Sponsor Profile:
Name: Clubsport
Address: Unit 9, Douglas Court,
Blackness Trading Precinct,
West Henderson's Wynd,
Dundee DD1 5BA
Tel: 01382 201780
Web: http://www.clubsportdundee.co.uk
Description: Clubsport is a specialist sports retailer. By specialist I mean not an ‘across-the-board’ shop that tries to sell everything that a general sports retailer might (though at one time it was). The shop is a showroom rather than a browsing or ‘passing trade’ establishment. When customers use me it tends to be because I provide a very specialist service, not readily available except perhaps in mail-order catalogues, that they are looking for.
clubsport first opened its doors in 1983. Coming from a retailing background & with sport being my life, it was perhaps a logical idea to want to open up a sports shop. My first shop was a smallish one in Broughty Ferry, the sea-side suburb of Dundee. It did try to sell ‘everything’ but with my involvement in sport & knowing from personal experience that a proper choice of equipment was often hard to find, this is where the emphasis lay. Within three years it grew to become a bigger shop on a prime site in Broughty Ferry and then there was a significant expansion in 1988 when clubsport ‘came to town’ and opened up a second premises, a 2,000 sq. ft. shop in the Wellgate Centre, at the time Dundee’s main shopping mall.
Further expansion arrived in 1991 when a third shop, and the second one in the centre of Dundee, opened and the staff number grew to fifteen. Round about this time however the face of sports retailing was changing with multiple sports retailers grabbing large slices of the cake by site acquisition all over the town. The ’independents’ like us were being squeezed and there had to be a reaction. This basically was to ’specialise to survive’ but, like every cloud, there was a silver lining.
During the last few years of the 1980s, the sports retail trade was booming which was why the number of sports shops in Dundee & elsewhere more than doubled in a short space of time. clubsport found itself having to embrace the sports fashion side of business more & more & it did so with some success. If you remember ’shell suits’, you remember the time! clubsport’s ethic on opening in 1983 had been to cater for sports people’s sporting needs rather than the general population’s fashion requirements. I wanted to help sportsmen & women find what they needed to actually play their sport, specialising on equipment & not sports fashion. Specialising to survive enabled me to get my foot back on the ball. There was no need for fancy, expensive premises on prime sites. I found an ideal location on the NW edge of Dundee’s city centre, a 1,000 sq. ft. showroom with car parking at the door, which is where I am today. April 2006 sees clubsport’s 23rd birthday and the thirteen years of ‘phase two’ leaving behind the ten years of ‘phase one’.
