How We Grew Our Basketball Shoe Grip Business Over 240% [Update]
This is a follow up story for Grip Spritz. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 1 year ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Matt Olen, I am one of three members of Grip Spritz and I head our marketing, sales, and creative! I’m super excited to share what’s new with Grip Spritz in the last year since my first Start Story.
Grip Spritz helps provide basketball and volleyball players better traction on their shoes when they’re playing on a dusty court or have older shoes!
2023 wrapped up very well for us following the previous interview, we grew revenue by over 240% and so far look to make that happen for a second year in row here in 2024.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Over the last year we’ve just been hyper focused on growth. It’s still a sprint every day to continually grow and do more and do better than last year in every aspect of Grip Spritz.
We had our first six figure months in Q4! We fell a bit short of our first five figure sales day but we know that’s not too far off, especially come basketball season and holidays! We dove a lot deeper into volleyball. We went back to our roots of hitting weekend youth events to meet and interact with players and coaches. We started implementing more volleyball content into our social strategy. We debuted our first prototype of our newest product at the Women’s Final Four! Lots of exciting things are coming up for us.
To grow we ironed out the basics we talked about last time. If you are at a basketball event, you’re a coach, a high school athletic director, someone who has basketball content come across their social media feed, we want you to see Grip Spritz over and over and over!
The quicker you can see our name, our product, reviews, our faces at events, the quicker you will buy into this being a staple in the sport of basketball.
Part of that meant expanding our business to higher levels of the sport. We focused on being the most effective and economical solution for youth teams and high schools who have limited budgets and play on less than ideal courts. Unfortunately, when we spoke with colleges, they cared more about the looks of our traction mat and being able to customize it versus saving money.
We wanted to bring a traction mat to the market that would operate the same way but give colleges and professional teams the opportunity to make it fit their brand.
We had this idea for a while. When we were in Florida for an event, we ran into the USF Women’s Basketball Coach, Jose Fernandez. He was super interested but told us exactly what a college program would want in a product like ours. Thankfully, it was very similar to what we had begun working towards.
Flash forward six months to this March, we debut the first prototype of our ‘Elite’ Traction Mat at the Women’s Final Four in Cleveland, OH.
As fate would have it, who do we run into walking off the court? Jose Fernandez. Who was equally as happy to see our latest product as he was to know that he played a crucial role in its creation!
Ideally, in a year's time, when you turn on ESPN to watch the Final Four, you’ll see Grip Spritz right there on the sideline.
For us, things like this are what keep us grounded in what we’re actually trying to accomplish. I believe this is why we see so many returning customers, so many coaches come talk to us at events or even just pass by and let us know they have the product and love it.
We take feedback from coaches like Jose Fernandez the same way we would take feedback from a 3rd grade athlete in a TikTok direct message. We genuinely care about your experience with Grip Spritz. How can we make it better? How can we make it easier? How can we make it faster?
Even if you see our traction mat at the Final 4, we’re never going to forget that we exist solely to give athletes better grip. No matter if that’s a YMCA league on Sunday mornings or the NBA Finals and we’ll treat it all the same!
We actually had what we think is our coolest moment of our entire time in business stem from this!
Just prior to the holidays, a middle school English teacher in New York gave her students an assignment to reach out to a company they admire. We were absolutely honored to have been picked by one of the students. Sami explained that she played on her school's basketball team, slipped while playing on a dusty court and got a concussion. But, she has since started using Grip Spritz and hasn’t slipped since!
We worked with the teacher as well as the school’s basketball coach to get them a custom traction mat that was delivered to Sami in English class, as a thank you!
In addition to providing customers an experience they want to tell their teammates about, we took 2024 as an opportunity to triple down on what has worked.
In a normal week we will have at least 100 short form videos posted, one blog strictly for SEO purposes, two META ads, and multiple automated email flows for customers who haven’t purchased in a specific period of time. We want to stay top of mind at all moments.
Lastly, our travel for coaches clinics, athletic directors events, AAU tournaments has been insane! In 2022 we did about 8 state clinics. In 2023 we did just under 20 events. In 2024 we will do 35, at least. (We started traveling the first week of March, I will have had two weekends at home when we wrap up in early August. Middle of September we will get back on the road in preparation for the start of the high school basketball season).
Like said last time, it’s just about doing the work and results will inevitably follow.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Our challenges can be boiled down to three areas. Travel constraints, international fulfillment, and new product development.
Like I said, we’re traveling all over, all the time. But, for every event we’re at there are two or three also happening that same weekend. Part of alleviating that will be finding larger sporting good outlets to market our products for us. We work with a half dozen or so currently, but want to continue to expand in that area.
This will help spread Grip Spritz to more areas and more states than we currently do. It will also help with events we are at, coaches and athletic directors can see our name, logo, product in multiple areas to help build more credibility to something that is totally new to them!
Grip Spritz has grown to be in over 50 countries worldwide. With an increase in international interest comes rules and regulations that you have no idea exist. We are working on working with local fulfillment centers, Amazon internationally, and distributors to help athletes get Grip Spritz much more quickly and less costly.
International shipping can be very expensive and can see a ton of delays in the customs and tax collection process. Customers aren’t getting the best possible experience so this is definitely at the top of our priority list.
Lastly, new product development has been very tough. We are currently going through last tweaks, manufacturing, suppliers, etc. with the ‘Elite’ Traction Mat. It has been a very costly process as well as super time consuming. We know that we want to have it ready for the start of the upcoming school year so this has eaten up the bulk of our time.
It’s a never ending cycle of solving one problem that in turn creates a new problem. But, that’s how you know you’re progressing to the next level and growing. Every six months or so you look back at the problems you had six months prior and they feel like ant hills compared to whatever you’re dealing with at that moment!
We try to reframe these into positives. Each problem we solve, that’s a problem anyone who wants to copy us will also face. So the bigger the mountain you climb, the more likely that’s where your competition will quit! You’re just building a moat around your business with every hurdle you overcome.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The biggest lesson we all had to learn was not to dwell on things. Both in late fall as well as in January we had items go into very low stock on Amazon. Both times we had orders and lead times accounted for but things out of our control got pushed back a few weeks.
Unfortunately, we were doing a couple thousand dollars a day on Amazon at that point. In early November we had to turn off Amazon PPC ads. It didn’t make sense to spend money to sell out faster than we were going to.
In January, we did sell out of our best selling product for a few days on Amazon and had about two weeks once it was replenished until it was listed as Prime, again.
It was incredibly frustrating to see your sales fall off a cliff essentially and do the math each day of how much money you were missing out on.
I was probably the worst of the three of us on this front but it taught us a ton. Mainly that you can’t dwell on things that are out of your control. Secondly, order more and order sooner! It’s definitely easier said than done, however.
On the positive side, we did catch some great traction with TikTok shop. We got on that very early when not many companies were doing it. TikTok was 100% prioritizing shoppable videos so you got more organic reach by tagging products.
During the first week of May, we had videos that accumulated 9.6 million, 13 million, 1.7 million, 7.7 million, 1.1 million, 1.5 million 2.7 million views each.
In 10 days we amassed over 46 million views on TikTok alone.
Timing is everything sometimes!
Certain things are super difficult, there are learning curves, you don’t know what you don’t know. You can start to pick those things up and you can see progress. The “hard work” is more the things you don’t know and will never know until it happens.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Our ‘Elite’ Traction Mat is what we believe will be the key that opens the door to limitless growth all around. We are super focused on making it a premier product that looks and acts like something that belongs on the sideline of the Final Four or the NBA Finals.
Outside of the obvious reasons of brand awareness, we believe the trickle down to other products, such as our individual player bottles, will be substantial. It’s tough for a high school coach or parent to second guess a brand used at the pinnacle of basketball. Any hesitation or second guessing can be solved very easily!
There aren’t specific things we’re excited for in the future. Right now we’re in that super, head down, grind, and force success phase. Every day presents a new challenge and opportunity to get 1% better, so every day is fun! You see the ideas and changes you implement payoff very quickly. Continued growth and new opportunities that the growth provides is what we’re most excited for.
Over the next 5 years we want to expand our product line a bit more to fully round things out. We have some stuff in the works we can talk about quite yet but should be moving by the end of the year! Maybe on Starter Story 3 we can update you!
Day to day, it’s just a big focus on partnering with distributors at a national and local level. Get Grip Spritz in front of more people, in more gyms and keep things moving from multiple angles, not just what we’re doing ourselves!
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I’ve gotten way more into podcasts the past year. Mainly because I’m spending hours in cars traveling all over the country and it keeps my brain moving, thinking, and awake!
I’m not super tied onto one specific podcast. I’m more attracted to guests. Any guest that has built a business from the ground up is where I get interested. Seeing mistakes they made, marketing they did that was successful, hiring strategies that worked, anything that took them from $0 to their first $10M or so in sales is what I love because it’s where we’re at!
It’s even better if you can find a guest who is currently in that phase with you. They remember things a bit more clearly than people generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. I can imagine it’s harder to go back and try to put yourself back in your shoes in those moments, compared to someone living it every day like you are!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
My last starter story I talked about how different the “hard work” actually is from what you think it would be.
Certain things are super difficult, there are learning curves, you don’t know what you don’t know. You can start to pick those things up and you can see progress. The “hard work” is more the things you don’t know and will never know until it happens.
When will I be able to stop DoorDashing and actually get paid for all this work? Will traveling to all these coaches events translate to sales?
Last November we skyrocketed on Amazon, was that a peak, will we just match that, will we beat it?
Wow, sales stayed the same! Is this the new normal? Can we expect this much money coming in every month?
You rack your brain over these questions, planning for the future if things go how you hope, planning for if things don’t go as well, and you’ll never fully know until the moment comes.
Nothing has changed on that front in the last year, the questions are just different.
Similarly to what I said previously, patience and not stopping are so important. As cliché as they are!
The story I heard that tied this together was a great analogy.
Imagine you’re in New York City and you see a contest on the front page of a newspaper. “Hit a HomeRun off the Yankees All Star Pitcher and Win A Prize”.
That prize can be whatever you want. Fame, money, love, anything.
When you show up to Yankee Stadium, millions of people are there. They all want to win, but only one can. The only rules are that you can swing as many times as you’d like but once you put the bat down, you’re done.
The first person goes up, swings out of their shoes, looks foolish, everyone laughs, and they put the bat down and walk away. More than half the stadium of contestants leave simply because they don’t want to be laughed at.
If you truly want the “prize” you pick that bat up and dig in and you swing. Over and over and over. People will laugh at you. Eventually they’ll boo. They’ll scream that someone else deserves a chance.
But you keep swinging. And swinging. And swinging.
If it’s luck, if it’s the pitcher getting tired, whatever it is, finally you hit that home run and you win the prize.
Everyone that boo’d you, laughed at you, said you were dumb for trying will now be congratulating you. Saying they cheered for you the whole time and never stopped believing in you.
The great news is you won, you didn’t quit, and you believed in yourself! The good news is more than likely you will have someone in your corner. Someone will genuinely cheer for you while no one else is, so it isn’t all boo’s. The bad news is, this phase will not last a few hours of swinging a bat. This will last years.
But that just makes the home run that much sweeter.
The boo’s definitely amplified when we had our fun social media ride. The internet is not friendly, especially with that many eyes on you. But, you learn to roll with it. You never take the good or the bad that seriously, both distract you from the goal and slow you down.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We still aren’t hiring at this point but hopefully we will if we get a Starter Story 3!
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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