Two years ago The Sportsman’s Guide Inc. drew a bead on niche-oriented online retailing when it acquired The Golf Warehouse. Now the same executive team that manages The Golf Warehouse is helping Sportsman’s Guide expand into another online sporting goods niche: baseball and softball, a $500 million merchandising market.
Sportsman’s Guide, No. 76 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, is opening two more e-commerce sites, Baseballsavings.com and Softballsavings.com. The new sites will be developed and maintained by Golf Warehouse and carry more than 11,000 SKUs from brands such as Rawlings and Wilson’s Sports.
"These new sites are natural and logical extensions of our business and our business model. They allow us to extend and enhance our longstanding relationships with many of the same manufacturers and distributors we’ve been working with at TGW for years,” says Golf Warehouse CEO Mark Marney. “They allow us to bring our Internet marketing expertise to a half-billion dollar annual market that is growing at a faster rate than most of the sporting goods market."
Acquiring and developing niche sporting goods sites is helping Sportsman’s Guide grow its e-commerce revenue. In 2005 Sportsman’s Guide reported e-commerce sales of $171 million on total sales of $285.1 million. The web now accounts for about 60% of the company’s business. "The launching of these new sites will serve to broaden our product offerings and extend our reach into a young and expanding market,” says Sportsman’s Guide CEO George Binkley. “We look forward to establishing a real presence in this market and becoming a serious and significant player over time."
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