Learn how the viral Banana Ball baseball league leverages ShipBob’s WMS to manage their inventory across online and point-of-sale (POS) retail channels, sail through peak season, and actually enjoy fulfillment.
Customer Profile
The Savannah Bananas are a viral, entertainment-driven baseball team based in Savannah, Georgia, that reimagines America’s pastime with their own fast-paced “Banana Ball” rules, choreographed dances, and nonstop fan engagement. Like all six teams in the Banana Ball Championship League, their mission is to put fans first, prioritizing fun over tradition while touring stadiums nationwide. Beyond games, they’ve built a booming merchandise business, have a massive online presence with millions of followers on social media, and supports Bananas Foster, a nonprofit that celebrates and advocates for the foster care community.
Key metrics
- 13K orders per month
- 11.1M TikTok followers
- 200+ games in the 2026 season
- 2.2 million tickets sold in 2025
- 4,000 SKUs
- 6 teams competing in the Banana Ball league
- 70+ stadiums with point-of-sale retail locations that sell merch
- 80% of BFCM orders shipped within 24 hours
About the Savannah Bananas
In 2016, Jesse and Emily Cole risked it all and bought a college development baseball team. Their goal: to make baseball fun and bring fans back to Historic Grayson Stadium in Savannah, Georgia.
But selling tickets turned out to be harder than they thought – especially when they changed the team’s name to the “Savannah Bananas,” and the town hated it.
To save their team, Jesse got creative to make the game of baseball more fun for fans. He watched games, took note of when spectators began disengaging, and introduced rule changes to liven things up. Suddenly, the games were faster; the players all performed choreographed dances throughout the gameplay; and best of all, fans could catch a foul ball for an out.
All in all, the couple ended up creating a new phenomenon altogether – Banana Ball – that was so quirky and lovable, fans couldn’t get enough. They sold out games, created more teams, and before they knew it, they had an entire Championship league.
Today, the Savannah Bananas are thriving with 6 teams, six consecutive national tours, hundreds of thousands of attendees every year, and millions of fans worldwide.
We sat down with Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas, to unpack how the Savannah Bananas leverage ShipBob’s WMS to manage their inventory across online and point-of-sale (POS) retail channels to fulfill seamlessly everywhere.
Realizing we needed an omnichannel warehouse technology partner that can meet complex needs to protect the fan experience
As told to ShipBob by Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas.
Our business model is different than of a lot of apparel or merchandise brands. We have a warehouse where we store inventory and fulfill online DTC orders – but because our 6 teams move around to different stadiums on what we call the World Tour, we also periodically stock jerseys, hats, T-shirts, balls, baseball cards, and more in pop-up retail stalls in those stadiums.
When we started the World Tour, we essentially followed a concert venue footprint: we’d put inventory in crates and cases, take it all on the road, sell it through whatever stadium we were playing in, and then bring whatever was leftover back home and use it to fill out the next city. We were tracking our sales through Shopify, and it worked okay for a while.
But then we really started to grow. We launched a second tour, because we finally had enough teams to have two different games happening simultaneously in different cities. Between having inventory on the road and at our warehouse, inventory management got way more complicated.
Our tipping point was when inventory management started to impact the fan experience. Fans were placing DTC orders on our website, and our inventory fed that demand stream; but whenever we took that inventory in person to stadiums, our inventory visibility got hazy. We were selling products online and then would later realize we didn’t actually have anything left to send to customers. We were essentially taking inventory out of the online fan’s hands, just to put it in a case and maybe not even sell it.
We had to make a lot of apologetic phone calls and disappoint a lot of fans, and for us, that’s inexcusable. We’re so passionate about putting the fans first, and merchandise has so few touch points with the fans as it is, so we absolutely had to address it – and fast. We started looking for a professional system that could help us separate what’s on the road and what’s in-house, and then do it in real time across all our POS locations.
That’s when we found ShipBob. Our president, Jared, got a cold call; he almost never answers cold calls, but thankfully he answered that one! The stars aligned, and ShipBob WMS offered us just about every capability we needed, including inventory control and visibility in a way we’d never had.
ShipBob sent one of their onsite implementation experts, Marc, to our warehouse to help install ShipBob WMS, and he was such a huge help. He was very personable – even when a surprise snowstorm snowed him in for a couple of days, he was still really positive and upbeat.
Even now that everything with ShipBob WMS is up and running, I know I could reach out to him and he’d be willing to help, which I really appreciate. And he’s not even on the customer service team! That’s how dedicated ShipBob’s team is to supporting its merchants.”
Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas
Onboarding a WMS that’s personalized and done on-site (even in a snowstorm)
Once we decided to use ShipBob WMS, ShipBob sent a Solutions Implementation Manager to our warehouse right off the bat. That person knew exactly how the system worked, and we didn’t have to change too much of what we were already doing.
They looked at our current setup, saw how our operations worked, and provided their understanding of ShipBob to make it all fit together pretty seamlessly. There’s a lot that goes into installing a system like this, but the user interface is really easy to work with, so we were up and running very quickly.
Trailblazing with ShipBob to launch a Shopify POS connection and achieve real-time inventory visibility
Shopify powers our ecommerce platform, so we use Shopify point-of-sale (POS) software and hardware to sell merchandise in each stadium we play in.
Shopify is a great tool in so many ways, but as far as this kind of inventory movement goes, it just wasn’t built for that. Honestly, nothing is built for what we’re doing, and no WMS on the market offered the kind of integration with Shopify POS we needed – until we worked with ShipBob on a solution.
When we brought our needs to ShipBob, they weren’t intimidated; they didn’t brush us off, or tell us it was a job for Shopify. They were so open to building something new together. They told us we could use ShipBob WMS to power fulfillment and warehouse operations as usual, and that they would work with us to understand the World Tour and create a connection to Shopify POS for us that would unify our inventory management, however we sell.
“We are pioneering a business model that no apparel or merchandise brand has done before, so we needed a partner that could break new ground with us. ShipBob is so willing to work with us on whatever solutions and capabilities we need. It’s incredibly refreshing to have a partner that’s taking the industry’s largely archaic approach to inventory and WMS solutions and proactively moving it into the future.”
Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas
The results have been amazing. ShipBob is so invested in making sure we have the tools and capabilities we need – so much so that they built out this whole other user interface for us to connect to Shopify POS. It’s got a lot of the same parts and pieces of what ShipBob’s already designed to do, yet is totally from scratch.
ShipBob is so good at what they do as an omnichannel solution. They understand the complications of taking inventory on the road and our need to maintain separate inventories while still achieving inventory visibility, so they baked that into the Shopify POS connection.
Before, when we made sales in-person at a stadium, we had no way of seeing how those sales impacted stock counts. Now, with the Shopify POS connection ShipBob built for us, the data from in-person sales syncs with Shopify and ShipBob WMS, so we can see inventory levels change in real time.
We finally have cohesive visibility across our online Shopify store, our retail stalls, and our warehouse, and ShipBob has done a really good job of making it all work together.
Whenever we have a suggestion, ShipBob is always open ears. It’s been a really fun challenge for all of us to create something that’s really remarkable and works for our needs.
“We have always done things differently than most brands in the apparel or merchandise industry, and we’re pretty successful at it. There really aren’t many sports teams handling their merchandise in-house, so having the right tools is a must.
ShipBob WMS keeps our inventory organized, visible, and accurate – which only gets more complicated as we keep adding teams to our league. You need tools that you can trust as you scale, and we trust ShipBob WMS to support us.”
Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas
Trusting a well-designed WMS with our warehouse operations to boost confidence and actually enjoy fulfillment
Our warehouse has two sections: one that stores inventory for traveling retail locations, and one for inventory that’s set aside to fulfill website DTC orders. This means that a single SKU is often stored in two places – but the way ShipBob WMS is designed, you can easily store different batches of the same SKU uniquely. It lets us separate inventory (some for fulfillment and some for touring) without losing track of the bigger inventory picture. We can trust that each location’s counts are accurate, which is a huge help.
ShipBob WMS is so useful because it gives you more trust in your operations. You feel freer with picking and packing, because ShipBob’s system handles so much more of the tracking, and it does it really well.
Picking with ShipBob WMS is really well-designed – the system leverages batch and cluster picking to group multiple of the same orders and send your pickers through your aisles once (instead of all the way through for every order), which makes the process so much more efficient and yields endless results.
Packing also has a lot of great checks and balances, and it’s designed for the packers’ experience, so that it make sense and flows really well and. Overall, it’s really cool to be able trust your WMS system and feel like you can enjoy the way it works.
“We see fulfillment as an important, valuable part of what we do as an entire organization. It’s not just grabbing the right product or packaging it; we take great pride in every fan touch point, ShipBob’s WMS helps us make every fan experience special because it enables us to do fulfillment right.
Using ShipBob WMS, we’re not making mistakes and having to undo operations and redo actions. It alleviates a lot of those errors, which helps us enjoy what we’re doing a lot more. It doesn’t just get the job done; it makes the job worth doing.”
Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas
Managing 4K SKUs and boosting inventory accuracy via the ShipBob dashboard
All in all, we have 4,000 SKUs. Most of our merchandise is apparel, so lots of our SKUs have multiple variants for size, color, team, and more. It can be challenging to keep them all straight – but ShipBob WMS makes it so much easier.
First, the interface is really easy to use. So many WMS systems are just archaic and confusing, because they’re built by engineers – not by the people who really utilize it. ShipBob’s WMS is different: the technology is great and works well, but it’s sleek and intuitive to navigate, too.
Second, it gives us the inventory tools we need. ShipBob’s WMS has built-in inventory management features, and I’m constantly discovering new ways to take advantage of the technology. We’re actually doing cycle counts now; before ShipBob, we had some cycle counting, but you couldn’t trust any of it. As we’ve spent more time on ShipBob WMS, our trust is going up, and our inventory accuracy is improving with it.
I love that the ShipBob dashboard offers access to real-time data – especially for our offsite employees. Our inventory buyer doesn’t work in-house, but he can log in to the ShipBob dashboard remotely and immediately see our inventory levels and get answers to his questions. He doesn’t have to bother anybody; he can use that data to find what he needs much faster, and with a lot higher trust.
“Now that our team has adopted ShipBob’s WMS, we’re able to perform more complex tasks, increase efficiency, and instill inventory quality control – the types of things that are necessary in all warehouse environments that we just haven’t had for a long time! It’s really helped us raise the bar and raise our standards for what warehouse success looks like.”
Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas
Achieving a peak season that doesn’t feel like peak
Even though our demand is fairly seasonal most of the year, we do see a pretty significant increase in our web activity around BFCM and the holidays every year.
The year before we adopted ShipBob WMS, peak was really difficult for us. It was challenging to rally the troops to get all our orders done in time, and our backlog got to be 6-7 days. Right after peak ended, we launched with ShipBob WMS, so we were so excited to see how it would make a difference this time around.
Sure enough, ShipBob WMS was a godsend. We braced ourselves for the previous year’s chaos, but it never came. It was just business as usual. Our order volume was higher than the previous year’s, but this peak season, we never went more than 36 hours before shipping out an order. In fact, we had 80% of orders turned around in 24 hours or less because the tools drastically increased our picking efficiency.
Because we had ShipBob WMS and its tools were in place, we were able to satisfy our fans at a level that we’re much happier with. We were really, really grateful to have had ShipBob this peak season – it can’t be overstated.
“This peak season, our warehouse team looked at each other, like, ‘Is this it?’ A lot of orders came in, but because ShipBob WMS is designed so well, it felt like just business as usual. Our pickers knew what they needed to do to pick successfully, so they picked; our packers knew what they needed to do to pack successfully, so they packed; we trained team members how to do batch, and they were successful at that.
There was no real hustle needed because it was easier to fulfill more orders using better technology. There was no extreme pressure like there has been in the past.”
Tucker Robinson, Warehouse Director at Savannah Bananas
Plus, ShipBob’s system does such a great job of automating checks and balances at each step of the fulfillment process that that our errors decreased dramatically. It was amazing to get on the other side of peak season stress. I didn’t even break a sweat, because it just wasn’t hard with ShipBob.
Leveraging ShipBob’s responsive, accountable support for fast answers
On top of the amazing support we had when we first joined and transitioned our warehouse to ShipBob WMS, we also have a Merchant Success Manager that meets with us each week just to kind of check in, take our temperature, and make sure we’re doing OK.
On our end, those conversations always start with, “We’re doing really well! We just want to ask a couple of questions.” There’s just a lot of moving parts, especially with a brand like ours, so having someone who’s willing to engage with those questions is invaluable.
If we ever have a question our rep doesn’t immediately know the answer to, they’ll have figured it out by our next meeting – if not in the next hour. Their response is always, “I know what you’re asking for. If I can’t do it, I know who can. We’ll get you the right answer.”
We’re a fast-moving company, and we need information pretty quickly, so we need a responsive partner that answers rapidly, and doesn’t just wait around or check with a ton of stakeholders. There’s none of that. ShipBob’s support team just takes responsibility, stays accountable, and makes things happen. That’s our brand’s support philosophy, too, so it’s been a very harmonious partnership.
What’s next for Banana Ball
We’ve grown so much in just 10 years, and it’s all thanks to the fans. At the end of the day, our priority is delivering a truly world-class fan experience – so while we do look to the future, we’re always more focused on how we can make this next season as fun and engaging as possible.
Right now, that means preparing for our next World Tour! We’re asking questions and building out what our world tour version of ShipBob looks like, and then we’ll start testing the logistics and evolving that over time.
We really like to test things at our home stadium in Grayson, so we’re looking forward to having some of our ShipBob team come down to a game! Seeing the sport and point-of-sale mechanics in person can only help as they continue to build out what we need. Ultimately, we’re really looking forward to continuing our partnership with ShipBob, and building something one-of-a-kind together.
The Savannah Banana’s team at ShipBob
TR Rhodes
TR is the Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports the Savannah Bananas.
Marc Varon
Marc is the Senior Solutions Implementation Manager who onboarded the Savannah Bananas.
Casey Armstrong
Casey is the CMO of ShipBob, and serves as the Executive Sponsor for the Savannah Bananas.
Get started with ShipBob
Does ShipBob’s WMS sound like the fulfillment solution your brand needs to scale? Contact our team to learn more and start shipping from your own warehouse.
