Case Study
How Fitter & Faster Makes a Splash With Their Event Technology
Improving on excellence is Fitter & Faster’s mission. The company provides swim clinics and camps for competitive swimmers all around the United States and the globe. Their students are already good — but they come to the camps to be great.
The camps and clinics are taught by some of the best swimmers in the world: Olympic-level swimmers and coaches, some with gold medals.
“Many of our clinicians have gone to the Olympics. Those who haven't have come very, very close,” says Fitter & Faster CEO and founder David Arluck.
Over the last three years, Fitter & Faster has run swim camps at 100 locations throughout the United States, but the company is rapidly expanding. This year they will hold camps at 300 locations in 47 states as well as Canada and the Bahamas.
Their mission to “improve on excellence” applies beyond swimming, to drive Fitter & Faster’s business operations as well. But as the company scaled, the ticketing platform they built internally was holding them back from that mission. Arluck knew they needed a streamlined registration system that would allow them to grow.
By the numbers
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1000+
the number of swim clinic sessions Fitter & Faster runs in a year.
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47
the number of states Fitter & Faster runs clinics in
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300
the number of locations at which Fitter & Faster holds swim camps
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200
number of camp locations Fitter & Faster added since adopting Eventbrite in 2018
The challenge: Focusing on swimming, not ticketing
Fitter & Faster hosts hundreds of events all over the country, with many options for swimmers to participate in. A swimmer might choose to attend specific sessions or days of a camp, and some sessions are specifically designed for certain age groups. That adds up to a lot of possible ticket types for attendees.
“We run more than 1,000 sessions of clinics in 47 states, and there's a lot of information to be managed,” says Arluck.
With so many customized events to plan and prepare for, Fitter & Faster’s staff needed a simple, easy-to-use ticketing platform. Arluck wanted to minimize the time staff spent handling registrations and free them up to do what they do best: teach swimmers.
Arluck chose Eventbrite to grow his business to accomplish three goals:
- 1. Simplify ticketing so employees could focus on swimming
- 2. Allow staff to easily pull data about swimmers
- 3. Integrate ticketing with Fitter & Faster’s website
Saving time to focus on building the best camps
When Fitter & Faster was founded in 2009, the owners built their own ticketing platform. For the eight years they used that system, they handled their own technology upgrades — which was time-consuming.
Arluck estimates that employees spent hundreds of hours every year managing ticketing for events, updating the platform, pulling data for swim events, and making sure customer data was secure. Arluck needed to get that time back.
“We need to spend our time and resources putting together the very best swim camps in the world, not dealing with the technology behind the tickets,” says Arluck.
Once they moved to Eventbrite, Fitter & Faster staff no longer had to spend their time updating or manually pulling data from their own platform. Instead, Eventbrite’s secure ticketing platform allows staff to focus their energy where it matters: on the swim clinics and camps.
“We're not worried about the technology,” says Arluck. “We know that Eventbrite is going to remain on the leading edge of ticketing. We don't have to worry about that aspect of the company.”
“We need to spend our time and resources putting together the very best swim camps in the world, not dealing with the technology behind the tickets,”
— David Arluck, CEO & founder, Fitter & Faster
Photos by Misty Pelican Photography
Personalizing the camp experience
Fitter & Faster’s instructors don’t teach cookie-cutter courses. They prepare for each event, pulling registration data so they know who is going to be attending and what those swimmers need to learn to excel.
Teachers can easily access that information with Eventbrite. Fitter & Faster staff quickly pull the registration list to see who is going to be at each event and what their level of experience is.
“It enables us to get a better feel for who's coming to a clinic and prepare at a high level,” says Arluck.
While obtaining registration data was possible with the old ticketing system, getting that information wasn’t as easy as downloading a list. Staff members had to spend time getting the right information out of the system. Eventbrite, however, has made reviewing registration data easy — something that lets the swim clinicians spend their time preparing for their class rather than wrestling with technology.
“Each participant is very important to us. We want to make sure that it's a good experience for them,” says Arluck. “Eventbrite gives us the confidence that we have the information customers want us to know about them, so that we are prepared for the events we’re going to do.”
“Eventbrite enables us to get a better feel for who's coming to a clinic and prepare at a high level.”
— David Arluck, CEO & founder, Fitter & Faster
Providing excellent attendee experience – from registration to the pool
The Fitter & Faster experience doesn’t begin when swimmers arrive at a swim camp — it starts at registration.
To ensure that swimmers get a registration experience in keeping with Fitter & Faster’s brand, the company’s developers used Eventbrite’s embedded checkout feature to host end-to-end purchases right on the company’s website.
“Eventbrite has been able to seamlessly integrate with our site and provide a good user experience for our customers,” says Arluck.
Now, when swimmers and coaches register for a camp or clinic online, they start their Fitter & Faster journey with an easy, seamless registration user experience.
“The thing that I like most about Eventbrite is that it enables us to focus on what we do best: Run swim camps in a very creative fashion.”
— David Arluck, CEO and founder, Fitter & Faster
Photos by Misty Pelican Photography
Swimming into the future
In the year since Fitter & Faster partnered with Eventbrite, the company has grown. Staff members spend less time on ticketing, and more time coming up with new curricula and starting up new camps and clinics.
“Working with Eventbrite enables us to focus on our core business, making sure each camp we do is world-class,” says Arluck.
“We put a personal touch on every event we produce, everywhere around the country.”
— David Arluck, CEO and founder, Fitter & Faster
The partnership has also helped Fitter & Faster think more creatively about the sorts of tickets they create for their events. Because Eventbrite offers options for different ticket types, Fitter & Faster has experimented, offering new ticket tiers for some of their events that drive more revenue.
The company is hoping to grow more in the coming year, offering more camps in more locations. Arluck hopes to use Eventbrite to reach swimmers who’ve had great experiences with Fitter & Faster and will consider traveling to swim camps, rather than simply waiting for a camp to take place near them.
“There's no better feeling than when someone says a camp was the best day of their life,” he says. “We want them to feel like they learned something that's going to help them be a more efficient and fast swimmer. That is our primary objective.”
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