Web Provides Sales Bounce
Table Tennis Pioneers more than meets the expectations of its founder
by Derek Cassoff
Montreal Gazette
November 20, 2000

Revenue at Table Tennis Pioneers is expected to hit $4 million this year, says Mitchell Rothfleisch. With him (from left) are colleagues Hagop (Jack) Kabraelian, Marc Laporte, and Lyne Desjardins. (Photo: Dave Sidaway, Montreal Gazette)

When he began selling specialized Ping-Pong equipment by mail-order catalog a decade ago, Mitchell Rothfleisch admitted that making money was not the first thing on his mind.

A former nationally ranked table-tennis player, Rothfleisch said he started Table Tennis Pioneers so that he could stay connected to the Ping-Pong circuit after his competitive career ended.

He figured he would earn his living from the profits of his other, much larger company, Banda Sports, which imports a variety of athletic equipment from Europe and Asia for resale to sporting-goods retailers.

Little did he know what was in store when, in 1995, he decided to invest the princely sum of $70 U.S. to acquire a domain name, www.ping-pong.com, so that he could create a Web site to accompany his annual catalog.

Sales at Table Tennis Pioneers, which once held steady at $250,000 a year, have doubled each of the last four years and are expected to hit $4 million this year, Rothfleisch said, surpassing revenue from Banda Sports for the first time. And while a push into the U.S. market seemed unfathomable just a few years ago, 90 per cent of Table Tennis Pioneers’ customers are now from the U.S.

“It’s growing so quickly that we don’t have a busy time of the year any more”, Rothfleisch, 37, said in an interview from his Laval office.

“In a sense, it’s great, but it’s also a challenge to keep up.”

The company has had to expand its operations dramatically over the last two years, tripling the size of its shipping-room work force and customer-service desk. Together, Table Tennis Pioneers and Banda Sports now employ 17 people.

Rothfleisch, who for years had contemplated expanding into the U.S., said he could never have penetrated the American market so effectively had it not been for the Internet, which gave his company global exposure overnight. He coupled the launch of the Web site with an aggressive promotional campaign, which featured large advertisements in U.S. table-tennis magazines. He also shipped his catalog to Ping-Pong clubs and tournament venues across the country and began sponsoring some of North America’s top Ping-Pong players.

“If we didn’t have a Web site, we would never have been able to reach all of these people”, said Marc Laporte, who oversees the company’s Internet site in addition to his duties as international sales director.

While the company continues to publish an annual catalog—this year’s print run is expected to hit 40,000—more than 80 per cent of Table Tennis Pioneers’ orders arrive via the Web site, where customers fill up virtual shopping carts with products and send in their orders electronically.

And Rothfleisch figures that many of the telephone orders are generated by customers who browse for products on the Web site and call their purchases in to the toll-free number, forfeiting the 5% discount offered on all online orders.

“Some people, particularly first-time customers, will do their product research on the Web site, but then they want the reassurance of speaking to someone before they give out a credit-card number”, he said.

Yet another advantage of the Web site is the company’s ability to update information instantaneously, rather than once a year. Laporte updates the site at least twice a week, as new products arrive on the market and inventory levels rise and fall. The company also maintains a database of 3,000 customers who receive regular emails informing them of weekly specials.

“It means some extra work for the staff, but it gives us an edge”, said Laporte. “You can’t expect people to come to your site religiously, but they check their E-mail often and this reminds them about us.”

Table Tennis Pioneers carries more than 500 different Ping-Pong-related products, including sixteen brands of Ping-Pong balls. The most popular products are balls, rackets, and tables, but Rothfleisch also does brisk business in shoes and apparel.

“The same way that some tennis players wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a regular T-shirt, a serious table-tennis player needs to have his STIGA or BANDA apparel”, he said. “You have to look the part.”

And then there are the more obscure items that you would be hard-pressed to find at a department store or a traditional sporting-goods retailer; a full range of instructional table-tennis videos and CDs, for instance, or the selection of automated ball machines, which allow players to practice their Ping-Pong strokes on their own. They range in price from $500 to $5,000, with the highest-priced models being among the most popular.

“Our first year, we sold four of those models and we were amazed”, said Rothfleisch. “Now we sell at least one every week. I’ve played table tennis my whole life, yet it blows my mind that someone would spend $5,000 on a machine like this.”

Despite the anonymity of the Internet, Rothfleisch said that customer service is just as critical in e-tailing as it is in more traditional forms of retailing. A search of Yahoo! turned up the names of fourteen companies selling Ping-Pong equipment over the Internet, and of that group, Rothfleisch figures, there are at least four or five serious competitors honing in on his turf.

“The Internet can’t save a poorly run business; what it does is it points a magnifying glass at you”, he said.“If you do something well, thousands of people know you’re doing it well, but if you do something poorly, thousands of people know that, too. It multiplies and exacerbates the good and the bad.”

“For sure, the Web helps us a lot”, Laporte added. “But you also need to have good prices, a lot of product in stock, and the ability to ship it right away.”

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