Shop St. Introduced As New, Free Membership Benefit

Anyone who has ever dealt with BMABA before will know we’re big on packing a punch when it comes to membership. That’s why we already provide over 120 membership features as standard for our paying members and this is set to increase further into 2021.

In the build-up to Black Friday and Christmas, we feel it’s the perfect time to unveil our latest membership feature. We’re providing every member of the British Martial Arts & Boxing Association (BMABA) including all students, with free access to an exclusive app called Shop St.

What Is Shop St. and What Is It For?

In a nutshell, Shop St. provides discounts across hundreds of retailers quite literally across everything including Technology, Travel, Entertainment, Shopping, Fashion, Takeaway, Restaurants and more. Major retailers like Amazon, Costa, Next, Adidas, Uber, Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Currys, Pizza Express and hundreds more are included, offering discounts of up to 25% off purchases.

You can learn more about how Shop St. works from here.

Why Are We Introducing This?

Times are hard, and for martial arts, that often means times are even harder. We know many clubs are funded from the pockets of their instructors and whilst our longer term ambition will be to work with Shop St. to include more martial-arts centric suppliers, initially it provides an incredible opportunity for our members to save money on their consequential spending. This means saving money against purchases they have to make anyway – such as food, travel, gifts and so on.

Martial Arts has always been chronically underfunded. It’s hard to find an instructor or club that feels UK Government or their various agencies (Sport England, DCMS etc) are investing a suitable level of funds into the promotion of grass roots participation and the improvement of professional standards. This has been a source of deep-frustration for BMABA for a number of years. It’s why we’ve gone on to found the BMABA Group of Social Enterprises – to build a sustainable, long-term approach to funding for core Charitable martial arts. We do this by channelling our profits into the Fighting Chance Foundation that uses martial arts to change lives across the UK.

Shop St. provides a superb opportunity for our Group to fundraise in a sustainable, long-term way to secure the generational work being done by the Foundation. Better still, it provides a benefit to the club or student using the app. Rather than asking for £2 a month and so on, we simply encourage members to use the Shop St. app for their day to day transactional spending. In the process, you save money from hundreds of your favourite retailers and in turn the Foundation receives a share of that saving.

Sustainable. Long-term. Completely new.

From your morning cup of coffee, to the next Dojo laptop through to your equipment purchases on Amazon. It’s all in the app.