Opening the door to the U.S.A

For many New Zealand companies, making it big in the vast United States market is the ultimate dream. It’s a goal that high-end architectural hardware designer and manufacturer Halliday + Baillie can confidently say it is well on its way to achieving.

The proudly ‘Made in New Zealand’ company has been exporting quality architectural hardware to the global design community for over 15 years to four separate markets, including Australia – where the company has had a branch office for 12 years – and the United States, where Halliday + Baillie has been exporting to for over a decade.

Tiffiny Hodgson, director at Halliday + Baillie, says that the company has had its own exclusive distributor in the United States for eight years now, which after buying the product direct online, loved it so much that they wanted to be the brand champion in the States.

“Our distributor mainly works with the high-end architectural community and, out of a stable of eight main brands, we are the only New Zealand brand – the rest are European,” explains Tiffiny. “The fact that these products are made in Germany, or Holland, or New Zealand, is part of the inherent understanding that they will be quality, well-made products from places you can trust.”

Tiffiny believes that New Zealand’s strict regulations around wages and the need to provide real information about the composition of products are just some of the reasons that New Zealand-made products have such a good name on the world stage.

“Quality control in each step of the design and manufacture process means a great product at the other end,” she remarks. “For example, one of our standard flush pulls goes through five different quality control stages, so this one flush pull alone has been touched by at least 10 pairs of hands to ensure that it’s good enough!” she says.

The ability to be innovative, agile and resilient is also highly important for any companies that are designing products to sell overseas, Tiffiny remarks, as “that slightly different thinking is what will separate you from your many competitors.”

That famous Kiwi ingenuity and resourcefulness – or the ‘number 8 wire mentality’ – has certainly helped Halliday + Baillie to succeed overseas. While the company is doing extremely well with its global exports without any outside help, new opportunities with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), New Zealand's international business development agency, will help in creating new relationships with a range of suppliers.

“Having the backing of a government agency gives us a little more clout when we’re trying to start a new relationship with a company,” says Tiffiny. “America is considered one of ‘the’ markets for New Zealand companies to enter and people are knocking on the door of the NZTE every day so we’re very happy about it!”

While Halliday + Baillie mainly works with high-end, bespoke residential houses, providing hardware for large, complex projects in the hospitality market is one area that the company is excited to become more involved with, and not only in the United States market.

Due to privacy issues, Tiffiny can’t name many of the high-profile American, Middle East and Asian hotel projects that are scheduled or in process, however, one large project closer to home that the company is providing a large portion of the hardware for is the new luxury The International apartment block in central Auckland.

Because the market is so saturated with cheap commodity products, people are now starting to really differentiate between things that are made well and things that are not. Tiffiny believes that once architects, specifiers and clients actually get to touch the product there is the instant realisation that the hardware is not just adding price, it’s adding value to any project, big or small.

Halliday + Baillie is rightly proud of its Kiwi-made design, which encompasses quality, flair, functionality, and longevity.“We’re a relatively small company and there’s hundreds of Kiwi companies like ours that are under the radar, who are just getting on with making great product and selling it worldwide,” Tiffiny concludes.

“We really underestimate how high above our weight we punch in terms of respected manufacturing and we need to celebrate that more, because we’re doing some great stuff here in New Zealand!”

The sky would seem to be the limit for Halliday + Baillie, but the U.S.A is a good start.

Visit Halliday + Baillie’s profile on ArchiPro to see its entire range of architectural hardware.