How to Run a Team Store in 5 Minutes

Every season, somebody on the team has to raise their hand for gear. Usually it's a coach who already has two jobs, or a parent who volunteered for the group text and somehow ended up holding the whole logistics bag. If that's you this year, this post is the whole playbook.

The five minutes

The reason a team store takes five minutes — not five hours — is that you are not a clothing retailer. You do not need to forecast demand, count inventory, or figure out how to ship a large to a kid in Ohio who ordered through Venmo. The store runs on top of on-demand production: each order is made when it's placed, and shipped directly to the person who ordered it.

That means your job reduces to four decisions:

1. What's in the store
2. What colors, numbers, and names
3. When it opens and closes
4. Where to send the link

Everything else — payment, size breakdown, production, shipping, refunds — is already solved. You are not building a small business. You are curating a two-week pop-up.

The five decisions, in order

1. Who is this store for? Write down the group: 2025 Varsity Swim, Lincoln Middle School Lacrosse, 12U Travel Soccer. This shows up as the store name and becomes how parents describe it to each other. Keep it recognizable, not cute.

2. What goes in it? Pick between 4 and 8 items. The floor is a t-shirt, a hoodie, and one "performance" piece (a racing suit, a jersey, a technical top). The ceiling is anything that isn't going to sit unsold and confuse the checkout. Resist the urge to add a ninth thing because one person asked for it.

3. What names go on the gear? Decide this before you open the store, not after. Number-only? Number + last name? Just the team name on the back? If you let parents free-text anything, you will receive orders that say "Mom" on the jersey, and you will have to deal with that. Put guardrails in the product configurator.

4. When does it close? A two-week window is the sweet spot. Shorter than that and procrastinators miss it. Longer than that and early orderers forget they placed an order. Announce the close date on day one, and again 48 hours before close. That second announcement is responsible for about 30% of total orders.

5. Where does the link go? The team group chat is the strongest channel by far. Email is fine as a backup. Do not make a Facebook post and call it done — half your parents aren't on Facebook, and the ones who are scroll past team announcements the same way they scroll past everything else. One direct-to-humans message beats five posted-and-hoped broadcasts.

What "running" the store actually involves

After launch, the store mostly runs itself. The three things you'll do while it's open:

• Answer one or two size questions. "Do these run small?" is the most common one. The product pages already have answers; direct people there.
• Send one reminder midway. A quick "we close Friday at 8pm, last chance" message. Takes 90 seconds.
• Send the close reminder. Day-of, that morning. This is the most important message you'll send.

Once the store closes, the coordinator's job is essentially done. Orders go into production, they ship directly to each family, and nobody has to pick up or sort a giant box of gear in a parking lot.

What to do if the first store underperforms

If you open a store and participation sits at 30%, that's not a failure — that's a signal. The usual diagnoses are straightforward:

• The price felt high. Do the math on per-item markup before launch. 30% is a comfortable fundraising margin without scaring off price-sensitive families.
• There were too many options. Cut the store in half for round two.
• Communication was thin. Add two more reminders — one at the halfway mark, one 24 hours before close.

The second store you run will convert better than the first. The third will convert better than the second. This is the pattern every coordinator we've worked with follows, and it's mostly because of the meta-lesson: you learn what your specific group wants, and the store starts matching.

The part nobody tells you

The biggest difference between coordinators who dread running a team store and coordinators who do it every season without thinking is this: the dreaders try to get it perfect on the first pass. The easy-mode coordinators ship something reasonable in an hour, then iterate.

Your first store does not need to be the best store. It needs to exist, close, and produce gear. Everything else is a second-store problem.