All the Bs in Baseball Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Danielle Arnold, Tom Flierl at B2B Online Atlanta 2025

In the B2B Online Atlanta 2025 session “All the Bs in Baseball: How Rawlings Hit a Home Run with B2B and B2B2C Ecommerce,” Danielle Arnold of Rawlings and Tom Flierl of Znode unpacked how a heritage diamond sports brand is reimagining digital commerce. They showed how Rawlings uses flexible team stores, advanced customization, and tight ERP integrations to serve dealers, organizations, coaches, and parents while simplifying complexity behind the scenes.

Key Takeaways

1. Customer-centricity drives Rawlings’ digital strategy

Rawlings anchors its ecommerce evolution “for the love of the game,” focusing on the end customer experience even while selling through multiple intermediaries. From elite athletes to kids “simply dreaming of playing great,” the brand designs experiences that feel intuitive to parents, coaches, and organization managers. Every digital decision is framed around making it easier to buy, customize, and receive gear without sacrificing quality, tradition, or the relational aspects of the baseball and softball community.

2. The baseball ecosystem demands multi-channel, multi-buyer journeys

The Rawlings business spans wholesale, dealers, and direct, with big-box retailers, buying groups, mom-and-pop shops, training facilities, schools, and national travel organizations all in the mix. Each brings different needs, workflows, and payment methods—from purchase orders and booking orders to rebates and credit cards. The session highlighted how modern B2B and B2B2C ecommerce must account for this complexity, creating tailored paths for coaches, athletic directors, organizations, and parents while maintaining a unified brand and product strategy.

3. Team stores turn organizations into powerful B2B2C channels

By rolling out Znode-powered team stores, Rawlings effectively turns teams and organizations into digital storefronts that sell directly to parents and players. Coaches or organization leaders curate assortments, design uniforms, and publish custom-branded stores, while end consumers enjoy an Amazon-like buying experience with direct-to-door delivery. This model replaces manual uniform days and cash collection with streamlined, self-service ordering, making teams the “middle B” in a true B2B2C ecosystem.

4. Deep product customization is scalable with the right tools

Baseball and softball gear require a high degree of mass customization—from jersey styles and fabrics to logos, numbers, and nameplates. Rawlings uses Artifi (Znode’s sister product) for on-demand configuration so coaches can build uniforms and practice gear within defined rules. Approved logos, decoration methods, and color limits are enforced in the builder, ensuring production-ready designs. This approach scales to potentially hundreds of thousands of unique storefronts and uniform variations without overwhelming internal teams.

5. ERP integration reduces manual work and errors

Before the new solution, custom orders meant tedious, manual data entry into the ERP. Now, a combination of design IDs and structured data (via Artifi, Znode, and tools like Jitterbit) pushes only the essential SKU, size, fabric, and personalization details into Rawlings’ ERP. The system translates configuration choices into production-ready instructions, dramatically reducing errors and internal workload while preserving flexible variant-level pricing and fabric-based cost structures.

6. Personalized catalogs improve relevance and conversion

Rawlings builds context-specific catalogs to keep assortments relevant for each audience and use case. Demo-day stores only show the bats and gloves a rep had on the field. DBA training facilities see curated training gear with employee pricing. Large organizations access shared logo libraries alongside team-specific designs. This granular catalog management supports better merchandising, clearer decision-making for buyers, and higher conversion because shoppers see only what truly applies to them.

7. Self-service portals extend value to dealers and reps

Beyond team stores, Rawlings is evolving a dealer portal to centralize bulk and custom ordering. Dealers can use builder tools to assemble designs, collect them, and submit to customer service, with a vision to connect directly to the ERP for end-to-end automation. This consolidates fragmented workflows, empowers reps and dealers with digital tools, and positions Rawlings to support both high-volume B2B orders and individualized B2B2C journeys from the same underlying platform.

Why It Matters

For B2B and B2B2C leaders, Rawlings’ story is a practical blueprint for modernizing complex go-to-market models without losing sight of the end customer. The session showed how a legacy manufacturer can orchestrate wholesale, dealer, team, and direct channels on a single digital foundation. By combining team stores, advanced configurators, and ERP-integrated workflows, Rawlings reduces friction for internal teams while delivering consumer-grade experiences to coaches and parents. In an era where buyers expect personalization, speed, and convenience, this approach illustrates how thoughtful technology choices can transform traditional, relationship-heavy industries.

Actionable Insights

• Turn partners into digital channels: Empower teams, dealers, and facilities with self-service stores that sell directly to their communities.
• Standardize customization with configurators: Use rules-based builders to scale complex personalization without overwhelming operations.
• Connect ecommerce to your ERP: Automate order capture and configuration data to reduce manual entry and errors on custom products.
• Curate role-specific catalogs: Tailor assortments for reps, organizations, and parents to keep experiences focused, relevant, and easy to navigate.