After the tightened measures for gym closures, Qoo10 saw an increase of 82% in the demand for sports equipment. With the closure of gyms ever since Circuit Breaker last year, we are seeing more buyers and consumers buying more sports equipment for house use. The top 3 selling sports items on Qoo10 are dumbbells, gym benches and yoga mats.

In this story, we have iRunning.sg, a 12-year-old brand that has been on Qoo10 ever since the starting of e-commerce. As sales volumes doubled for them since the gym closures, read on to find how home-gymming demand has been over the years.

About iRunning.sg

The owner, Dale Tan, created the brand back in 2008 to serve a group of customers who were into home-gymming. At that time, home-gymming was not as extensive. In their early days on Qoo10, they sold small items such as resistance bands, so that the parcels could be posted out in envelopes. At that time, Qoo10 was just launched and Dale wanted to be on-boarded to capture customers who were willing to try out new products and concepts at a low price.

The shop now sells small exercising equipment to a wide range of products such as exercise bikes and dumbbells. Consumers will be glad to know that iRunning.sg has their technicians for serving and repairs, as well as their own delivery fleet.

Running an e-commerce store

The biggest challenge we had was in maintaining the quality of the exercise equipment. Over the 12 years, customer demands have changed where more seek out higher-end products with better quality. Thus, iRunning.sg had to source for factories to manufacture better quality products.

A day in the e-commerce team will start with checking and preparing for orders before handing them over to the operations team to arrange for delivery. Concurrently, their sales team will tackle any customer enquiries on delivery or products. In the afternoon, their team will mainly be doing restocking and repairing, or handle walk-in sales at their showrooms. iRunning.sg has two showrooms, please visit here for more information.

Future plans

As they move on to higher tier experience products, there are products with phone app connectivity that calculates calories and performance daily so that users can track their fitness progress over time. One area that iRunning.sg pride itself upon is that they are a local team with proper operations teams to handle deliveries and provide proper after-sales service. Even though their operations are online, they are not invisible. Some other stores can only be reached by email but iRunning.sg make it a point to be contactable by phone as well, and also service walk-ins. Customers can call their office and their approachable staff will handle enquiries, or walk into the showrooms to try out the products before purchasing. 

Sustaining for 12 years alone has been an achievement as it was already longer than I expected. Moving forward, it is going to be a lot tougher to survive in this changing environment.

– Dale

Visit Running shop on Qoo10