Global Expansions: How a sports company's bare bones web site led to international business

Fast Hands Hockey defied all the odds. The Northville, Mich.-based company set up a bare-bones website and expected orders to fall from the sky. And they did. Jim Marinoff had developed little pipes that, when bent into a half octagon, serve as a tool for honing hockey-puck-handling skills. He thought he could sell them, so he launched the site in September 2012 and did a pittance of Web marketing by posting a few notes about it in online hockey forums. Almost immediately, orders started coming at a rate of about 20 a day for the $80 product. When Mr. Marinoff posted an instructional video on his site in December and sent it to a Canadian distributor of hockey gear, things started to really take off. The company, HockeyShot, placed an order of 100. A week later, it ordered another 200. A week or two after that, Mr. Marinoff got an unsolicited call from a man in Sweden looking to order 150 units and have them shipped by air. The caller was the person buying the product from HockeyShot, and he wanted to cut out the middleman. So he called Mr. Marinoff directly. And just like that, a global business was born. But Mr. Marinoff, a strength and conditioning coach, wasn't exactly positioned to be in international trade. He wasn't thinking about how to become a global distributor and how to manage cultural landmines. Instead, he came up with the Fast Hands tool from teaching kids how to play hockey. "I had all these cones set up for these little squirts, and the little squirts kept knocking them over," he said. It's also been helpful that his wife, Angela, happens to be operations director of Taylor-based logistics company ARC Supply Chain Solutions Inc., which takes care of Mr. Marinoff's shipping and gives him a friendly rate on storage. "If it wasn't for my wife and the logistics, I don't think this would have taken off," Mr. Marinoff said. "She took care of everything." Sales in Sweden, a major hockey country, caught the attention of enthusiasts back in North America, who began placing orders. "It didn't take off in the U.S. and Canada until Sweden. Sweden did it all for me," Mr. Marinoff said. He ships 700-800 units a month on average, with about 25 percent of that headed to Europe. Shipping has been thornier and more expensive than Marinoff imagined. Russia has been particularly frustrating. On both of the two occasions Marinoff has sent small shipments to new customers there, the shipments disappeared. "I talked to the customers there and they said it happens all the time," he said. "They say it gets stolen at the port by the mafia. "Russia is a huge hockey country and I just can't get shipments in there. That's been the biggest disappointment." This story first appeared in Crain's Detroit Business