Advanced engineering specialist, Carac Group, has secured the Buy NZ Made Hero Award for October, securing its win with impressive domestic growth and a startling performance developing and selling its latest ground breaking trailer and towing products, the latest innovations in a 30 year history.
The Taranaki company joins an impressive list of Hero Award winners confirmed over the past year by the Buy NZ Made Campaign. The monthly Hero Award is awarded to companies who not only do a fantastic job promoting their NZ Made status but who have also excelled in other key commercial areas such as domestic and international growth and diversification into new markets.
Still owned by the original founders John & Yvonne Burling, Carac has won a number of key contracts nationally throughout the last 12 months and has taken on a significant number of new staff as a result. It is also opening up new markets domestically and internationally. Its TrackGrip traction enhancer for vehicles with tracks is also now in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand and the company is looking to expand into other markets. Trailer couplings are in the USA, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand.
Another product, Towlock, has secured national media coverage in New Zealand because of its innovation. Capable of holding a load tight no matter what angle it is towed at, or how rough the ride might prove to be, the oval device slips over the tow ball shank or another suitable anchor point on a tow vehicle and is held firm by a spring. As well as capturing the imagination of the domestic media, it is also gaining real traction commercially in New Zealand and abroad.
As with other products in its portfolio, Carac makes a point of flying the New Zealand Made brand.
"Carac is extremely proud to be New Zealand Made and make sure we always have our New Zealand Made signage on display in the office, on all our stationery, all our marketing material and at trade shows," explained John Burling. "We make sure we let everyone know our products are made here in New Zealand. We have a lot of customers always saying to us how proud they are that our products are still all being made here in New Zealand. We have the New Zealand Made logo on everything we use and make sure we are forthcoming in promoting this. We inform our customers whom we manufacture for here in New Zealand and encourage other manufacturers to join Buy New Zealand Made."
Hand in hand with the New Zealand brand, Carac Group have also focused on some key philosophies.
"Our major focus has always been quality, innovation, diversity and reliability" added Burling. "We believe that our customers look to us for well designed, well finished, high quality products. We are constantly finding new ways of designing simple effective precision components and parts to enable our customers to complete even the most challenging of engineering manufacturing projects. To make it all work from a commercial point of view we are strong advocates of maintaining a high level of diverse capability across the business, which allows us to be responsive and flexible to meet a wide range of engineering requests from customers. And of course we believe that a key desire of our customers is for us to deliver what we say we will, on time, all the time."
Carac Group are the final monthly winners in the first annual Buy NZ Made Hero Awards and now complete the field for the first Ultimate Hero Award, which will confirm an overall winner from the monthly winners over the past year.
As a monthly winner, Carac receive a certificate, promotion on the Buy NZ Made website, promotion in target media, Hero artwork which can be used in their own marketing, a social media advertising voucher worth $100 to be used on the Buy NZ Made social media channels and automatic entry into the annual competition where the 12 monthly winners will be voted on by the public for the Ultimate Hero Award.
If Carac succeeds and become the Ultimate award winner, it will receive a trophy and certificate, artwork displaying their ultimate Hero status and an advertorial in a magazine of their choice (from a selection of approved magazines) that includes information about their award, Buy NZ Made and other content of their choice.
