Pepper Pong game of ‘Shark Tank’ fame lands in Dick’s Sporting Goods and Scheels stores

Pepper Pong is still bouncing.

The pingpong-pickleball hybrid will soon hit the shelves at Dick’s Sporting Goods and Scheels, nearly a year after it bagged $150,000 on ABC’s “Shark Tank.”

When Pepper Pong lands in around 150 Dick’s and all 34 locations of the midwestern outdoor retailer later this month, it will be the first time the game will be available for purchase outside of the company’s website.

“I didn’t know what to expect long term after the insane initial pop. People would say ‘It’ll pop and then it’ll hit a new plateau and hover there for a while,’” said Tom Filippini, who started the business in mid-2023.

“But because Pepper Pong is viral and everyone wants to get a set of their own, the flywheel has spun up and we’ve continued to grow,” he continued.

In the 24 hours after the Shark Tank episode aired in November, with Filippini securing a check from Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves, Pepper Pong doubled its lifetime sales of $350,000, Filippini told BusinessDen last fall.

He said that since then, the business has been growing every month and will do “several millions of dollars” in revenue this year.

“It’s definitely on a hockey stick type of growth trajectory,” Filippini said. “And I don’t see it stopping.”

Initially, Filippini was hesitant about going into brick-and-mortar, preferring to grow direct-to-consumer and “not bite off more than we can chew.” But when national chains started reaching out, it was hard to put the phone down.

“Usually, you would call retailers and ask for meetings. But we never presented our product to anyone,” Fillipini said.

He said he chose Dick’s and Scheels for the initial rollout to keep the footprint relatively small at first, rather than go for the Walmarts and Targets of the world.

Pepper Pong has spent relatively little on marketing itself. The brand doesn’t have a TikTok account. It does have Instagram but doesn’t pay for ads on there or Facebook, Filippini said.

As far as the product goes, everything is staying the same besides more eye-popping packaging. Prospective pongers will still get four paddles, called “mullets,” and three foam balls, called “peppers,” for $89.99.

“It’s almost this thing that you hear about and you have to proactively find out where to get it. It sort of creates this mysterious feel to it,” he said. “I don’t know if I think it’s cool or not, but it’s working. We’re growing far beyond what we could’ve ever imagined by not forcing it.”

Filippini said Graves and the Raising Canes team have also been instrumental since the Shark Tank deal closed, which gave the chicken finger tycoon a 19% stake. He said he’s been working with the Cane’s marketing team throughout this year — access he didn’t expect to have at first.

He also noted one instance where Graves, who Filippini said nicknamed him “Spice T,” put up cardboard cutouts of Filippini in hundreds of Cane’s locations across the country. He said Graves didn’t even have a conversation with him about it before doing it and that he’s just the third cutout to be featured in stores along with Graves himself and Ice T, the rapper turned “Law and Order” star.

“I was skeptical, and my inclination was that I wasn’t going to get a great economic deal on Shark Tank. I heard terms could be a little iffy, so I was not anticipating closing on a transaction,” he said. “But thank god I did. This guy is the real deal.”