Padel Pro Shop sells padel rackets, balls, grips, and gear to players across Europe and beyond, including an exclusive racket collection designed with Adidas, Nox, and Siux. Founder and chief executive Dionisio Ugalde launched the business in late 2020.
Since moving to Shopify in 2022, Padel Pro Shop has built a stable foundation for international growth, expanding into new markets across Europe and becoming a sponsor of both the Spain and Argentina national teams at the Padel World Championship in November 2026.
- Grew annual revenue from €2.5 million to an expected €26 million, more than 10 times over, in under six years.
- Increased Shop app orders by 284% over the past year.
- Scaled the team from three people to around 50 while expanding sales focus into markets including Germany, Italy, France, and the UK.
The challenge: rapid growth outpaced a fragile platform
Before COVID-19 stopped it cold, Ugalde had spent eight years building an online handball store. “I remember three days with zero orders,” Ugalde said. Around the same time, he was a frequent customer of other online padel retailers, and the experience was poor: wrong products shipped, unreachable customer service, and rackets sent without proper authorisation from the brands they claimed to carry. He saw the gap and launched Padel Pro Shop in December 2020, built on PrestaShop, the platform inherited from the handball business.
The timing turned out to be lucky. An early, unpromoted test order convinced Ugalde there was real demand, and revenue climbed fast: €2.5 million in the first year, then €5 million, €9 million, €16 million, and €20 million, with around €26 million expected in 2026. But PrestaShop could not keep pace. “If you were doing any changes, the website was breaking down,” Ugalde said. Every update risked an outage, and the self-hosted setup left his small team managing speed, database performance, and checkout reliability themselves, instead of building the business.
As international orders grew, the gaps became harder to absorb. A single unreliable checkout, with no consistent way to support multiple currencies or local payment preferences, was a weak foundation for a brand trying to sell worldwide.
The solution: a stable foundation for international growth
Padel Pro Shop moved to Shopify in 2022. “Shopify didn’t change our strategy, it gave us the infrastructure to execute it at a much bigger scale, while our growth continued to come from product, service, operations, and international expansion,” Ugalde said. He had been looking for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that could take the operational weight off his team. “I was expecting something like Shopify, a SaaS that takes care of your speed and your database. Everything’s easier, a bit more connected,” he said. A single, dependable checkout replaced the patchwork setup that kept breaking under its own growth. That stability also freed up time: Ugalde estimates Shopify saves the team 20 to 30 hours a month compared with the old setup, mainly through easier site management, greater platform stability, and far less time spent resolving checkout or technical issues.
Shopify Payments followed, bringing local payment methods and Shop Pay to the checkout. Ugalde is candid that the transaction rates are higher than he would like, but the trade-off has paid off: fewer drop-offs, a smoother mobile experience, and a checkout customers trust enough to use across multiple countries. The team also launched a connected Shopify storefront for its B2B customers, syncing stock with the main site so both channels stay accurate without manual work.
It’s like you have a car you have to push yourself, and then you have a Porsche.
The Shop app has become a meaningful channel in its own right. Shop orders are up 284% over the past year, something Ugalde credits to the one-click checkout experience. “People are learning that when you check out through Shopify, you just click one button and everything runs through it,” Ugalde said, comparing it to Amazon. The team is now also testing Shop Campaigns, with early results showing efficiencies comparable to some of its Meta campaigns.
The result: revenue surged and new markets opened
Padel Pro Shop’s revenue has grown from €2.5 million to an expected €26 million in 2026, more than tenfold since its first full year in business. The team has grown alongside it, now working out of a combined headquarters and warehouse.
That growth has created opportunities a three-person team could never have pursued. In November 2026, Padel Pro Shop will sponsor both the Spain and Argentina national teams at the Padel World Championship, a milestone Ugalde had been pursuing for over a year. “I wanted to go a bit further. My dream scenario would be a Spain–Argentina final, with Padel Pro Shop represented on both sides of the court,” Ugalde said. The brand now sells to markets worldwide, with a growing sales focus on Germany, Italy, France, and the UK.
Looking ahead, Ugalde is targeting another year of strong double-digit growth, built on a deliberately unglamorous plan rather than a dramatic expansion. “We are trying to figure out how to make everything more stable. It’s difficult when you grow that fast,” Ugalde said. The plan centres on strengthening the relationship with UPS, aiming for 24-hour delivery across many of its key European markets from the existing warehouse, rather than opening new ones, and testing brand visibility through roughly 20 partner padel clubs in 2026 ahead of a potential wider international rollout.
With a stable platform underneath it, Padel Pro Shop is now scaling deliberately, market by market and club by club, rather than firefighting its own growth.
Five years ago, we were three people trying to build a business. Now we’re very proud of how far the company has come.