Padel Shed owes success to using its own tools

In just a few months, Padel Shed has embedded itself in its local community and built a loyal player base. The key to this instant success? Data.

The £1.3million nine-court centre in Huddersfield has a plush but friendly vibe which you feel as soon as you enter the building on the West Yorkshire town’s Tandem Industrial Estate.

There’s lots of social space between the courts with sofas, a shop, mezzanine bar with pool table and table tennis, changing rooms and air conditioning. It’s a cut above your fast-becoming-clichéd draughty warehouse venue.

Founded by local businessman Jamie Lyne, who has a background in leisure and hospitality (he also owns the BigBox Leisure Club next door), the club opened at the start of October.

For the first 30 days, with the club only half ready, they threw the doors open and offered free court time and racket and ball hire to a host of local schools, the town’s university, charities and businesses. They partnered with Huddersfield Town FC and invited the club’s staff and sponsors in for a hit, and even hosted the Yorkshire Padel Championships.

This blizzard of early outreach brought in 2,500 new players and got the town talking. “We were flat out every day. It was exhilarating and absolutely exhausting at the same time,” founder Lyne tells The Padel Paper when we’re invited in for a hit.

But in addition to creating a local buzz, what those busy early weeks did was give Padel Shed a chance to learn about their customers.

To do that, they connected with Jack Williams, founder of On The Court, a white label app which enables padel clubs to control their brand, data and membership experience with tools for bookings, memberships, insights, coaching, events and communication.

Williams’ fully-branded app gave Padel Shed full control over its customer data — a database that currently consists of 850 premium members, 2,500 casual players and a further 3,300 app registrations.

Williams explained: “When someone joins, we know their rating and their age, and as they start to play, we know how often they play, with whom, at what times, when they access coaching and much more.

“That knowledge about them makes our customer communication so much more effective, drives occupancy and makes us better at retention.

“If someone has played five times in a month then not shown up for a couple of weeks, they’ll get an in-app communication with a tailored offer. If we want to push an over-50s session, we can promote it specifically to that segment, likewise beginners or advanced, or if it’s a Christmas party, we’ll promote it to everyone.”

In short, data enables Padel Shed to have proactive and relevant conversations with different segments of their customer base and take steps to improve their individual experience.

“We use the demographic data to gain all sorts of insights,” added Williams. “Do 50+ players access coaching quicker than younger ones? Do women want coaching more than men? We don’t know yet, but we’re going to find out. It’s early days, but the potential is massive.”

It’s these kinds of insights that many operators claim they cannot access through the the market-leading court booking app. This year has seen several multi-site operators such as Rocket Padel and Padium move away from Playtomic citing lack of control over their own customer data.

Lyne revealed: “We looked at Playtomic in great detail before we’d even done any construction. We quickly worked out that we wanted to control our customer journey. At our gyms, we’ve got really good information on demographics and it guides our businesses. None of that was available with Playtomic.”

Padel Shed has formed a partnership with the BPT Academy whose high-performance training centre is based at the club, attracting the likes of GB no.1 junior Ben Phillips and GB player Laura Jackson. There’s talk of Padel Shed becoming an LTA Centre of Excellence.

Padel Shed are in negotiations over a second site and have their eyes on four or five others. Again, data will play a significant part in this expansion.

“If you don’t have data on your customers, how can you write a business plan?” said Lyne. “If we’re all sharing the same customer base [as on Playtomic], then it’s very difficult to see where to go next. It was key to us to get our own data and you can be sure we’ll grow from that data.”