Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
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Innovation, expansion and export - growing your business
Exporting and innovation can boost your firm's growth and profitability. The Business is GREAT campaign inspires with its success stories.
Rob Law’s Trunki suitcases have been an international hit from the outset. It started from the moment that he posted up a press release on a popular design blog to gauge interest in his concept of wheeled suitcases for young children. It immediately led to a full email inbox and crazy web traffic. Rob Law said:
Our first international customer was the Museum of Modern Art who wanted Trunki for their store in New York because they had seen the blog.
Our original Australian and our Japanese distributor both came from that blog.
We looked at our export strategy and very quickly chose to use distributors. We were aiming to build a global brand, so marketing was key – and distributors have the marketing expertise. We also built up a great questionnaire about how to filter through and appraise distributors.
International expansion in the early days of starting a business can be a dizzying experience. Law was bombarded by requests from distributors – he had inquiries from 30 Australian firms alone – and had little idea how to filter, choose and make approaches. He reached out to UKTI and went on thePassport to Export programme.
The GREAT business campaign has a wealth of information for employers about hiring apprentices and about the government support available. There are also some terrific case studies on the GREAT business website demonstrating the vital role that apprenticeships play in the UK economy.
