There are lots of reasons for our direct to customer sales model. The biggest benefit to our customers is reduced cost. Support for traditional sales channels easily adds 50-60% to the retail price of a paddle. Factory direct allows us to continue to deliver an exceptional paddle at an affordable price.
Retail is a great way to get your products to market when you are an established brand. As for growing a brand, our experience says maybe not so much.
Grocery store shelves are full of new and specialty products from brands with minimal consumer recognition that come and go. Not because the product is substandard but because there was no recognition for the brand at the consumer level to drive the volume of sales needed to cover the significantly lower margins and costs associated with selling through retail channels.
As we build our brand identity our priority is to build a strong and loyal customer base. To accomplish this our route to market requires selling directly to the consumer. We make amazing praddles but there are limits to what people will spend, especially on a relatively unheard of brand. It would be difficult for any of our customers to justify spending $300 on one of our paddles and honestly we’d feel guilty having to charge that much.
So to be able to price our paddles fairly and grow our sales we needed to reduce our selling price to the customer by 50%. The only way to accomplish this was to minimize the costs associated with traditional retail distribution channels including large online retailers.
There are lots of other reasons for us choosing a direct to consumer model.
As we build our brand 100% customer satisfaction is our goal and we need our customers to get the right paddle for their game. Nobody knows our product better than we do and selling directly lets us work with our customers to ensure they are 100% happy with their purchase.
Working directly with our customers we also get first hand feedback on our paddles. This is huge in our developing new and more innovative paddles while continuing to build our brand.
Selling direct means we control our customer service. This allows us to better accommodate our customers special requests, customize paddles, adjusting grip size, meeting weight targets or supplying custom graphics. It also means after sales service is more efficient and eliminates the need for customers to register their paddles warranty purposes.
Selling directly provides significantly more flexibility around promotions and pricing which allows us to respond faster to changes in the market.
When we deal directly with a customer we ensure the integrity of the sale. Meaning we want the customer to get the best paddle for their game, not the most expensive paddle they can afford. We are so committed to this that we aligned our paddle pricing across all models.
One of our primary founding principles was a commitment to minimizing our environmental impact.
Not just in our products and manufacturing process but in our route to market. By selling directly, we significantly reduce our environmental footprint by minimizing carbon generated through transportation, warehousing and redistribution. We are also able to eliminate unnecessary packaging that would ultimately end up in landfill.
There are lots of great reasons to sell via retail when your brand is established or you want to gamble on growing exponentially. But make no mistake, we have no dilution that we are going to sell thousands of paddles a month and take on any of the major paddle brands or offshore manufacturers. Nor do we want to.
Our decision to sell directly to consumers is rooted in our commitment to keeping our products manufactured 100% in-house, building a brand that values quality, innovation, environmental responsibility, and customer satisfaction above all else.
Bypassing traditional retail channels, we can offer exceptional paddles at competitive prices, provide personalized service, reduce our environmental impact and ultimately foster a deeper and more rewarding connection with our customers.