The Swedish golf apparel brand has signed an agreement with Caulfeild Apparel, a Canadian distributor, to sell its products in both Canada and the United States. Abacus will gain exposure in the U.S. market as the brand worn by the European team at the Solheim Cup, to be held in Illinois next month, and it will be introduced to the U.S. trade in January.
Abacus has already been sold in Canada for seven years by another company, Cutler Sports, reaching sales of about 1 million Canadian dollars (€614,400-$865,200) last year. However, Cutler decided to focus on its own brands and Abacus was on the look-out for a distributor with strong infrastructure in the U.S. market as well.
Based in Toronto, where it has more than 80 employees, Caulfeild is a family-run company with a wide-ranging apparel business in Canada and the U.S. market. In its home market, this includes distribution of golf brands such as Cutter & Buck, CK Golf, Pukka and Sun Mountain. It has no golf-related business in the U.S. as yet, but has built up all the required infrastructure there to deal with other apparel brands.
Abacus, which is now a decade old, has been expanding fast in the last five years. It reached sales of about 69 million Swedish kronor (€6.4m-$9.1m) in 2008, up by 19 percent. Sweden still accounts for about 33 percent of the brand’s sales, with a turnover of about SEK 23 million (€2.1m-$3.0m) in the country in 2008, which was an increase of about 15 percent. Other key markets for the brand are Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. But in the last years, Abacus has been widening its international distribution to cover nearly all European markets: before the deal with Caulfeild, it had found partners in 2008 to launch the brand in Japan, Slovakia and Turkey.
