The new and improved Nueva spirit store re-launched on Aug. 7, hosted by a new vendor on a new platform.
Driven by feedback from students and parents on the prior store’s small range of options, a parent-led team spent over three months consulting with community members and looking for a new partner to manage the store.
“We heard feedback that the product quality and options weren’t great, and that our customer base of Nueva parents weren’t particularly happy with the offerings,” said Susan Hayward, one of the parents who helped launch the new store.
Nueva eventually was able to partner with SquadLocker, which offered a more streamlined system than the previous vendor ApparelNow, and the opportunity to use popular brands such as Champion and UnderArmour.
SquadLocker offers the Spirit Store team increased insight into the ordering backend, allowing the parents who run it to understand which items are most popular and which items aren’t selling as well.
“SquadLocker provides us really pretty rich information on what items sold to whom and over what time period,” Hayward explained. “So there is an opportunity—if something’s not selling, we can replace it with and try something new with data from SquadLocker. On our old website, it was just a complete guess as to what was selling.”
The team is pleased to have already seen a significant jump in sales volume and customers. In the first month since launching the new store, they have already achieved over 60 percent of last year’s total sales volume. This is a huge leap considering last year’s revenue amounted to less than ten thousand dollars worth of merchandise purchased at the store in total.
SquadLocker caters to a wide variety of community members. Apart from athletes, the site also gives clubs and affinity groups a chance to design their own custom Nueva merch and sell it via the spirit store. Lucas R. ’27, one of the Upper School spirit reps, is looking forward to utilizing this feature in the near future.
“It’s a really great opportunity to highlight different groups of different interests at Nueva,” Lucas said.
