4:47pm Thursday 4th March 2010
By Richard Garfield
A SUCCESSFUL online sports specialist is kicking off its financial new year with the opening of a showroom in Basingstoke.
Headed by managing director Clive Riches, along with partners Ian Boyle and Richie Maure, 0800Sports has opened a retail outlet at its Hart House base in Priestley Road.
Clive said: “This is a sporty town, with plenty of rugby and football clubs and even an ice hockey team.
“It’s got around nine tennis clubs and six golf courses, and yet where do people buy their sports gear from?
“With the showroom, we are trying to be a bit more specialist in what we are offering and advis ing compared to some high street stores. And here we are able to show some of the technically advanced equipment and sportswear we sell.”
Among the product range is the latest advanced performance clothing from X Bionic, which keeps an athlete’s core body temperature at the optimum 37 degrees centigrade.
Clive said he is confident the showroom will com plement the 0800sports.co.uk website as the compa ny grows.
He said: “Golf was one of the areas we started in, but we’ve gradually expanded it out to lots of other sports, and as the website has developed, we’re get ting anything between 1,500 to 3,000 unique visitors a day.”
Clive is confident the company will expand fur ther. “In the last financial year, we doubled our turnover and I think we will double it again this year,” he said. “I’d say around 80 per cent of our business comes from the UK, with the other 20 per cent coming from Europe – we’ve also got quite a strong following in Scandinavia.”
Clive puts this down partly to the favourable Euro exchange rate for the pound. Boasting big names like such as Basingstoke-based golf equip ment distributor TaylorMade, the company is con tinually attracting other leading players from the sports industry.
“One of the major golf trolley manufacturers – Click Gear – has just gone through a complete clean up of their authorised Internet resellers,”
said Clive. “Whereas they had 35 to 40 resellers in the UK, they have carved that down to 14 and we are one of those.”
Another company that uses 0800Sports to sell its products in the UK is sports drink firm 5-Hour Energy. It’s the number one selling energy drink in the USA. They have decided to relaunch in the UK and we are the first place to be approved to sell it here,” said Clive.
“We have the top brands, but we’ve also got some very unique products, such as our range of fully waterproof hats, gloves and socks.”
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