We were lucky to catch up with Amy Gillett & Carolynn Hayman recently and have shared our conversation below.
Amy & Carolynn, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Taking care of customers isn’t just good business – it is often one of the main reasons folks went into business in the first place. So, we’d love to get a conversation going around how to best help clients feel appreciated – maybe you can share something you’ve done or seen someone do that’s been really effective at helping a customer feel valued?
We believe in celebrating our customers and their unique journeys in the world of tennis and pickleball. We have a few ways in which we do this: through our blog, by taking special orders, and by communicating with our customer base.
The CourtMerch blog
Our blog on courtmerch.com is dedicated to sharing customers’ stories, experiences, and expertise. By highlighting their stories, achievements, and tips, we show our appreciation and create a platform where they feel recognized and celebrated. One of our recent posts featured Coach Martin, who has coached a daytime ladies team that won 9 consecutive championships. He shares some tips that players can follow to win more matches. He’s pictured wearing his CourtMerch “Game Changer” tee. Another post features Carmela, a competitive doubles player who got her start on the courts in Brazil and now plays out of Ann Arbor. She shares her fascinating tennis story with us on the post and we’ve got her pictured there in her CourtMerch: a Vamos! shirt (Let’s Go! in Portuguese) and her beloved “I Play Deuce” tee.
Special Orders & Requests
We love taking special requests from our customers. Because we use print on demand, no order is too small. One of the players at our tennis club hails from Poland. She asked us if we could create for her a hoodie that has the word Love and the Polish word for Love (Miłość) intersecting at the ‘o’ with a tennis ball overlaying the ‘o.’ We designed that for her and added it to our International Collection. She ordered it right from our site. Later, we featured her in our blog and she was excited to share her story and be pictured in her new hoodie.
Personalized Follow-Up and Apparel Care Tips
After every purchase, we follow up with our customers via email to make sure they are delighted with their new apparel. We include tips on proper apparel care, ensuring their items stay in great condition for years to come. We want our customers to feel appreciated and also make them feel valued as part of the growing CourtMerch community.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We are recreational tennis players who met on the courts. We have both played tennis for many years, but we only crossed paths when we joined the same summer team last year at a local club. As soon as we met, we clicked and discovered we share a similar sense of humor! We would always joke around and laugh during practices, and we’d often find ourselves saying, “We should make a shirt that says that!” Finally, we decided to get serious and scheduled a meeting over coffee to plan out a business with tennis-themed clothing that would bring humor and fun to the courts. To get started, we made a bunch of sample designs and shared them with friends at the clubs and asked for feedback. We got a lot of ideas and suggestions. We create our own designs, so we have been learning about ways to make things look attractive on shirts and other products.
We pride ourselves on reacting quickly to trends and events in the tennis world. For example, during the Wimbledon finals, when the women’s singles finalists were Barbora Krejčíková from the Czech Republic and Jasmine Paolini from Italy, we created shirts with “Forza!” and “Pojď!”—”Let’s go!” in their respective languages. For the men’s finals, we celebrated finalists Carlos Alcaraz Spain and Novak Djokovic of Serbia with “Vamos!” and “Idemo!” shirts. Additionally, when Taylor Fritz famously told his opponent, “Have a nice flight home!” we made a shirt featuring that memorable phrase.
We have also worked to source clothing products in attractive colors and a variety of fabrics, including performance fabric with UPF that is ideal for outdoor play. And we have added some fun accessories to our lines as well. Since we both play on multiple tennis teams, we know that teams like to buy tennis themed captains’ gifts at the end of each season, so we offer lots of great options for that. We recently outfitted co-captains with hoodies that feature our Courtney mascot and the saying “Being a Captain is a Ball!” We also love to outfit teams with practice tops or team uniform tops.
We have spent a lot of time trying to reach out to clients and listen to what people want to buy when they want to buy tennis items and gifts. We have so many ideas and products that it can be a little overwhelming! And we are working on lots of social media posts and other ways to reach our customers.
Mostly, we like to keep things fun and hope that our products reflect that.
What’s been the best source of new clients for you?
Our best source of new clients has been chatting with people on the tennis courts. They see our fun shirts and hoodies and want one for themselves or as a gift for a friend (we personally think CourtMerch makes the best gift for a tennis or pickleball player – it’s just what we would want if we weren’t the owners of the company!). For instance, Carolynn was wearing her “Allez!” performance shirt during a match when our opponent, who turned out to be her team’s captain, loved it and asked if we could make a version for her team. We said, “Absolutely!” and got her team name on the back, with a link up on our website the next day. Now her team looks super sharp on the courts!
Of course, our adorable mascot Courtney is always a hit, too. In the fall, Amy wore her “Out Here Having a Ball” Courtney hoodie whenever she hit the courts. Players would often ask where they could get one, leading to a lot of sales. Some opted for the royal blue that Amy wears, while others went for Sport Gray and Carolina Blue.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
We built our social media audience by focusing on a few key social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, and X. We started by posting fun and relevant content related to tennis and pickleball, sharing many pictures and short videos of ourselves and other players wearing CourtMerch on the courts. We keep a calendar of both key tennis events – tournaments like Wimbledon and the US Open, and holidays and fun days like World Emoji Day (July 17). We post content to celebrate these occasions.
Engagement has been crucial for us. We follow and interact with others in the tennis and pickleball community, commenting on their posts and sharing our thoughts. Following a few key tennis podcasters led to us being featured on the “Second Serve” podcast, which reaches our target audience of recreational tennis players. This was a fantastic experience that we shared with our followers, who appreciated and shared our posts.
Recognizing that we might not be in touch with all demographics, we recently brought on a summer intern to help with our social media and expand our reach into high school and college tennis players. We’re young at heart and, hopefully, our hearts are in good shape from all the tennis (because our knees and ankles certainly aren’t!). Having a young person on our team has been great and brings another perspective, especially for resonating with teenagers and twentysomethings.
For those just starting to build their social media presence, our advice is to focus on a few channels where your audience hangs out and concentrate your efforts there. Post consistently to keep your audience engaged and coming back for more; creating a content calendar can help you stay organized. Engage with your community by liking, commenting, and sharing content from others in your niche—it’s a great way to build relationships and get noticed. Make sure your content is high-quality and relevant to your audience. Lastly, be authentic and show your brand personality. Authenticity resonates with people and builds trust. Keeping posts fun and engaging means people will come back for more!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.courtmerch.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/courtmerch
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/CourtMerch/61556143757796/
- Twitter: https://x.com/court_merch
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Courtmerch
