournament, roughly 55,000 balls are used. Once the tournament wraps up and Roger Federer and Serena Williams have taken their cuts, what happens to the balls? The majority are sold to fans as keepsakes. Some are turned into speakers.
You read correctly, hearO is a new Bluetooth speaker housed in a 2016 Wimbledon Championships tennis ball.
Designer Richard Moss grew up playing amateur tennis and though he never played professionally, he wanted to remain close to the game. “Tennis always stayed in my heart. While working as an engineer in London I started to reimagine how a championship tennis ball could live on,” said Moss in a statement. “I saw the ball as the perfect handheld object. After playing with several ideas I thought, ‘Why not fuse the ball into a connective speaker?'”
The idea took a once-forgotten object and made it useful again. hearO is built with a single button (for on/off & Bluetooth pairing) and a Fibonacci spiral grill pattern to project sound. Soft and bouncy by nature, the tennis ball serves as a protective layer for the device. The rubber and tactile felt also work to eliminate vibration and improve the speakers’ acoustics.
The simplicity of the device might be its greatest feature. Balls are cut by the Woodash Group in Northampton, England in a way that complements the properties of the tennis ball. A hydraulic press was developed using insights from the fashion, aviation and automotive industries to precision cut the balls.
To charge, the speaker rests on a magnetic charging cradle. Once charged the battery allows for up to seven hours of continuous listening.
“hearO’s shape and portability make it the ideal media companion,” explained Moss in a statement.
Moss hopes the product will ignite other ideas of reuse. The goal is to ‘become an icon of reuse and environmental awareness.’
You can learn more about hearO and purchase it on hearospeaker.com.
