GEWOUSA

GEWO USA is the American arm of GEWO, a table tennis equipment manufacturer. It was established by Ben Nisbet, a long-time table tennis equipment specialist, in partnership with professional player Mishel Levinski — on the principle that, in their words, building a better foundation “with the eyes of a player” is what the youth and professional levels of the sport need.

That changes the design brief. A multi-brand retailer helps a customer choose between brands. A manufacturer’s store has to carry the brand itself — its range logic, its sponsored players, its reason for existing — while still functioning as a shop. Every layout decision on the site is a negotiation between those two jobs.

The menu follows the sport’s own taxonomy rather than a generic shop structure — twenty-seven subcategories under six headings, mapped above. A player who already knows they want long pips reaches them in two moves.

That is the entire point: the menu is doing the work a shop assistant would do, and it can only do it if whoever built it understands the categories.

The homepage carries collection tiles showing how many products sit behind each one. Fifty blades and fifty rubbers is a serious range; seven pairs of shoes is not, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise.

Showing the count costs nothing and stops a customer bouncing off a category that was never going to have what they wanted.

A rotating trust strip sits directly under the hero: pro tested, match-ready consistency, premium materials, precision engineered. Those are manufacturing claims, not retail ones — a reseller has no standing to make them.

Placing them immediately after the hero, before the catalogue, frames everything below as the manufacturer’s own equipment rather than another storefront selling the same boxes.

The site features its sponsored players — Alex Averin, Kokou Fanny, Felix Lartey, Romain Lorentz, Amoolya Menon and Kazeem Makanjuola — but positions them below the product sections rather than above them.

A visitor who arrived to buy rubber does not want to meet the roster first. A visitor who has been scrolling for two minutes is exactly the person for whom ‘these players use this equipment’ is the closing argument.

The hardest customer in table tennis retail is the one who does not know which blade goes with which rubber. The store answers that with combo specials — pre-matched setups carried as their own navigation category, their own homepage section and their own collection tile, with the saving shown as a percentage.

It converts an intimidating configuration problem into a single product decision, and it does it without hiding the components from the players who do want to choose them.