SidelineSwap - Where Athletes Buy & Sell Their Gear

Company & Team Introduction

SidelineSwap is the largest online sporting equipment marketplace in the world. The company was founded in 2015 by former college athletes Brendan Candon (CEO), Anthony Piazza, Conor Mcdonough (growth lead), Nick Gantsoudes (customer experience), and Eric Carlstrom (ex-CTO, departed in 2019). The team recognized the massive market opportunity after discovering how difficult it was to find high-quality used sports gear online. The company’s goal is to increase access to lower-priced used equipment options, reducing the barriers to entry for many families who want to enroll their kids in sports but can’t afford to due to high prices. SidelineSwap is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and has grown its team to over 50 employees.

Product Overview

SidelineSwap is the leading marketplace for buying and selling sports equipment online. Initially started as a peer-to-peer marketplace, the company has since transitioned to a hybrid model offering both new and used options on the site, giving them inventory levels unmatched by any other company in the world. The company has built a strong community of over a million users. It has also created a strong network of partners, including the ECHL, MonkeySports, Dick’s Sporting Goods, SportsEngine, Perani’s Hockey World, and Inflcr. The partnerships with the ECHL and Influcr give SidelineSwap access to highly coveted equipment from college and professional athletes, and SidelineSwap's partnership with well-known retailers such as Perani’s, Dick’s, and Monkeysports allows them to use their prominent brick-and-mortar locations to create in-person reselling events.

Total Addressable Market

To many, this may seem too niche to be a successful venture-backed business, but the market opportunity for SidelineSwap is enormous. 90M+ people in the United States alone participate in some sporting activity. Over 60B is spent on sporting equipment each year, with the majority of spend currently happening in-store and on new purchases. Growth in secondhand buying and selling is far outpacing retail sales, with the market slated to grow 127% from 2022 to 2026. Over the past decade, an increasing amount of those spending dollars have been shifted online, and it is a trend that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, with 70%+ of sporting equipment spending occurring in brick-and-mortar locations.

Business Model & The Numbers

The company follows a simple transaction-based business model. SidelineSwap doesn’t charge to list an item on their platform but will take a 12% transaction fee for each item successfully sold through their platform for your first five items sold on the platform. After selling five items through SidelineSwap, the company’s take rate decreases from 12% to 9% as the company gathers more data to ensure the seller's legitimacy. There is also a minimum platform fee of $1.99 and a maximum fee of $100. The company take rate does not include the payment processing fee (2.9% + 30c), and buyers pay for shipping.

Traction

SidelineSwap has had incredible traction amongst sports gear fanatics. Users on the platform have earned over 100M selling their equipment since being founded in 2015. The most popular sports on the platform tend to be high-cost sports such as hockey, golf, lacrosse, and Skiing, where buyers can save the most by purchasing second-hand, while sellers earn more by selling fewer items. Without location barriers, SidelineSwap acts as the largest second-hand sporting equipment store in the world, making it the defacto platform for sports enthusiasts to find limited or older sporting items as their breadth and depth of equipment is unmatched by any brick-and-mortar second sporting goods store. SidelineSwap has also been recognized by top-tier venture capital firm A16Z in their “Top 100 Marketplace Startups” list.

Competitors

The competitive landscape for buying and selling secondhand sporting equipment is thin, giving SidelineSwap a favourable market position. Some sites focus on reselling for a single sport, such as Sports2K, which focuses on reselling hockey equipment and has a small community. Besides these niche sport-specific sites, most secondhand equipment is sold on eBay, but buying and selling on SidelineSwap has multiple advantages. First, eBay charges sellers higher fees (13%) than SidelineSwap (12% for first five sales, 9% after), equipment listings on eBay are routinely low quality and uninformative, and equipment condition can vary drastically from listing to listing. In addition, SidelineSwap’s customer support is knowledgeable about the product and industry (because they don’t sell everything else in the world in addition to sporting equipment).

Funding

The company has raised about 18M in total funding since being founded in 2015. The company raised a 1.5M seed round in 2016 after participating in multiple top startup incubators and accelerators, including Harvard Innovation Lab, MassChallenge, and, most notably, 500 Startups. The exposure from these accelerator programs allowed Sidelinewap to build relationships with early investors, enabling them to later raise from firms such as Haystack Partners, FullStack Sports Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and 500 startups itself, in addition to notable angel investors such as Maria Thomas (ex-CEO of Etsy), Sean Branches (ex-EVP at ESPN) to their cap table. To extend their runway, SidelineSwap raised a 2.1M seed extension round in 2017 that was led by the Germany-based investment group Rocket Internet, with follow-on participation from previous investors like Haystack Partners, Global Founders Capital, as well as new firms such as RiverPark Ventures. In 2018, SidelineSwap raised a series A round as the platform started to show real traction, raising 5M in the round, including follow-on investments from Global Founders Capital, RiverPark Ventures, and new participants such as Admiral Capital Group and PEAK6 Investments. More recently, SidelineSwap has been looking to raise capital from more strategic investors, raising an undisclosed amount in 2022 from DSG Ventures, the venture capital arm of Dick’s Sporting Goods, before securing another strategic investment from DSG Ventures, eBay Ventures, and FJ Labs in addition to angel investors.