With more than 70% of the world’s purchasing power located outside of the U.S., exporting is an increasingly attractive opportunity for small and medium-sized companies. Joe Perfito, founder and owner of Gordon J. Gow Technologies – the company responsible for the design and manufacture of Tributaries and Clarus audio and video cables – had gained some international distribution but was convinced that there was significant untapped potential abroad. To increase the company’s penetration of foreign markets, Perfito turned to the Florida Small Business Development Center at the University of Central Florida’s (FSBDC at UCF) International Trade Services team.
Tributaries is a leading provider of high-performance and high-quality digital & analog audio interconnects, speaker cables, AC power products, and HDMI cables for discriminating audiophiles and cinephiles. Clarus serves the even more selective high-end audiophile market, offering ultimate-performance audio cables, power cables, power conditioners, and digital-to-analog converters (DACS) for the most discerning listening audiences. Combining patented technologies and painstakingly meticulous hand-craftsmanship, Tributaries and Clarus products are designed by music lovers for music lovers and are universally recognized for their quality.
“We design all of the internal parts of our cables and the cosmetics – the jacket, all the conductors and the shielding,” Perfito proudly states. “We have those cables made for us and bring them into Orlando where we do all our own soldering and assembly, packaging and testing. This makes us quite a bit different from our competitors, most of whom have cable from China or the Far East brought into the U.S. where they take it out of one box, put it into another and ship it out. There’s no value added. We do all the assembly, so we know how it’s made. We do all our own quality control as well. As a result, we have cables that outperform any of our competitors.”
“Our company has been selling domestically since 1991,” recalls Perfito, “and we started working with international distributors in the early 2000’s. But we didn’t have as many as I would like, even though I knew we had the products that would sell in countries around the world. When I learned about the FSBDC, I said ‘Wow, they have a lot to offer small businesses, including in the area of exporting and international distribution, and we began working with them to help us develop some of the foreign markets.”
Together with FSBDC International Trade Services program manager Jill McLaughlin and consultant Rafael Pratts, Perfito set about to further expand globally. First, Pratts prepared a customized Export Marketing Plan, available in partnership with the U.S. Commercial Service and funded by a grant offered by Enterprise Florida, now SelectFlorida, to assist qualified Florida manufacturers and service providers with identifying overseas growth strategies. Such Export Marketing Plans provide comprehensive industry and market analyses and identify promising new foreign markets and provide a go-to-market strategy for each. Next, McLaughlin assisted the company with obtaining State Trade Expansion Program (STEP) Grants to reimburse certain travel expenses, thereby supporting their attendance at international trade shows throughout Europe.
“Because of our partnership with FSBDC and working with them, we were able to improve our international marketing,” Perfito affirms. In fact, because of the Export Marketing Plan and the STEP Grant-funded travel, the company has now secured a new distributor in France and has another in the United Kingdom, with high expectations for one in Germany as well. “I would strongly encourage other small business owners like myself to contact the FSBDC and to take advantage of the services and programs they have to offer. It would be a huge benefit for them, as it was for us.”
