Taranaki manufacturers get taste of Hollywood
A product made in a tiny Taranaki town to help heavy machinery operate in any conditions now has a Hollywood family as its ambassador.
Carac Group, based in Eltham, makes Trackgrip, a product that goes on the tracks of excavators, providing grip and making them them safe year-round in rain, hail, or snow.
The company have recently signed Todd Hoffman, Jack Hoffman and Andy Spinks, of celebrity goldmining family The Hoffmans, to be their ambassadors.
“This came about when we went to an expo show in Law Vegas and came across Ted Hoffman on the floor,” Sonia Kiser, Carac Group chief executive, said.
“We presented our brochure to him and showed him our product and then the next week they were on the call with us asking to use our Trackgrip on their machines in the mines in Alaska.”
The crew was now using the product in some of the most intense terrain in the world.
The Hoffmans found fame on the television show Goldrush and have their own show Hoffman Family Gold.
“We run the Trackgrips on our 50 and 65-tonne machines and they are amazing. They save money, they save time. There are only a few companies that I’ll get behind,” Todd Hoffman said.
Kiser, whose father John Burling founded the company in 1988, said the partnership was a dream come true and she couldn’t think of anyone better to endorse the product to the world.
The Carac team had flown over to Alaska to watch the product in action and stayed with the Hoffmans.
As ambassadors, the Hoffman crew would help educate and promote the Trackgrip product range across North America, cutting down the time and investment needed to grow the company’s existing market share, Kiser said.
Kiser started on the floor when she was just 15 and has been chief executive for the past three years.
In the last 18 months across North America they had set up three contract manufacturing centres, three distribution centres, and more than 400 deal locations.
They currently had 40 staff at their factory in Eltham. Some days she’d start at 3am to be on calls with North America and then work until 10pm at night to catch companies in Europe too.
“Our largest contract in Canada took three months of me calling every day.”