Company Posts Largest Monthly Sales Total in 90-Year History

Schutt Sports, Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of football helmets and faceguards, made company history in July, posting the best sales month since the company was founded in 1918. Sales for the month of July shattered the previous record by 13%, based upon strong sales of the company’s three new flagship products: the ION4D^TM and AiR XP^TM football helmets and the AiR Flex^TM shoulder pads.

“The sporting goods industry is struggling to keep its head above water and that’s what makes our July so rewarding,” says Robert Erb, CEO of Schutt. “Everyone in our company is pushing it to the limit, thanks to these new products. From our sales force to our factory to our distribution center, everyone is just knocking it out of the park right now.”

In a move unprecedented in the football hard goods category, Schutt has introduced two new football helmets during the last eight months. Normally, that’s a process that takes several years. But demand for the ION 4D^TM and the AiR XP^TM has been so great, the company has been forced to deal with a good problem - keeping up with demand.

“The AiR XP^TM is the fastest growing helmet in the NFL and in college football,” says J.C. Wingo, Executive Director of Football Development for Schutt. “One team in the NFL ordered 100 helmets from us. Usually, teams are slow to adapt to new helmets, testing the water by purchasing 5 or 10 helmets when it’s introduced. With the AiR XP^TM, we’re finding colleges are ordering 30, 40 or 60 at a time. Boston College hasn’t ordered a helmet from us since Doug Flutie left. They just ordered 30. That’s just unheard of.”

Several major Division 1-BCS schools have decided to go completely with Schutt helmets, thanks to the ION 4D^TM and AiR XP^TM.  Penn State and South Florida will be using Schutt helmets exclusively, as will West Virginia and TCU, to name a few. 

The new shoulder pad, the AiR Flex^TM, has been flying under the radar, as the new helmets grab all of the headlines. But, the AiR Flex^TM has been widely accepted at the highest levels of football and is also the fastest growing shoulder pad line in the NFL and college football.

“The AiR Flex^TM pads bring to the elite player a quality in their equipment they’ve been lacking,” says Wingo. “A truly lightweight shoulder pad that is strong enough to withstand the most violent impact and performs well enough to keep an average of 66% more of that impact from getting to the player’s body. Once we got teams and players to understand that, the AiR Flex^TM was the talk of locker rooms across the country. In one NFL locker room, in fact, we went from zero players wearing our shoulder pads to twenty - just by letting them try it out in the off season.”

The company is poised to ride the wave of opportunity with these two new helmets even farther, as August is trending upwards towards an even higher total. The company could wind up breaking the sales record it just set in July. That success has reverberated throughout the company, at all levels. In fact, the company just expanded its customer service program to six days a week because of the demand.

“I have the utmost confidence we’ll keep this going,” says Erb. “We’re just weeks away from introducing our new football product line for 2009 and we’re going to turn a few heads when they see what’s in our pipeline. We’ll be breaking our monthly record a few more times in the foreseeable future.”