In the early 1980s Kevin Cummins and Pat Moore made a business trip to the United States to close a door and knock on a door. Cummins Sports was still a young business, and sports retail was not yet a land of marauding giants. They had taken a punt on a shoe manufacturer in New York, but there had been issues with quality control and in the break-up they were resigned to losing their investment.
After New York they flew to Beaverton, Oregon, where Nike had its headquarters. Bill Bowerman had designed the sole of its first running shoe with his wife’s waffle iron, and it had been such a success that in 1980 the company exploded on the stock exchange.
“Nike were a crowd that we had only read about in a magazine,” says Cummins.
And yet the Nike people were prepared to meet a small trader from a small city in a small market and strike a deal. This was globalisation before the world was shrink-wrapped into a smartphone. After a couple of meetings Cummins Sports was Nike’s agent in Ireland.
“Pat was driving around the country introducing people to Nike,” says Cummins. “They had never heard of it. We were young. Any opening we saw we went after it. When Pat came in to us originally, he had two or three pairs of Adidas shoes in a Dunnes Stores bag. He was doing it out of his front room.
“The place where we started [on Princess Street, in the centre of Cork] was a fish shop on a Friday and we opened it as a sports shop on Monday. All our clothing hung on one roller rail. We didn’t know our arse from our elbow, but we were prepared to work hard.”
A few years ago, Nike stopped doing business with independent traders. They decided to pursue a strategy of “consumer direction acceleration”, a word salad Ricky Gervais might have put in the mouth of David Brent in The Office. Nike has since had second thoughts.
I don’t get how somebody can order a set of darts online and feel that they’re right for them
— George O’Connell of the TW Murray shop in Cork
For small independent traders in the teeming world of sports retail, though, there is always the threat of earthquakes. Just like in professional sport, money makes the odds. The big multistore, multinational chains have the wherewithal to buy from suppliers in vast quantities, which naturally queers the pitch in their favour.
And even in the age of gluttonous, trigger-happy, online shopping, the big retail chains have doubled down on maintaining a footprint in shopping malls and on the high streets. A couple of weeks ago the French giant Decathlon opened its fourth shop in Ireland on a 2,300sq m site in Douglas Shopping Centre in Cork. Worldwide, it has more than 1,900 shops in 80 countries.
And yet, just like the little brown mouse in The Gruffalo, some small independent traders have found ways to survive in the retail jungle. One of the oldest mantras in business is that people buy from people. For the small traders, that is the first commandment.
“When we started we had a bricks-and-mortar store because that’s where most of your business came from,” says Michael Murphy, the Donegal footballer, who opened a sports shop in Letterkenny with his former Donegal team-mate Neil Gallagher in 2014.
“You were building up that relationship [with customers] and you were able to offer that one bit of advice or guidance on a pair of runners or whatever. You knew the face, you knew they were coming back, you knew roughly what they were looking for. You’re always weighing up whether coming through the door is warranted long term, but we believe it is. It’s still hard to beat that interaction with somebody and that conversation and figuring it out.”
In Letterkenny, there are five sports shops: three of them belong to big-brand multichains, but the other two are independents. A sixth shop left the pitch a couple of years ago, but the others are sustaining themselves and maybe sustaining each other in small ways. Nobody stocks everything.
When Michael Gibbons and his wife Rosemary opened Grandstand Sports in Dún Laoghaire 22 years ago, Lifestyle Sports was already in place and Elverys followed a few years later.
“Lifestyle closed their branch here about four or five years ago and it was really disappointing for us,” says Gibbons. “People would go in there looking for a hockey stick or advice on a tennis racket and they would send them up to us. We had people coming in to us looking for a United jersey and we were sending them down to them. People were coming to town, though, because there was a good sports offering.”
As a business model, Grandstand Sports decided to narrow its focus. In its hinterland, hockey, tennis and sea swimming were markets that needed to be served. A couple of years ago, when a unit became available across the road, the Gibbonses took another plunge and created a bespoke outlet for tennis and its spin-offs, padel and pickleball, under the management of their son Sam. Every independent trader needs a point of difference.
But was it a risk? “Absolutely,” says Michael Gibbons. “Everything is a risk. Honest to God, it’s not easy. We’re family-run, we have a couple of staff. We’re not a big operation. We open the doors every day and you hope people come in.
“We were pretty green when we opened first. We know how to twist and turn a bit better now. We were lucky to survive when the financial crash happened. It was miserable. We probably should have closed but we battled back. We just worked harder, we kept our overheads lower, we did an awful lot ourselves. We were doing seven days a week.”
The small traders, though, are always vulnerable to shocks. In 2015 Munster Rugby signed an exclusive deal with Lifestyle Sports. It meant that any independent traders, or any of the other major chains, would have to negotiate with one of their competitors to gain access to Munster kit. For Cummins Sports it didn’t make commercial sense.
“I was looking back at the figures,” says Cummins. “From August 1st, 2008, [four months after Munster won their second Heineken Cup] to May 6th, 2009, we sold €380,000 worth of Munster rugby stuff. We lost that. It was a savage blow to us. You have no idea what Munster were like at Christmas. It was enormous.”
The small traders must be nimble. Gareth Britton has run a sports shop in Donegal Town for nearly 30 years. He is also on the executive of Retail Sport Ireland, an umbrella group for about 20 independent shops. Twice a year they host events where a dozen or more suppliers display their wares and because the suppliers are dealing with a group of buyers, the terms are better.
But the shops are still putting their necks on the line. “We have orders done the whole way up to Christmas next year,” says Britton, “and we haven’t even covered this Christmas yet. Forecasting is one of the hardest parts of the trade. If you had a recession next summer and you’ve all your buying done, you’ve a lot of chopping and changing to do if the suppliers will let you.
“We’ll be in business 30 years next September. We’ve come through the Celtic Tiger, we’ve come through the recession, we’ve come through the ecommerce boom, we’ve come through Covid. We’ve diversified and I suppose that’s our saving grace. We can move fast when we have to.”
Britton invested in embroidery equipment to offer a more personalised service. In Murphy’s shop you can have jerseys autographed. They sell trophies and medals too because that builds relationships with clubs and schools. People buy from people.
TW Murray has been trading on Patrick Street in the centre of Cork city since 1828. The people there know the rules. In the beginning all they sold was guns, but by the beginning of the last century theirs was the biggest general sports shop in Cork. Over time, though, they wouldn’t have survived unless they adapted.
They still sell guns but shooting, as a sport, has been in decline for decades, so they diversified into fishing a long time ago. George O’Connell is the third generation of his family to own the shop, and he says he has seen an uptick in young people coming through the door to buy fishing rods and tackle. He suspects it must be an instruction from social media.
But they were always passionate about darts, long before its first TV boom in the 1980s, and through all its incarnations ever since. They were on hand for the Crafty Cockney Eric Bristow and they are present now for the kids entranced by Luke Littler.
“Darts is very big for us,” says O’Connell. “We’re the only shop that will go through the darts with a person rather than expecting them to buy them off the shelf. To me, it’s like putting on a pair of football boots – darts is a hugely individual sport. I don’t get how somebody can order a set of darts online and feel that they’re right for them. Normally I’d let someone take six or seven sets out of the packaging and let them feel them in their hand.
“I’ve often said it, if you go off and buy a table tennis table from one of the big shops, you can’t get the tennis balls off them afterwards. That’s the kind of scenario I come across constantly. They sell you a pool table but you can’t buy the chalk for the cues afterwards. They’ll sell you a soccer ball, but you can’t buy a needle to inflate the ball. That’s where I see the big crowds failing terribly.”
The challenges never relent, though. In 2023 Asics, the Japanese sportswear manufacturer, stopped supplying small independent stores. It was reported at the time that they refused to do business with any shop that sold fewer than 500 pairs of their shoes in a year, but Asics never confirmed that number. “They basically shut out about 480 shops between Ireland and the UK,” says Britton.
O’Connell is certain they wouldn’t be trading on Patrick Street if they didn’t own the premises. In Donegal, Britton reckons there are only about half as many independent sports shops as there were 20 years ago. In Dublin, Gibbons reckons the number of independent general sports shops could be counted on one hand.
Cummins Sports emerged from an examinership process during the summer with its business streamlined and consolidated. At one stage they had seven shops around Cork, but during the boom years they were locked into Celtic Tiger rents and that was unsustainable. The business is healthy again.
For all of them, the next few weeks will be the harvest season. May the sun shine.
Source: The Irish Times · Denis Walsh
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