Founded in 2016, Sturdy Sports specialises in cricket equipment, serving customers both online and through its physical retail store in Melbourne. In 2025, the company launched a second brand, Sturdy Racquets, focused on tennis and pickleball equipment.
Today, the business manages more than 5,000 SKUs across both brands, using Retail Express retail management software to manage inventory, reporting and in-store sales, while Shopify powers their ecommerce store.
For co-founders Vipy Agrawal and Falgun Patel, having the right retail POS and inventory management platform has been essential to sustaining growth.
From the beginning, Sturdy Sports faced a major operational challenge: managing thousands of SKUs in a highly seasonal sporting goods retail environment.
Cricket equipment in particular evolves quickly, with manufacturers releasing new product models every year.
“In cricket every year there are new models and new SKUs. We’re talking about almost 3,000 to 4,000 SKUs every year that get launched,” says Vipy Agrawal, Co-founder and Director at Sturdy Sports.
The sales window for those products is also short.
“The realistic time cycle when we actually sell those products is around five to six months. It’s highly seasonal.”
Using Retail Express POS, the team can track product performance, manage inventory and access reporting across thousands of SKUs while maintaining visibility across both their physical store and online channels.
When launching Sturdy Sports in 2016, Agrawal carefully evaluated several retail POS and inventory management systems.
As an accountant who regularly works with ERP software, he quickly identified a gap in the market.
“Either retailers were offered very high-end ERP software or very basic systems. There wasn’t a robust solution designed for medium-sized retailers.”
Retail Express stood out for three key reasons:
“Backend reporting was a major reason we chose Retail Express,” Agrawal explains.
“And the front end is easy enough that we don’t have to spend a lot of time training staff.”
Since launching the business, Sturdy Sports has significantly expanded its product catalogue. The company began with approximately 1,500 SKUs and today manages around 4,000 cricket products alone.
“We’ve grown three to four times in terms of SKUs since we started,” says Patel.
Across both Sturdy Sports and Sturdy Racquets, the business now manages more than 5,000 live SKUs, with plans to continue expanding as the racquet sports category grows.
Retail Express enables the team to maintain control over this complex inventory environment while delivering detailed reporting that helps them analyse product performance and sales trends.
In 2025, the team launched Sturdy Racquets, a new brand focused on tennis and pickleball equipment.
Before launching the new business, they reviewed other retail platforms to determine whether a different POS system or retail management platform might better suit their needs.
Ultimately, the decision came back to Retail Express.
“We went back to square one and asked ourselves what issues we had with Retail Express,” Patel says. “To be honest, we found none that were major. That made the decision very simple.”
Sturdy Racquets launched with around 200 SKUs and has grown to more than 1,000 products in four months, demonstrating strong early momentum.
Alongside Retail Express, the team has begun using Maropost Marketing Cloud to power email marketing for the Sturdy Racquets brand.
By connecting Marketing Cloud with Retail Express, the business can use customer purchase history and product preferences to create highly personalised marketing campaigns.
For sports equipment retailers, this level of personalisation is particularly valuable.
“If someone is a left-handed batter, they won’t need right-handed gear,” Patel explains.
“The system understands that from their purchase history and sends marketing that’s relevant to the customer instead of spamming them.”
This enables the team to segment customers based on:
Currently, Marketing Cloud is being used for the Sturdy Racquets business, while Sturdy Sports continues to run campaigns through Klaviyo.
However, the team sees this as a transition phase.
“Once we’re fully comfortable with the Marketing Cloud setup on the racquets side, we’ll move Sturdy Sports across as well,” Agrawal says.
As the racquet sports brand grows, the team plans to expand Marketing Cloud across both businesses, creating a more unified marketing strategy powered by their Retail Express customer and purchase data.
Supporting consistent year-on-year retail growth
Over the past four years, Sturdy Sports has achieved consistent year-on-year growth of approximately 15%.
Retail Express has helped streamline operations across both the physical store and ecommerce channels, allowing the team to focus on growing their sporting goods retail business.
Today, the company operates with a small team of three to four full-time staff, all of whom use Retail Express daily.
“The common feedback we get from new employees is that it’s very easy to learn the software,” says Patel.
A POS platform that grows with the business
After ten years using Retail Express, the Sturdy Sports team continues to rely on the platform as they expand their product catalogue and launch new ventures.
“If we weren’t confident in the system, we wouldn’t have used it again for our second business,” Patel says.
With plans to continue expanding their product range and customer base, Sturdy Sports is confident they have the right retail POS and inventory management platform to support their next phase of growth.
Key results