Sport and exercise have never been more popular in Germany than they are at present, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, says Signa Sports United (SSU), which claims to be Europe’s biggest e-tailer for sporting goods through its numerous websites. Gear for home and outdoor use has been selling at record levels, says the company, whose online retail operations have evidently allowed it to overcome the closure of competing brick-and-mortar stores.
Sales of home gym items were up by 200 percent year-on-year for fiscal 2020 at Internetstores Group, a subsidiary of SSU which also delivered an unheard-of 40,000 bicycles in April and about 250,000 for the year to its customers. The single day of May 25 saw more than 3,000 bicycles shipped. The group met the demand by hiring professional mechanics who’d been sitting idle because of the cancellation of professional cycling races.
With the parallel closure of numerous sports facilities, another SSU web store, Tennis-Point, has seen unusually high sales of items for home play out in the yard. Sales of the Fill & Drill ball-on-a-string trainer, from the producer of tennis grips and accessories Tourna, are up twentyfold, while small football nets are up by 152 percent and rebounder nets by 138 percent.
Outfitter, the football specialty e-tailer owned by SSU, actually raised the number of its partner clubs by 25 percent, despite an effective shutdown of sports clubs and associations. Moreover, its sales increased by 5 percent year-on-year.
Stephan Zoll, chief executive of SSU, which owns all of the above retail banners, believes that these changes in consumer behavior are here to stay. “Getting exercise and keeping fit,” he says, “is a mega-trend that will persist for a long time to come. Going into quarantine, working in home offices and gaining a new awareness of one’s health have had a lasting effect on the love of sports, and they’ve made society more active.”
Without revealing its latest sales figures, SSU boasts about four million active customers, 200 million visitors per year, 1,000 brand partners and 500 independent brick-and-mortar dealers. Among its other e-tailing brands are Fahrrad.de, Bikester, Campz, Addnature and Stylefile. SSU is controlled by Signa Retail, the Austrian-based group that also owns the Karstadt Sports and SportScheck sporting goods retail operations as well as the Karstadt and Galeria Kaufhof departmet stores.
