In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Match Point Promotions grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2025 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Shawn Winston: Match Point Promotions started with a specific problem. A friend of mine who was an assistant coach at the University of Iowa was looking for custom vibration dampeners for his team but couldn’t find a reliable supplier. The options were either generic, low-quality, or impossible to order in reasonable quantities. I realized that while the promotional products industry is massive, it wasn’t serving the specific needs of racquet sports teams.
That gap launched the brand. What makes us genuinely different is that we are specialists, not generalists. Most promo companies rely on automated templates and sell everything from pens to keychains. We are tennis and pickleball natives. We understand the court feel players need, meaning we obsess over product texture, durability, and design in a way that generalist distributors simply can’t. We don’t just put a logo on a product; we create gear that teams actually want to use.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1–2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Shawn Winston: The first major turning point was in 2022, when we made the strategic decision to go all-in on Pickleball. We saw the sport exploding, not just as a pastime but as a structured community with leagues and tournaments. By pivoting our inventory and marketing to serve this new demographic alongside our tennis roots, we rode a massive wave of interest that led to substantial year-over-year growth.
The second turning point was a comprehensive redesign of our website. In the custom promotional space, trust is everything. If your site looks outdated, customers assume your print quality will be too. We invested in a sleeker, more intuitive interface that better showcased our product capabilities. That visual upgrade didn’t just look nice; it immediately improved our conversion rates and gave us the credibility needed to land larger B2B contracts that previously might have passed us by.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Shawn Winston: Our primary revenue driver is organic search (SEO). In a niche market like ours, purchase intent is high. People aren’t browsing for custom vibration dampeners for fun. They are looking to solve a specific problem immediately. We’ve learned that general keywords don’t convert. The magic happens in the specific, long-tail queries. Optimizing for terms like ‘bulk custom dampeners for college teams’ brings us customers who are ready to buy, rather than just browse.
Our second major channel is email marketing. The key lesson here has been timing and seasonality. Coaches and directors operate on strict seasonal schedules. We learned that hitting their inbox with a generic offer doesn’t work, but sending a reminder six weeks before the season starts, right when they are planning their budget, results in immediate sales. It’s less about frequency and more about being helpful at the exact right moment.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Shawn Winston: We view the rise of AI search not as a threat, but as a demand for higher-quality authority. In 2025, it won’t be enough to just rank for keywords. We need to provide the answers. To that end, we are launching a dedicated blog section with deep, informational content specifically designed to feed LLMs the expert data they need to recommend us answering the technical questions about materials, durability, and customization that generalist sites ignore.
Simultaneously, we are looking at how AI can improve the user experience once they land on our site. We plan to integrate AI-powered tools, such as instant mockup generators, that allow customers to visualize their custom gear in real-time. By combining high-authority content with high-utility tools, we ensure we remain visible to search engines and indispensable to customers.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Shawn Winston: We turn first-time buyers into repeat customers by focusing on two things: an amazing product and obsessive communication. In the custom promotional space, clients are often anxious. They worry if the logo will look right or if the shipment will arrive before their tournament. We alleviate that by staying in personal contact throughout the entire process, from the initial design proof to the shipping notification.
We don’t just ship and disappear. We follow up after the order arrives to ensure everything is to their liking. That simple human touch asking ‘Did the team love them?’ builds a level of trust that automated systems can’t match. When a coach knows we care as much about their gear as they do, they don’t just come back next season; they tell the other coaches in their league about us.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Shawn Winston: If I were advising a founder one stage behind me, I would double down on niche authority. Don’t try to be Amazon. Pick one specific category like we did with racquet sports and own the SEO and expertise for it completely. That specific focus builds trust faster than a broad catalog ever could, and it allows you to dominate search results for high-intent keywords.
Conversely, I would stop doing manual operational work immediately. In the early days, it’s easy to feel like you need to grind through every administrative task. But with the AI tools available now for everything from content creation to customer sorting and design assistance, there is no excuse for a founder to be bogged down in admin. Automate the mundane tasks so you can focus entirely on strategy and growth.
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