Twelve badly cut pentagons, stitched into something barely round. It was terrible. But it looked fixable, so came another, then another, and the urge to make the next one better never switched off. There are hundreds of them now.

After a few years the balls had become gradually less embarrassing. Each one got its own video walking through the process: every design decision, every fumble, every mistake, and how the finished thing ended up the way it did. People started watching, and the same comment came up again and again. Do you sell these? For about a year the answer was no. But the comments kept coming, and eventually the no got harder to justify, until the only question left was how to make the answer yes.

Saying yes meant building something to sell them through, which is 12 Pentagons. The videos became its lab: everything gets shown there, the balls that work and the ones that don't. If a ball resonates, it will graduate the lab and go into a limited release, sold direct. We're a small team of ball enthusiasts now, experimenting and messing around together, with no real idea where it goes next.

Football is the biggest sport in the world, which makes its balls some of the most visible objects on the planet. But the famous ones aren't famous because of how they were designed. They're famous because of where they ended up: a World Cup final, a title-winning goal. The biggest brands pay enormous sums to put their ball on those stages, and the exposure is in large part what makes it iconic. We're playing a slightly different game. We don't sponsor tournaments, we just make balls we think are good, and each one has to stand on its own.