Spikeball is a sport, a community, a product, and a fast growing retail business. Best described as the love child of volleyball and four square, the sport has a community of over half a million players worldwide. As seen on the hit U.S. TV show Shark Tank, they were backed by Daymond John with a $500,000 investment to support the awe-inspiring business.
Like many other Brightpearl customers Spikeball started out as a part time venture from the kitchen table, but in 2013 things began to pick up steam. The company hit the $1 million mark with no full time employees. Then in 2014 the company reached a whopping $3.2M in revenue! This great story was expanded on in our webinar ‘Spikeball from Shark Tank Discuss Multichannel Retail Strategy’ which was hosted with our fulfillment partner ShipStation.
Spikeball now retails to over 3,000 retail locations (the likes of Dicks Sporting Goods, Modell’s Sporting Goods, REI, and others), via five Shopify websites, three Amazon web stores, and on the eBay marketplace. They’ve gone from a kitchen table operation to one which ships from six warehouses all spread throughout the world. Getting there took smart technology like Shopify andShipStation but also a highly efficient team. They are now expecting to grow another five times, there really is no stopping these guys!
Scott Palmer is the Chief Operating Officer at Spikeball and has steered the company to its great success. Scott is a retail operations pioneer for small to mid-sized businesses. Before teaming up with Chris Ruder, the founder of Spikeball, to formalize the company and put the business on its high-growth trajectory, he was working as a consultant to startups. He has a wealth of business knowledge but specializes in operational data efficiencies and marketing strategy based on customer data.
The retail journey is a different story for every business depending on the industry you are in, the drive to succeed you have within your team, and the resources you have to play with. The picture below is a generalization of the retail journey we typically see at Brightpearl.
Scott identified that they implemented Brightpearl when the business was in between the ‘Start up’ and ‘Growing’ phase. This wasn’t long before they appeared on Shark Tank, during the webinar he comments; “to ensure we could keep up with the expected demand after appearing on Shark Tank we heavily invested and relied upon Brightpearl, ShipStation, Shopify and the rest of our technology stack.” Good job too, the tech held up against the influx of orders which came flurrying in once light had been shed on the game during the TV show.
Now Scott believes the company is in the ‘Established’ phase of the journey making its way well towards ‘Enterprise’. Unlike the figures represented on the journey, all this has been achieved by a remote workforce of just 8 full-time employees. Which is what is meant by ‘a highly efficient team’ which Spikeball most certainly is.
Watch the ‘Spikeball from Shark Tank Discuss Multichannel Retail Strategy’ webinar today to find out more about the lean retail operation. This awe-inspiring story is set to continue with the support of great technology which can scale with the business. We’re very proud to be a part of this amazing story, and watch this space as there are more great things to come!
If you have any questions you’d like to ask James, Scott or Cody who presented this webinar please ask them in the comments below.
