Kott Koatings’ Export Savvy Recognized at White House

When the Department of Commerce handed out its annual “E” awards last week for excellence in exporting, one of the six recipients at the White House ceremony was an Orange County company that is spreading the joy of bathtub and sink refinishing overseas.

Kott Koatings Inc. of Foothill Ranch received the coveted award from outgoing Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor for exemplifying the successes that small business can have overseas. There’s a big hunger in most markets for goods and products that provide consumers with options to existing goods and products, says John M. Kott, whose father, John T. Kott, founded the company in 1953 in the Detroit area and moved it to Orange County 20 years ago.

Kott Koatings makes a proprietary glaze used to refinish chipped or discolored porcelain bathtubs and sinks. The company sells its products to refinishing specialists who operate their own businesses as “authorized Kott Koatings products dealers” who have been trained to apply the recoating material properly, said the younger Kott, who is vice president of the company.

The company, which has 12 employees at its headquarters, began franchising in the U.S. in 1972 and pushed into the export market in 1992 as the U.S. economy was staggering through one of the worst recessions since World War II. The reception has been tremendous--$4 million of Kott Koatings’ $6 million in annual sales come from its foreign franchises.

Kott says he signed up his first foreign franchisers in Canada and Bermuda. Today, Kott Koatings has dealers in 22 of the world’s 24 time zones and on every continent except Antarctica.

‘We found that in most overseas markets, much more than in the U.S., the first physical impression is the most important,” he said. “You have to have high-quality sales and marketing materials.”

The company supplies dealers with complete marketing kits. To cope with language differences, Kott said, four-color brochures for overseas markets are printed in bulk in the U.S., but with white spaces for the copy, which is added in the appropriate language in the dealer’s home country.

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John O’Dell covers major Orange County corporations and manufacturing for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5831 and at john.odell@latimes.com