Playwell: An Idea Born in Kindergarten, Grown on Amazon

Playwell started in 2012 as a physical sports goods shop. Today it is an online business selling on several marketplaces and in several European countries, with a catalogue that left the boundaries of sport a long time ago. We spoke with Jacopo Esposito, one of the two co-founders, who runs the online side, to hear how you get to where they are now.

Interview with Jacopo Esposito, co-founder of Playwell

How did Playwell start?

We began in 2012: my business partner and I opened a physical sports goods shop. For the first three or four years we worked only there, on the physical side.

Then a friend of ours said: why don't you try selling online? At the beginning we approached it through eBay, but it wasn't a business. It was a way to clear leftover stock and recover capital that was tied up, the kind that is hardest to get back any other way.

And how did you get to Amazon?

After a year or two we joined Amazon as well, because we felt it was taking hold, especially on accessories. The starting idea was always the same: take the slower-moving items in the shop and clear them online.

But once we saw some results on Amazon, everything took a different turn. We started thinking about investments tied only to online. And some suppliers followed us there, opening up discounts and commercial opportunities we didn't even know existed.

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The Turning Point for Playwell

The real change came in 2020, with Covid.

Until then we had only sold the brands we already carried inside our shop. Then we found ourselves working exclusively online for a period, and at the same time we saw some of the suppliers we stocked in the shop struggling. From there we started selling other sports brands we didn't carry, and little by little items that had nothing to do with sport at all.

At that point we split the two businesses. On one side the physical sports goods shop, which stands on its own two feet and is run by my partner. On the other side the online business, which I run.

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When Selling Online Stopped Being Simple

The difficulties weren't there at the start. They came over time.

When I began, paradoxically, you didn't even need an EAN code. I don't remember eBay or Amazon asking us for the EAN, the UPC or SDS sheets to check materials in those first two years. You just had to write a listing and publish a product. In terms of publishing an item, it was almost easier back then.

Then the regulation of online selling arrived, one piece at a time, alongside the explosion of Amazon. Today Amazon quite rightly asks for the EAN or the purchase invoices to prove where the items come from. And some suppliers have decided they no longer want to sell on Amazon at all.

The same thing happened on the tax side, in parallel. As volumes grew, Amazon asked us, if we wanted to keep selling in Germany, France and Spain, to register for VAT for tax identification in those countries. These were situations we knew nothing about, very far from the world of someone running a sports goods shop in Italy.

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Playwell and ZonWizard

It was precisely for the foreign filings that I turned to an accounting firm. An auditor there was the one who gave me your name: he told me I was managing everything with Excel, in a rudimentary way, and that I should look at ZonWizard.

I asked around among a few other sellers, then I ran a one-month trial to really understand it. We didn't even take the top plan straight away: we started small. It worked well for me, and since March 2024 the collaboration has still been going.

Today there are two of us using it fully: me and one colleague.

I use it on both fronts, for the accounting reports and for profit analysis. The tax side isn't my field, I just take the results. On margin and profit, though, it is a completely different story, because that is my area.

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The Real Profit, Returns Included

There is one thing I used to do in a far more complicated way, and it is the reason I would never go back: understanding the real profit of a product.

I used to think very much on a monthly basis. But plenty of things are bought one month and returned the next. If you only look at the month, that product seems to be doing well when in fact it isn't doing well at all.

Seeing the number of returns and the actual return rate of each product helped me a lot with the real result of certain items. And above all with where to invest. Today the Profit Table is my starting point, and the Product View is where I go when I need to drill down to a single item.

Asked whether I could see myself working the way I work today, but without a tool like yours, the answer is blunt.

It would be impossible.

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From 2 Partners to 7 Team Members

We started as two partners. Today we have five members of staff between warehouse workers and the people who give us a hand, plus my partner and me.

Volumes are growing exponentially, and most likely without ZonWizard they wouldn't have grown that way, in such a short time. We would have understood each situation far more slowly. Instead everything is growing to the point that we need a hand physically too, not just digitally: software helps you go faster, but the work still has to be done somewhere.

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The Future of Playwell

Since Covid I have been dealing almost exclusively with finding new sales opportunities. I reinvented myself: from a sports goods shopkeeper, which was my partner's passion and mine, into a compulsive researcher of new commercial opportunities. New labels, new brands, new products that might suit us.

Because online isn't just dynamic, it changes completely. It has often happened to me that a brand which three years ago accounted for a significant share of our market changed its internal dynamics: a new CEO arrives, a new sales director, and from one moment to the next they put a stop to online sales. At that point you have to shift investments and resources onto other brands.

I am always looking for a plan B and a plan C, in case the dynamics change on what I know.

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A Company Born in Kindergarten

There is one thing worth telling, because you don't hear it every day.

My partner and I had been thinking about opening this sports goods shop ever since we went to kindergarten together. Then primary school, middle school and high school together, and now we run a company side by side. Only now, telling you about it, do I realise how unusual that is.

He is the person who has put up with me the longest, and I have put up with him for a lifetime.

If you ask me when the company was born, the honest answer is that the desire to build something together was always there: the rest came later. Online, on the other hand, wasn't just something we hadn't thought about, we didn't even know it existed.

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Thank you Playwell

Thank you Jacopo for your time and for telling us all of this, from the school desks to the shop and on to Europe, with the right people alongside you.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to share our story, for the support in solving problems, and for always listening to our suggestions.