About The Bat Cellar
The Bat Cellar is the brainchild of myself, Toby Peirce, a professional cricketer for Sussex throughout the 1990s. I left cricket behind for a number of years while starting a new career as a wine merchant, and at the same time my wife and I raised our family of four children. It was when this family began arriving at the age where they wanted to play cricket, that I reconnected with the game. For the first time I had to begin buying cricket bats for both self and kids. I spent a small fortune buying bats of all sizes for us all, and generally, they weren't great. I wanted to buy something I'd have been happy using as a 'pro', yet this proved very hard. Previously as a pro I'd been lucky enough to receive sponsored kit, and finding something that felt right was easy. I simply looked for a while through a large pile of unstickered willow down at my kit sponsor's factory. Only now do I realise how lucky I was then; most bats are highly expensive and yet still not fit for purpose, in truth!
I dug a little deeper, and discovered that in the twenty years since I finished playing professionally, batmaking has changed. 98% of batmaking in the UK seems to have been out-sourced to the sub-continent, and most bats are now made partly or entirely by machine using willow of questionable origin. Even if they are made from English willow, this raises the crazy prospect of a lump of wood travelling halfway round the world to spend a handful of minutes being shaped to an unchanging recipe on a machine, only to make the return trip to be stickered and sold. Bats break too often due to design weaknesses or cheap materials. Faults are routinely hidden beneath huge, glitzy stickers. Bats are unbalanced and pick up heavy, or they are pressed wrongly and just don't 'ping'. The skill of bat-making has largely died out in England; there may be hardly more than a dozen actual bat-makers left in this country. Most people are importing and stickering up pre-made bats, whatever their websites claim, and these are sold using smoke, mirrors, and bright stickers.
Thus I resolved to learn to make proper, 'pro' quality bats by hand, the old-fashioned way. It's a slow, difficult process; the skills are now very rare and, generally, jealously guarded. Fortunately, we have a mentor; someone who is at the top of the bat-making game. Through this connection we are able to learn not only the skills required, but are also able to access willow stocks from the oldest and very best English willow supplier in the world, JS Wright. Wright's don't supply just anyone; we are lucky. This is a huge bonus, and invaluable, as it means our raw material is impeccably selected, seasoned, and pressed.
There is an actual Bat Cellar; we have recently built an extension at the back of our wine business, Quaff, and if you visit, it is here you will come. The 'Cellar' reference is a play on this rather unusual location for a cricket bat producer! You will walk through the wine shop, and find yourself passing through a stockroom door and into another world, one redolent with the smell of willow shavings and linseed oil. It is here that we will be making cricket bats of one quality - professional standard - using the best English willow available.
Furthermore, we will aim to provide the best aftersales service in the industry. Our bats are full of unusual or unique design features and quality materials, to help them to outlast the vast majority of bats available. We also ask you to engage with the process. It helps us if you really understand how bats are made, how to know what separates the good from the great from the mediocre. In this way you'll appreciate that we are doing this a little differently. We'll show you how to maintain your bat, and encourage you to return it to us at regular intervals for proper servicing. In this way your original investment, rather than being something that breaks and needs replacing each year, will hopefully last and perform for you for many years.
Come and see us!
