As the sporting goods industry rebounds during the pandemic, particularly outdoor sports like baseball and pickleball, Tanners Team Sports Inc. has added staff to bolster its customer service, logistics, warehouse and shipping teams to meet the rising demand.
The sporting goods manufacturer recently announced three new hires to fill key roles at the company's headquarters at 736 Mid-America Blvd. in Hot Springs.
Mike Piatt was recently named general manager for the company's wholly owned subsidiary Vulcan Pickleball.
Lucia DiGiacomo was added to the Customer Service Department, working on the Walmart account, and Cody Worley also joined the Customer Service Department, working on the Academy Sports + Outdoors and Dick's Sporting Goods, two major retail chains.
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"Demand is at record levels, so we are aggressively aligning our teams to support our customers," Dusty Thornton, vice president of marketing said in a news release announcing the additions.
"We've really got a bull by the horns. But we've got a fabulous team," CEO Vince Signorelli said in a recent interview.
Tanners Team Sports is a leading supplier of team sports accessories worldwide, so when the pandemic first hit in March of 2020, Signorelli says, "It was very stunning."
"The first quarter of 2020 was a record quarter for us. And so just when we were winding up the first quarter of 2020, that's when the pandemic hit," he said. "Suddenly no one was allowed to play baseball, spring baseball, so we were a baseball company without any baseball players anywhere."
Everything from that point on happened "very quickly," he said. "We immediately began hunkering down like a lot of sporting goods companies. You know, hunkering down in terms of just lowering overhead, doing whatever we could to kind of withstand the downturn.
"We immediately pivoted our manufacturing to making masks. The Vulcan mask was one of the more popular high-quality masks for athletes around the country, it was featured even in GQ magazine as one of the top five masks for athletes."
Signorelli said sales from Vulcan masks "helped us sustain through 2020."
"I will look back at the year (2020) in amazement, always, that we actually didn't lose money. We broke even, and barely, but we survived it," he said.
"As we rolled into 2021, immediately in January, sales demand just began to skyrocket. Baseball and our other sport that we are big in, pickleball, both are outdoor activities. So as athletes and recreational people returned to leisure activities and sports, they were doing it outside, and we were just so fortunate to be a big player in those outdoor sports," Signorelli said.
"We just finished 2021. It was a record year for us. Sales were up 40%. And now, as we've turned the corner into 2022, the company is going to grow again by another 50%. Demand is extremely high, which is fabulous, obviously," he said.
Signorelli credits much of their recent success to their pickleball business.
"It has been super popular. It grows year over year in amazing sorts of ways. So with that we've needed to bolster our staff, our teams here, you know ... on the customer service side, on the warehouse side, on the logistics (side). And so that's what we've done. And that's why these great folks here are now joining our team and helping us in amazing ways," he said.
According to the release, Tanners is the sporting goods industry's "leading supplier of team sports accessories with over 500 different consumer goods distributed to thousands of major retailers around the United States and in 27 different countries worldwide. Tanners is also the official exclusive baseball training and accessories licensee for St. Louis-based Rawlings Sporting Goods Co. Inc."
