Zepp Labs’ aggressive approach has led them to considerable headway within the sports technology sector. This year alone they have formed partnerships with SportsBoard and Milos Raonic, which augments their swing performance data and tennis products, respectively. Each of these initiatives strategically building off from work done thus far.
Fast forward from the projections offered during CES 2015, and Zepp Labs is following its own advice through now delving into the softball arena and additional support from coaches.
Softball, in its own right, possesses a passionate community that tends to get overlooked by sporting goods manufacturers, but one that Zepp has grown to appreciate, especially as a ripe target for continued growth. They have enlisted the likes of legendary Olympic champion, Jennie Finch, two-time Olympic winner, Natasha Watley, as well as collegiate coaches in Heather Tarr from Washington and Sue Enquist of UCLA. These players and coaches share the same mission as Zepp Labs, as far as helping athletes improve. These spokespeople provide notable insight into the game of softball, where Zepp will look to leverage in conjunction with their own athletic development and guidance.
“Players and coaches love the real-time feedback and actionable data that Zepp delivers as it is instantaneous, efficient, and it scientifically supports what coaches and players think is happening with a swing. This allows the coach or athlete to customize drills for improvement,” Jason Fass, Zepp Labs’ Chief Executive Officer, tells SportTechie, in terms of the feedback they’ve gathered from their users leading up to this new partnership.
“We’ve also been receiving a lot of excitement around the video tools, and the softball community is finding our library of drills and tips to be very helpful,” added Fass.
According to the SFIA, there were 2,498,000 and 6,868,000 total participants in 2013 of fastpitch and slowpitch softball, respectively. These figures represent a -4.8 percent decline in fastpitch and -7.3 percent in slowpitch from the previous year’s playing levels for anyone above six years-old. Yet despite a recent decline, Fass acknowledges that they underestimated the size of the softball market. It wasn’t until launching the baseball product thereafter, that they noticed thousands of softball players joining their platform. At which point, Zepp realized that their overall market approach wasn’t optimal. Softball instantly became a priority to forge ahead and try to capitalize on.
In the latest Zepp Baseball-Softball app, users can determine what they want to accomplish for either fastpitch or slowpitch modes. Besides the analytics collected via the sensor attached to the bat, softball players will get Zepp Insights, a weekly assessment report that offers customized recommendations derived from practice sessions.
Therefore, this update centers around delivering a tailored, more softball-focused user experience for Zepp Labs’ consumers. Now, once a player or coach identifies themselves as a softball user (as opposed to baseball), all of the content, like drills, tips, and goals, displayed to them within the app will register as softball-specific for their personal account.
Softball players will still obtain all of the same data as baseball, such as bat speed, hand speed, attack angle, etc. The softball app continues to allow users to capture and view their swing in 3D and track improvements. The difference, again, is that all of the aforementioned activity configures to a softball program instead. That’s where the softball and coaches serving as spokespeople come into play.
Specifically with Zepp Insights, though, its system analyzes the user’s swings relative to their respective goals on a weekly basis. It determines what the user did well and what they can improve upon. Zepp then gives the a user a drill to work on based on this data. Zepp Labs can claim it’s the first platform to take softball swing data and distill actionable instructions, where it’s cultivated from individual user-produced metrics.
To go along with the softball focus, Zepp Labs ventures more into the coaching aspect of player performance, debuting the Zepp Coaches Center, an instructional video hub.
Available on their website, they have compiled a library consisting of over 60 how-to videos, drills, fun exercises, and practice plans. Fass is confident that such content will be able to assist athletes reach the next level of their game, because each video stands as a “culmination of tried-and-true methods” from some of best coaches and athletes around today.
In order to create the quality and depth of this library, the aforementioned coaches and softball endorsers have been instructed a specific outline for their videos to address and provide solutions towards softball and baseball player needs and common mistakes. They recorded hours upon hours of footage with their partners to really break down the fundamentals of the game, offering new tips as well.
Given that Zepp’s sensors capture more than 2,000 data points per swing, they’re using all of this data combined with an athlete’s goals to quantify actual improvement. Also, this process helps Zepp improve their algorithms and overall experience. Zepp users can expect more new content and features down the road that resonates, both for the players and coaches alike.
“We’re seeing about 1,000 users sign up on our platform per day. However, the really interesting thing is that we can now see user improvement based on actual data,” says Fass.
Zepp Labs’ swing into the softball arena and solidifying their coaching tools should add another analytical layer to its current strategy to scale going forward.