How did you persuade Energizer to partner with Technuity?
We were at the right place at the right time, we had relationships with the management of Energizer through previous businesses and we knew that they were looking for a different solution for their rechargeable pack business. We described ourselves as being entrepreneurs with other battery companies and we walked with them a little bit.
We set up a program where, at first, we weren’t selling to Energizer’s customers, we were just sourcing the product for them. Once we proved ourselves, that turned into, ‘Why don’t you guys go and do the whole nine yards, you source it, sell it, you own the customers and those kinds of things.’
How are you growing the business?
One, we want to make sure we are always doing our homework to make sure we’re providing the new battery products that the consumer is going to want when they want them. We have a lot of growth in North America yet to do.
We sell a lot of battery products to a lot of bigger retailers, but we don’t sell all of their battery pack needs to any of them. So our biggest customers, we may be only supplying 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent of their battery pack needs. There are other areas that we haven’t penetrated yet that we have a full line of Energizer products for.
It’s just a matter of continuing to work those accounts and continuing to show them our quality and our sophistication and hoping at some time they’ll give us a shot at the business we don’t have. That’s a huge opportunity for growth, farming those accounts.
The other area that we’re going to get into in 2006 … selling our products overseas. We are currently looking at opportunities in Australia and in South America.
How do you protect your position in the market?
We have a three-pronged approach when we go to a retailer, and some retailers utilize this approach and some don’t. We provide them with one of the best battery brands in the world, and they understand that quality that’s associated with that and the name brand recognition.
But there are other people who can do that with different brands, so it doesn’t make us that unique. What we also provide them with are back-end solutions for their Internet sites. We do all the heavy lifting when it comes to cross-referencing these battery packs to the devices.
There may be one battery that fits 10 different model numbers of camcorders, and without doing all the research (to figure out which model numbers a particular battery fits) it becomes virtually impossible to sell products over the Internet. We provide all the cross-referencing upon request to our retailers so they can sell our battery products over the Internet.
We provide them with the distribution of those products so they do not have to handle the inventory, so you can go to a site of theirs and buy the product, and we’ll at times ship out of our facility to the customer.
We touch their customer in three different ways, through the store, through the Internet and third, through a phone system.
