$468 Million Volleyball Shoe Market Just Got a New Challenger
Avoli launched the first volleyball-specific shoe for female athletes on Thursday in a bid to solve the challenges specific to the sport.
Created by Mark Oleson, a 25-year veteran of research and innovation leader with Under Armour, Adidas and Lululemon, and Rick Anguilla, whose career includes high-level stints with Nike and Under Armour, the Avoli Vol. 1 shoe addresses the reality that volleyball players are “jumping a lot, but it’s also lunging, it’s squatting, it’s diving,” Oleson told Sourcing Journal. “Volleyball is really about making sure that forefoot [cushion] is mixed with a spring damper kind of combination.”
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Future Market Insights pegs the value of the volleyball shoe market at more than $468 million last year, a figure it projects will eclipse $732 million by 2031. Statista’s December research says most of the 560,000-plus high school athletes who played volleyball in the 2021/22 school year were girls. Now, Avoli is taking on brands from Mizuno and Asics to Adidas and Under Armour that currently serve demand for women’s volleyball shoes.
Avoli’s founders hope to stand out by designing the new footwear with female anatomy and physiology in mind.
“If you look at the hip ratio to height, the Q-angle is different in women,” Oleson said, referring to the intersection of lines between the knee and the spine. “So the shoe is designed at about 80 degrees and everything has a very hard, rounded edge to make sure no matter what happens when they’re landing down, it’s getting you back into that [ready] position. That’s not something that normally your running shoe or basketball shoe would entail.”
In addition to the biomechanics of the design, the sneaker features a patent-pending heat-release mechanism that relies on holes on the top of the shoe that align with holes in the sock liners, creating a continuous vestibule of ventilation, Oleson said.
“You can actually see it on the heat camera,” Oleson said. “They push out the moisture and the heat so…you’re seeing the heat dissipate. So instead of having a wet, hot shoe that they’ve been wearing for six hours, you end up with a dry shoe that’s actually creating a little bit more turbulent flow within the environment of the shoe.”
Beyond the $140 Vol. 1 footwear available in sizes 5.5-13 and five colorways, Avioli also introduced knee pads at $40-$45 per pair, moisture-wicking sleeves at $30 and slides at $50. Oleson wouldn’t divulge the materials used in constructing Avoli products and the brand’s product pages are mum on this information as well.
Avoli secured NIL endorsement deals with three Division I women’s volleyball players: University of Nebraska outside hitter Harper Murray; Virginia setter Ashley Le; and Reilly Heinrich out of Texas. Oleson said starting out with elite collegiate players representing a variety of positions was an important part of the marketing strategy.
“We’re big fans of athlete co-creation when we start looking at a product, so we don’t design things in a hole,” Oleson said. “It’s just making sure we represent those three [positions] because of functionality, but also the size of these athletes. A back row player is normally a much shorter player and we wanted to make sure we were representing the game.”’
Oleson said the footwear and knee pads are manufactured in China with apparel and accessories split between Colombia and Vietnam. He said the decision to also make kneepads came from seeing young players burn through theirs every six to eight weeks.
“It has to do more with the abrasion of the court against their knees; it’s not a sport where they’re jumping on their knees, they’re sliding,” he said. “So we’re making sure we’ve created a really low co-efficient of frictionless materials that allow these girls to get more distance in terms of how they’re actually sliding.”
Portland, Ore.-based Avoli currently employs less than 10 staff in marketing, digital, social, innovation and brand design roles. It came to market with help from $1 million, two-thirds of its $1.5 million seed round goal.
Angel investors include Ho Nam, managing director and co-founder at Altos Ventures whose investment portfolio included Roblox and Coupang; Blythe Jack, former managing director at both TSG Consumer Partners and Rosewood Capital, who led investments in Under Armour and Backcountry.com; James Gau of ShoeBot, a footwear innovation and manufacturing company in Dongguan, China; Pete Saperstone, a partner at Greycroft Partners and former managing director in the private markets group at Fidelity, leading investments in Fanatics and On Running; and Silicon Valley high school and club volleyball coach, Shane Stent.
