Sports Basement uses Wonolo to get people with as little as 2-3 hours’ notice.

About Sports Basement

Sports Basement is a sporting goods retailer with six locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. They take pride in selling the best brands at basement prices. But beyond that, a Sports Basement store is a community center, a hangout, a hub. The stores are a second home to local athletes and groups who use the public space daily for club meetings, to host potlucks, to start a workout from the front doors, or to pick up some tips at a speaker series event.

Since 2015, Sports Basement has leveraged Wonolo to staff a number of jobs across its six retail locations.

The Challenge

Over time, Sports Basement faced quite a few staffing challenges. The white-hot Bay Area job market was making it tough to hire quickly, as fewer people were looking for more jobs. In addition, there were spikes in both deliveries and customer traffic that required on-demand staffing.

Enter Wonolo

Wonolo has been key to Sports Basement in terms of the flexibility to scale staff up and down at a moment’s notice. Aaron Schweifler, Sports Basement’s Director of Operations commented, “We save money by being able to dial up staffing only when we need it.” This agility in staffing is a big win for Sports Basement, given the shifting daily nature of their business needs.

Wonolo has also been instrumental in saving the day as Sports Basement rolled out new offerings. Aaron shared, “We started renting ski apparel this year. This required huge amounts of laundry to be done. We found a consistent Wonoloer who would use her car to drive 10-15 sacks of ski laundry to a local laundromat and do laundry all day. We ended up hiring her.”

The Benefits

The benefits that Sports Basement has realized since using Wonolo are many, both in terms of time and dollars saved. Aaron elaborated, “Wonolo was a quick, effective way to meet these challenges. A deep pool of Wonoloers meant that we could get people with as little as 2-3 hours’ notice. The review system meant that we got good, motivated people. The price was affordable, given the fully-loaded cost of employing people in the Bay Area.”

No matter the time of year or the task at hand, Wonolo has proven to be a reliable, game-changing source of labor for Sports Basement as it continues to be the go-to sporting goods retailer for the Bay Area.