Over the last year, the Franchise Support Team (FST) has been piloting the DTC program with three Franchise Partners (FP’s). The goal, to determine consumer demand for adding-on merchandise during check-out. Six products were offered in the pilot, - mini balls, soccer balls, water bottles, additional youth jerseys, youth shorts and youth socks.

Within only the first few weeks, the pilot proved to be extremely successful. The pilot allowed us to gain valuable data and insights into what consumers and how consumers were purchasing.

Here are some key takeaways from the DTC Pilot:

• Top selling product was Youth Shorts

• Second highest selling product was Mini Balls

• The average merchandise order was $24.49

• 96% of purchases were made during enrollment (purchased with a season)

Given the success of the pilot program, FST has been working diligently to roll DTC out to the entire Soccer Shots franchise system.

FST signed a contract with a new vendor partner, Augusta Sportswear Brands (ASB) who will be our sole manufacturer and distributor for the program. Their mission and values strongly align with ours and they offer a full range of youth and adult performance and athletic apparel. Configio is also working on creating custom API integrations where they’ll be able to send order information from their database directly to ASB to be fulfilled.

FST collaboratively worked with ASB to select an appropriate mix of products which includes mostly youth items, some adult apparel and a mix of hard goods / equipment. We essentially took the product offering from the pilot and expanded it to include additional product for consumers to purchase. This apparel will be branded with the new Soccer Shots logo.

FST will determine product mix and will forecast, order, manage and ship product out to the end consumer via ASB. All customer service questions in relation to the DTC program (such as processing returns and exchanges) will be handled by FST in conjunction with ASB.

All DTC merchandise will be purchased by consumers through Configio through a separate payment gateway from enrollments and will go directly to FST. The merchandise products will be added at the FST master level in Configio and will be syndicated to all local FP sites. Product will also be added to our National Site (www.soccershots.com). FST determined product offered on the national site was necessary in addition to the individual local FP sites for a seamless customer service experience, this way if consumers wanted to purchase merchandise outside of the enrollment process, they could easily land on our main national site to do so.

Therefore, consumers can purchase DTC product via three methods:

1) Product(s) is added in addition to the annual enrollment fee during checkout on a local site.

2) Product(s) is purchased individually and separate from enrollment on a local site.

3) Product(s) is purchased on the FST National Site.

Checkout will look the same to a consumer as it would for the enrollment. The consumer can easily add product to checkout, input their payment information and enter in their shipping address. The consumer will need to pay an applicable shipping charge and any necessary taxes before fully submitting their order.

The FST is adding two additional full-time staff positions, a Staff Accountant and a Purchasing and Logistics Coordinator, to support the DTC program, including registering to sell merchandise in all appropriate states and locations and then collecting and submitting sales tax.

To go along with this program, FST will be creating specially branded order and shipping confirmation emails. These will be added into Configio databases and set up for the DTC program. Once a consumer submits an order, they’ll receive this order confirmation and then once their order ships, they’ll get the shipping confirmation email.

In addition to branded emails, special 4” x 6” inserts will be included inside the package with each consumer order. This will have pertinent information on it such as how a parent can process a return, exchange, or reach out to us for customer service.

Social media assets will also be created and sized appropriately to be used on different social media sites. These will be included in the social media calendar.

The marketing team will continue to work on ways to market DTC at multiple touchpoints and will continue to share out those plans.

We think this program will be of tremendous value to the Soccer Shots Community. We designed the program so that FST owns all the risk for hiring additional staff to support, produce products, brand products, house and store inventory up front, manage the ASB relationship as a third-party vendor and handle all sales tax including Canadian provinces.

Even though FST owns all the risk we believe the right thing to do is provide FPs with a portion of the sales from the DTC program. We will provide each FP with 7% of sales through their specific site. All consumer sales through the local FP sites will be tracked at the master FST level in Configio, so we are able to provide the payment specific to DTC sales. The payments will be issued in the same timeframe with FPs monthly royalty fee payments.

7% of total sales collected through the National Site will be added to the Marketing Brand Fund to benefit the community. We expect sales that occur during enrollment to make up 90-95% of overall sales and the National Site to be a small percentage of sales with a focus on user experience.

Merchandise products will be added into Configio over the next few weeks. The products will be hidden so they will not be shown on the Configio sites at this time.

Configio is working on the custom development work with a deadline of Thursday, June 30, 2022. Confirming everything is set up and ready, we’ll be using the month of July as a testing period between Configio and ASB.

The official launch for the program will be Monday, August 1, 2022 systemwide!

For those planning to attend Convention in July, ASB will be in attendance and will have the branded DTC apparel on display during the vendor lunch on Thursday. There will also be a DTC specific presentation on Friday morning.