Barstool Sports launched Balls Beachwear on Friday. So how is it doing?
Well… In 24 hours they have generated over $175K in sales .
Here is the story of how they did it.
This blog will be a little inside Barstool so I apologize if you do not know all the people I reference, but I have to imagine the majority of people have at least heard of Barstool by now.
This was a very successful product launch done by Barstool. They built up excitement and anticipation and used all of their promotional tools to launch a product/brand that did over 2300 orders on the first day.
The Birth of The Idea
About 10 months ago, Glenny Balls mentioned to Dave Portnoy on Barstool Radio that he wanted to create a Hawaiian-type clothing line. Dave bought in immediately and talked about it on their nightly “Run Down” show:
Tommy Bahama is QUIVERING in his fucking boots.
— Glenny Balls (@Glenny_balls) October 13, 2020
Balls Beachwear coming soon 🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫 pic.twitter.com/jHzzbnUvIK
So how did they get over 2300 orders in under 24 hours?
Barstool built up the anticipation and excitement for the brand. Over several months from when the idea was first made public until last month, they would give a few updates that the product line was coming.
In the middle of June 2021 we started to get more concrete information that the line would be released soon:
Day of Launch
Friday July 16th at 11am the twitter account @ballsbeachwear posted an image of Dave Portnoy wearing the Balls Beachwear shirt:
Beach Wear for the Sophisticated Gentleman pic.twitter.com/OsG9Jq8Fy6
— Balls Beachwear (@ballsbeachwear) July 16, 2021
A half-hour later, Glenny Balls (@glenny_balls) tweeted:
You can’t tell me @ballsbeachwear isn’t slimming. You REALLY can’t. pic.twitter.com/kYgaT54fdd
— Glenny Balls (@Glenny_balls) July 16, 2021
At 12:50pm Big Cat (@barstoolbigcat) tweeted an image of him wearing the Balls Beachwear attire with a caption “Balls Beachwear Day>>>”:
Balls Beachwear Day >>> pic.twitter.com/lh7OxPod8N
— Big Cat (@BarstoolBigCat) July 16, 2021
Then at 1:48pm this tweet was released from the Balls Beachwear twitter account:
100 likes and we will drop the first line of #BallsBeachwear at 3PM pic.twitter.com/gG5ujKaUQb
— Balls Beachwear (@ballsbeachwear) July 16, 2021
Similar posts were made on their Instagram accounts.
At 3pm, I got the email from Barstool Sports with the subject line “Balls Beachwear Is Here” and this was the content of the email:

At 3:25pm I placed an order and found out that 600 orders had already been placed before me. I checked in at the 24-hour mark and found out that over 2300 orders had been placed.
$75 Average Order Value
It is impossible for me to know exactly what their average order value is but by looking at a couple of data points, I estimate that their average order value is around $75.
The lowest a person could spend was $66 ($60 for swim trunks plus shipping). However, there were bundle options for $120-$140. By sorting their products on their website by best selling, I can see that 7 of their top 8 best selling items are between $60-$65. The 8th best-selling item is a bundle for $125.
Also many styles of the swim trunks are now sold out, which signals to me those were the most popular items to purchase.
The theory is, the vast majority of people placed an order for one item of $60-$65. Then you have people that bought the bundles or bought multiple items in one order.
My best guess is that their average order value is around $75. Which means with 2300 orders at AOV of $75, they generated north of $170K in sales in under 24 hours.
Zero Advertising Dollars Spent
This is a great example of the “Barstool Machine”. Unlike most other companies, Barstool does not have to spend money to get their product in front of an audience. Barstool already owns their audience with their blog, with their social media accounts, and with their email list.
They have the audience, they just have to sell into it.
Another great feature is that each one of their content creators is an influencer. A brand would pay between $1K – $50K to get any one of their creators to post on their social accounts about their product. Barstool employs these creators so they do not have to pay anything for that exposure.
Barstool had 10-15 of their content creators posting about the release of Balls Beachwear on Friday. Dave Portnoy posted, Big Cat Posted, Ria Posted, Glenny Posted, The Main Barstool account posted, and on and on. They reached 10s of millions of people with this release.
If a brand approached the Barstool content creators and got them all to post for their product like they did for Balls Beachwear, it would have cost close to $100K. But Barstool doesn’t have to pay that.
That is the Barstool Machine. They have built a loyal and engaged audience through their content. Which took many years, but now they are able to release a new product line and sell $170K in 24 hours.
Interesting note:
They created a store just for Balls Beachwear rather than selling it on their Barstool Sports store. I am curious why they decided this product line needed to have its own store. I wonder if there are bigger things they are planning for this brand.
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