Bat and mallet sales boom

STRAIGHT SHOOTER: Wood Mallets owner George Wood of Otane has carved a top-end global niche with polo and croquet mallets. PHOTO/DUNCAN BROWN

GEORGE Wood had 28 summers in a row spending New Zealand winters overseas playing polo for teams including the national polo teams of Malaysia, Singapore and Ghana.

He had made a few mallets when home and when he retired from playing overseas he started a joint venture making polo mallets with his father at their Otane home.

The business did well, carving out a global niche at the top end of the market and expanded into croquet mallets and game sets where similar success was found.

Last week it went in another direction, taking over the sole Australasian distribution of one of the largest Indian sports goods manufacturers.

His company Wood Mallets won the Hawke's Bay Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year Award in 2001 and Exporter of the Year in 2011.

"Every 10 years we pop up and say, 'Hi, we are doing it still'."

In 2011 his polo mallet was on its 84th prototype, where it remains.

"You can't improve it."

Timbers are selected from sustainably-managed sources from around the world. Sadly there are no suitable timbers available in New Zealand, he said.

The imported timber was "good stuff" but he's not afraid of technology, developing a carbon fibre and fibreglass composite stick.

Croquet mallets and game sets are just as important to turnover but he credits much of his success to his staff, especially Fidel Russ.

The 76-year-old from Argentina has been with the company for 25 years.

"He's just one of the world's greatest craftsmen. He can make anything. Some of the most complicated things Fidel just does beautifully."

There are five fulltime employees and one of his sons may be coming into the business "in the next year and two".

"They are pretty good on the holidays."

Wood Mallet's website receives 1500 visitors a day from 50 countries.

"That's our shop 24/7. Buying online is the most logical, sensible way to do it. With email I have to ask for the same details as if they went through the shopping cart.

"Some older customers can struggle and they just ring me and I can do a manual transaction, but at the end of the day that is what the website is for and that works very well. It is interactive and has dozens of different options.

"For products like polo sticks and croquet mallets everyone has a completely different ideal. They want different lengths, handle sizes, weights and flexibility and that sort of thing. No shop can have them all in stock. We are making about 100 mallets a week to order.

"I don't know where next week's orders can come from but I know we are going to be flat out making them. That's what I love about it."

The distributorship isn't the first new direction - he made cricket bats in partnership with Englishman James Laver.

"We decided to part our ways and he bought the business from me. Cricket bats are a pretty competitive industry - I was glad to get out."

James Laver was once a construction engineer in London but wanted a hands-on job.

"It was mainly sitting in an office punching a calculator," he said.

"I was just looking for other things and saw an advert for an apprentice. The ad didn't say what kind of apprenticeship, so I thought I'd find out.

"It was making cricket bats and I thought, 'well that's really different'. I wasn't a great cricketer - that's not really my background at all - but I have but I have always worked with wood, doing joinery through school and that sort of thing. I always had that interest."

He became a bat-maker under Julian Millichamp of Millichamp & Hall in Somerset and was manager/senior bat-maker when he emigrated to New Zealand.

It wasn't a huge leap - his wife was from New Zealand, his grandmother once lived in Dannevirke, he had Australian relatives and he had lived in the Solomon Islands where his father trained teachers.

They settled north of Wellington and through a friend of a friend heard of George Wood.

He approached him with a business proposition and they went into the bat-making business as Laver and Wood.

They developed a website and he spent several weeks introducing his bats to North Island sports shops where most already stocked bats made by his former employer in England.

"They had a good reputation over here so I had a little bit of a foot in the door to start with.

"I ended up stocking about 35 shops throughout New Zealand but what we rapidly found the manufacturing process I did was too labour-intensive. It just didn't work - you couldn't sell it for enough and we weren't on mass-produced systems."

He pulled out of the shops and concentrated on direct sales through the website.

"We have a nice business model now."

He moved to new premises after buying out George Wood.

"It just didn't work out - we didn't really see eye to eye so I bought him out and set up in Waipawa." He can't remember who he sold this first bat to, he said probably a local, but the United States was the first market capture.

"There are a lot of Indian expatriates living in the United States. Chicago alone has more than 200 cricket clubs. It is quite staggering.

"It is a very different market over there. They have a national team but it's lower-tier because they don't have good facilities and the politics is terrible, so they can't get themselves together and produce a good national team."

He said sales channels had changed.

"People don't come and see you, they want to see your product through Facebook or email or chat - the whole concept of the market has changed.

"Our main marketing tool is our Facebook page. That is huge - we have just about 30,000 followers.

"We bought a decent camera and had some good instruction from John Cowpland on how to take photos. The marketing you can do through Facebook is just fantastic.

"The old-school bat makers are just not interested in that. They go home at the end of the day and don't want to think about Facebook, but the reality is if you want to move with the times and get into it, you have to adjust.

"I worked out how to build websites and operate all the social media and it's been a big part of how we do things."

Mainstream bat makers were also clients. "They don't have skilled craftsmen around anymore - we do a lot of custom work for them."

He won't say which international players use his bats.

"A lot of people ask me but I never tell because it is not our method of selling.

"We want people to buy them because they are a good bat. The whole concept is the process we use - sizing you up and getting the right bat suited to you."

Lavey and Wood bats are in top-tier competitions but fly under the radar.

"We do have a lot of our bats in there - they just don't have our labels on them."

While the mainstream brands have lower per-unit production costs, their marketing model was expensive.

"We can compete with the price of the bigger brands because they can't cut their prices too much, because they pay a lot of money out on sponsorship."

The business has five employees "and in the the last three years we have posted constant growth".

"That has put us in a position where we can start to make some good decisions as to how we can move forward. One of the big things I'm looking at the moment is getting some investment and expand to make it into a really solid New Zealand company."

Nine years ago business was not as rosy. Marty Graham and his wife Megan were made redundant.

Marty was a trained bat maker with Laver and Wood and Megan its administrator.

Both are cricket fans and heavily involved with the game.

Marty got another job, outside of cricket, but instead his new boss inspired him to start his own business making bats.

"The boss sat down in his office and asked what I'd been up to.

"Because Megan was selected for the Central District Hinds women's cricket team I had been involved with that in Hamilton, which coincided with the Sri Lankans being up there playing New Zealand. I had caught up with the Sri Lankan guys and made a couple of bats for them.

"He said, 'you shouldn't really be working here - you need to be carrying on with what you know'.

"I was already making a few bits and pieces for people but nothing serious, just as an aside.

"He gave me a week and I got inspired by a couple of other people so I thought, yeah, I'll give it a crack. What have we got to lose?"

Operating from their Taradale home, MG2 has a website and uses Facebook "but most of our stuff is word-of-mouth".

"We are very lucky that we have both been involved with cricket for a long time and one person tells someone else and it just goes from there."

Apart from Laver and Wood there was only one other cricket bat maker in New Zealand, of similar size to MG2.

He has no plans to wholesale and compete against the many brands from India and Pakistan.

"I believe 80 per cent of UK willow goes over there - that's a serious amount of bats being made."

The English-grown cricket-bat willow tree was the only timber used "but the right species is grown in New Zealand nowadays so maybe we might be lucky".

"The stuff I've seen so far out of New Zealand has been too dense, which is a bit weird, but it was from down-Invercargill-way and there is pretty severe weather there from time to time. I know of someone planting in Nelson/Blenheim so maybe

Being a one-man bat maker ensured quality timber "because then my supplier can get me the best stuff. That's all I want".

He has made bats for "some pretty serious dudes", including Virender Sehwag, MS Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar and Kumar Sangakkara.

Kumar Sangakkara, the former captain of the Sri Lankan team, once borrowed Marty's personal bat and scored 203 runs with it against New Zealand.

"I was only averaging 13, so it can't have been the bat's fault."

He said he is glad he took the plunge and followed his passion.

"If you have a skill and a passion, how would you feel five years time when you thought, 'Jeez wish I had done that and had a crack'.

"A wise man once said to me, life is not a dress rehearsal."