Hull’s 43 Clicks North is helping a local firm chase its American Dream after it increased turnover from £3.5 to £17m since it relaunched five years ago.
The agency is delivering a comprehensive ecommerce package for Rhinox, which started out as a plant spares business before relaunching in 2018, upping its ecommerce game, adopting the name of its best-selling Rhinox brand excavation buckets and attachments and watching sales increase fivefold.
Will Hooper, sales director of Rhinox, said: “We are aiming to reach £50m in the next three years and some of that will come from the US as a result of our investment in our own distribution network over there.”
Rhinox currently employs more than 40 people, around 30 of them work at its office and manufacturing base at North Newbald near Beverley.
The company also has exclusive manufacturing agreements at third-party factories in India and Eastern Europe and has remote sales staff in Tunbridge Wells, Ipswich, India and the Philippines. The new distribution network in the US will be supported by its own sales team.
Josh Sprakes, marketing manager at Rhinox, said work began on raising the profile of the Rhinox brand in the US in 2022, with 43 Clicks North selected to develop the existing e-commerce strategy.
Sprakes said: “Because of the work we have done there is already a lot of awareness of Rhinox in the US and the distribution deal will boost customer confidence because they know the product is already in the country.
“Our approach to ecommerce is unusual in our industry and has also helped us make a lot of progress in the UK in a short space of time compared to competitors who have been out there for 30 or 40 years. We have gone from being an outlier in the market to the UK top two in various product categories. There are not many others doing it on the scale that we have adopted. We set up a website in the US and started to get somewhere, and then we felt we needed a partner to help us take our ecommerce strategy to another level.”
Mike Ellis, MD of 43 Clicks North said:” The exciting part for us is that this is a traditional B2B industry but the way they have set it up is B2B2C – ultimately they are pitching and marketing a strong brand to the end user to build demand for the network of dealers.
“When we looked at Rhinox we saw a huge opportunity to drive performance through brand recognition. Usually B2B businesses are a lot further behind us in their approach to speaking to the end user but Rhinox already had two working ecommerce sites. There’s a lot of work to do but it’s clear the ambition is there and it’s a good fit.”
