Background
Retail Sports Ireland (RSI) was founded in 2015 by a group of independent Sports Retailers, whom, having worked together before, decided to formalise their association in order to grow, collaborate, network, negotiate and trade together for mutual benefit.
Expertise
RSI is comprised of specialist sports retailers and is a non profit organisation. We have a committee that takes care of group administration and the organisation of it’s members. Like any organisation, we require a degree of expertise in many areas. What differentiates us from other similar groups is that the expertise lies in our members.
Category Managers
Each member is a sports specialists in their own right. We have been able to assess this talent pool, assign specific roles to members and apply this expertise across all of our businesses. This is demonstrated across our panel of Category Managers(CM). Each CM is responsible for learning their category in each of the members businesses. Because we have built up a level of trust from working with each other before in another group, we trust each other to make decisions that mutually benefit us all.
Management
It is this level of focus that allows us to benefit from these specialist Human Resources, normally only achievable in much larger organisations. Each member has over a dozen specialist category managers focused on every area of their business – managing everything from examining cost efficiencies to managing supplier relationships and everything in between.
Work Ethos and Membership
There are no paid executives in our group. Members are expected to work hard for each other and this is a condition of membership – they will get out of it what they are prepared to put in to it. They are expected to cooperate and communicate with each other. We have a strong membership and we are very protective of that.