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Managing an increasingly global rugby audience
Learn how New Zealand-based Rugby Bricks leverages partners like ShipBob to scale their brand to customers across the world.
Customer Profile
Rugby Bricks is a brand that sells kicking tees proudly made and designed in New Zealand. They are firm believers that 2 principles in life determine your outcomes: to outwork and outlearn others — in other words, lifelong learners on and off the pitch go further than those who are only going to put in the work. And Rugby Bricks practices what they preach, providing hundreds of videos on improving rugby skills, from field, home, and gym passing programs to demonstration videos that help players hone in on specific techniques.
Key metrics
- Grown 266% in order volume this year
- 60-70% of Rugby World Cup kickers use their tees
- 280,000+ rugby students across the world
- 10M + views on video content
- 10s of 1,000s of customers from 40+ countries
Born in Dunedin at the end of 2017, Rugby Bricks creates kicking tees and other products that are used by some of the best rugby players in the world.
But they do much more than create helpful products — they’ve built an impressive community of 280,000+ rugby students who rely on Rugby Bricks’s content and training aids to become better players by developing the pass they’ve always wanted, improving their kicking abilities, and ultimately honing their craft.
Whether you’re a beginner or want to become an elite player that stands out among coaches and selectors, their kicker tees and other rugby items are great for anyone in the world of rugby.
And the numbers speak for themselves — they have tens of thousands of customers from 40+ countries, including many of the most well-known professional players.
We sat down with Joe Coventry, Marketing & Partnerships Lead at Rugby Bricks, to hear how they manage their growing customer base across the world.
Managing an increasingly global rugby audience
As told to ShipBob by Joe Coventry, Marketing & Partnerships Lead at Rugby Bricks.
Rugby Bricks was founded by Pete Breen, who grew up playing footy, was a kicker himself, and wanted a personal tee. He looked in the Dunedin area to find a manufacturer that could create a custom 3D mold for the rugby tee he wanted to build from scratch.
During that time in rugby, there was not a lot of online development for skills like passing and kicking on social media. With this gap in the market that he noticed, Pete began creating this content and launched the brand. Today, our small but mighty team is distributed across New Zealand with customers across the globe.
When the company was started, Pete was managing shipping and logistics himself from his own house. He then moved to a 3PL provider and then a bigger warehouse location due to scale, but shipping to the UK and EU was very expensive.
Now, ShipBob manages all of our shipping for the UK, and we use their fulfillment center in Manchester, which makes up over a third of our entire customer base.
We went with ShipBob because their process seemed quite streamlined. We had several productive implementation meetings and sent the product over to get it stored. Their technology makes setting up rules to send out wristbands and stickers that we send out as a bonus to customers who order our tees really easy.
Scaling seamlessly while growing order volume 4x in a year
We’ve grown 266% in the last year due to our audience expanding online and from selling in more retail stores. ShipBob has definitely saved us a lot of time. I also don’t have to worry about whether orders are going out or if anything’s going wrong with them.
Seeing the tracking we have in the ShipBob dashboard, like real-time inventory levels and how many orders have gone out, is also really great. Other fulfillment providers we’ve worked with are more limited with the technology they provide, where we could only see certain details in our Shopify store.
In the ShipBob dashboard we can view a breakdown of daily costs, which is also very different from other providers who just give you a big bill at the end of a month.
As we’ve more than quadrupled our order volume in a year, we’re also gearing up for a big Black Friday. The holidays are always massive for us in terms of sales, and we’re glad to have partners like ShipBob that can keep up with the increase in demand.
What’s next for Rugby Bricks?
We have an upcoming product launch for our grip socks and a distribution deal with Rebel Sport in Australia and New Zealand that we’re excited about. We’re also looking to secure other retail partnerships in the coming months, and are working closely with many rugby clubs and schools to get apparel and uniform deals.
We’re starting to crack into up-and-coming countries including several Asian markets, where rugby is growing fast and more schools are playing rugby so people are looking for resources to learn more.
We also see more professional players using our products, including at the Rugby World Cup happening right now in France, where 60-70% of all kickers are using our tees.
We’ve grown our organic traffic by 340% over the past year from people finding our content, and every week we’re consistently growing our social media following by 5% across our YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instragam audiences. We’ll continue providing content devoted to developing rugby skills and the products that help players perform their best.
Rugby Bricks’ team at ShipBob
Brian Totten
Brian is the Account Executive who worked with the Rugby Bricks team to get started with ShipBob.
Mandira Das
Mandira is the Sr. Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports Rugby Bricks.
Get started with ShipBob
Looking into switching fulfillment partners or outsourcing fulfillment for the first time? Request a quote from ShipBob to get started.
