Your string picker is useful on the first day

Most shop software hands you an empty database and calls it flexibility. Before you can log a single restring you are typing in string names, one at a time, guessing at gauges, and hoping you spell things the same way twice.

Racketworks starts you with a shared catalog of 777 strings across 18 brands, and it is there before you do anything. It is built from official manufacturer sources, reviewed before anything lands, and it refreshes every week — so it keeps up with the market without you maintaining it.

It is keyed on the diameter the manufacturer actually publishes, not the number on the packet. A "17" is 1.20mm from one brand and 1.25mm from another. If you have ever had a customer insist two strings felt completely different when the packet said they were the same gauge, that is why. 720 of those 777 entries carry a real measured diameter, and 705 carry the manufacturer's own color name — so "Rough Black" reads the way the customer will say it back to you, not as a code.

Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, the field stays blank. 57 entries have no diameter, because nobody published one. We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number you might repeat to a customer as fact. The same rule runs through the whole product.

What it doesn't do yet. The catalog covers the brands players actually ask for, not every string ever made. If you carry something that isn't in it, you add it to your own catalog and it stays yours — but it doesn't flow back to everyone else, and there is no request queue for us to add it.

Where to start. Open the string picker on your next drop-off and type three letters of anything you carry. If something you stock is missing, add it once and it is there for good.