Chang Loon Seeks New Growth with ProRatchet® Brand

Innovative design keeps wrench maker ahead of the price-slashing competition

Chang Loon Industrial Co., which was founded in the central Taiwan county of Changhua in 1978, has sharpened its focus on R&D in the hope of finding a new growth engine in its ProRatchet® brand.

Chang Loon has specialized in making wrenches meeting GeprUfte Sicherheit (GS) standards for over three decades. The company supplies two major lines of products, ratchet wrenches and bolt cutters, mainly on an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) basis, and today is Taiwan's largest exporter of ratchet wrenches by volume,

Customer-driven Services Build Success
The company's current success is attributed to its decades-long concentration on customer-oriented services, noted senior sales representative Alice Chen. “As customers now tend to order more frequently than before in an effort to keep minimum inventories in-house as a response to the market uncertainty in the U.S. and Europe over the past few years,” she said, “we enhanced our warehousing capacity and production flexibility to meet that trend.” This development entailed considerable cost, Chen added, but it paid off in the steady growth that Chang Loon enjoys today.

Innovative packaging is another Chang Loon service that helps customers boost the added value of their sales. The company knows that catching the attention of customers is critical, and has come up with refreshing ideas for packaging that effectively raises the visibility of the products in the spacious display aisles of big-box wholesalers.

Chen said that her company's inspiration for its eye-catching packaging design comes mainly from customers' needs, which are determined by their specific situations. For instance, the company's ready-to-display packaging is tailored to address buyers' concerns about the rising cost of raw materials, as well as meet the need to cut labor input for buyers who want simply to deliver pre-packaged products to retailers. Chen introduced a new kind of end-cap packaging which has proven effective in boosting sales of wrenches displayed on retailers' cashier tables.

Commitment to Quality and R&D
Chang Loon places strong emphasis on product quality, and its ratchet wrenches boast a higher torque rating and stronger structure than those of competing models that meet international standards, such as ANSI and DIN. This achievement is a result of the company's effective production system and rigid quality control, Chen commented.

To secure a supply of raw materials with dependable quality, Chang Loon uses steel only from Taiwanese suppliers and pays special attention to heat treatment, which is a key to a sturdy structure and long service life. Advanced testing instruments, including precision projectors and tension testers, assure that quality-control standards measure up.

Unremitting devotion to R&D is another factor that has enabled Chang Loon to survive and prosper amid the underselling rivalry by competitors from emerging countries.

Chen said that the company's management and supervisory staff form part of the R&D team, playing an active role in every R&D decision to assure that the development process is carried out properly and in line with up-to-date information and market trends.

Chang Loon also assures that its R&D projects will be successful by providing newly-developed hand tools to users on a trial basis and then, based on their feedback, rounding off their rough edges. This goes on until the tools are ready for launch; it is a costly process, but it allows the company to fine-tune its products until they are perfect.

The company has brought in an advanced 3D prototyping machine, which is fully computerized and provides a high degree of precision, to speed up development and make sure that prototypes take shapes in accordance with draftings and drawings.

R&D Materialization for Enhanced Brand Recognition
All of these features help to give Chang Loon a basis for the development of its ProRatchet® into a world-caliber brand. Unlike other companies that focus on volume alone, however, the company aims to achieve brand-recognition globally by dedicating itself to innovation that differentiates its products from others on the market.

One way Chang Loon sharpens its brand recognition is to make the heads of its ratchet wrenches thinner and lighter than those of competing models, so that they are readily recognizable.

A patented design feature of Chang Loon ratchet wrenches is a colored ring embossed on the head that clearly shows the size of the wrench in Imperial or metric units, effectively preventing users from wasting time searching for wrenches of the sizes they need.

“A red-colored ring denotes Imperial units,” Chen explained, “and a blue one means metric units. This design is much sought after in the U.S., where both measurements prevail.” In addition, she went on, colored rings can be applied in enterprise identification, and so have been adopted by some OEM customers in Europe to forge recognizable links between the wrenches they sell and their company names.

Chang Loon still has a long way to go before its brand will be recognized all over the world, but the company is supremely optimistic. “The development of a hand tool's functionality has hit its ceiling,” Chen said, “but Chang Loon will continue to take advantage of R&D to build value-added features into our products through packaging, exterior appearance, and function.”