How Swift Hockey Keeps Sold-Out Gear in Stock Without Giving Up Equity

Swift Hockey makes high quality hockey, lacrosse, and pickleball gear at prices designed to be within reach. Founded by Zechariah Thomas, who played professional hockey before retiring at twenty to start the company, the brand was built on a single conviction: the sport was too expensive, and that had to change. Since launching during COVID, Swift has doubled its revenue almost every year, growing through organic social content and an approach to marketing its founder describes as "causing havoc on the internet."

The sport was too expensive

Zechariah Thomas grew up in a small Canadian town where most people around him couldn't afford hockey gear. Sticks broke. Families replaced them when they could. Often they couldn't.

Hockey was extremely expensive. A consistent problem I kept seeing.

He went on to play professional hockey, then retired at twenty to build something about it.

I started the business for one reason: to make hockey and sports more accessible, more affordable.

Swift Hockey keeps prices low by design. The margins are narrower than competitors by intent, and the product range stays focused. As Zechariah puts it, one product doesn't turn into thirty. There is no private equity money cushioning the growth. What there is instead is one of the biggest social media followings in the industry, built over two to three years of purely organic content and a strategy he describes without much ceremony.

We will go and break a lot of our competitors' sticks pretty quickly. We will cause as much havoc as possible on the internet.

The audience it built is genuinely Swift's own. Dragon's Den came and went along the way. They pitched, received three offers, accepted one, and then didn't hear from the Dragon for close to a year. When contact resumed, the deal no longer made sense.

The visibility was arguably the best part about it.

Swift kept going on its own terms.

Every day, to be honest

When asked when the first cash challenge emerged, Zechariah's answer is not a date or a particular inflection point.

Every day, to be honest. Our number one problem is we have no inventory. That's been our number one problem since the beginning. We get sold out over and over again.

Demand has never been the constraint. Stock has. And the standard routes to fixing that were closed off on two fronts.

The first was credit history.

I was 19 years old when I started the company. I don't have seven years of credit history.

Young founder, fast-growing business, no long borrowing record. Traditional lenders weren't interested. The second was the business model itself.

We're eCommerce as well. They don't like funding eCommerce because there's not direct receivables. It's not a traditional business in their sense.

Equity wasn't the answer either. Swift had turned down the Dragon's Den deal when the Dragon eventually came back, and the same principle applied to any other equity route.

We didn't want to dilute the business extremely early.

The business needed capital that matched how it actually worked, not a structure built for someone else's balance sheet.

Our sales data proves we deserve funding

The answer came from research. Zechariah was looking specifically for lenders who would assess an eCommerce business on its actual performance rather than its physical assets or credit history.

Our online sales data proves that we deserve funding, but most companies won't fund it. Wayflyer ended up funding it.

The relationship has been running for over a year. Advances come through on a monthly basis, each one going directly into stock.

The cash was going right into inventory. He was helping us out every single month.

As inventory moved in and sold out, the cycle kept turning. The consistency of that access has opened up more than stock levels alone. Swift has launched new categories with Wayflyer alongside the original hockey line, adding lacrosse and pickleball and building out the range as capital allowed.

We wanna be the biggest sporting brand in the world.

The plan stays focused on sports with high equipment costs: the categories where the price of participation has always been a barrier, and where Swift was built to do something about it.

We wanna stick with the sports that cost a lot.

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