A specialist consultancy in global distribution.
We find the companies that will sell your product in markets where nobody has written down who they are. More than ten years of it, across 40+ countries and over a hundred product markets.
What we do.
Distribution is where an international growth plan meets the ground — and where most of them come unstuck.
There is no shortage of advice on whether to enter a market. There is very little on who will actually sell your product once you are there.
That is the work. We establish which markets are worth entering and how they really function, find the companies capable of selling into them, test what those companies can genuinely do, and stay with the appointment through approach and negotiation.
Our clients are manufacturers and brand owners, from Fortune 500 groups to companies exporting for the first time, working mainly across the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Market selection and intelligence. Sizing, structure, customers, competitors and the regulatory position, built bottom-up rather than bought in.
Market intelligenceDistributor search, screening and selection. From a market with no reliable list to a signed agreement with the right company in it.
Distributor targetingJoint ventures, local partners and acquisitions, for the markets where a distributor is not the right structure in the first place.
Strategic partner targetingWho does the work.
The practice is led by consultants with more than ten years in distributor search and selection. That experience is concentrated rather than general — a working network in a core set of sectors and country markets, built by running the projects rather than by reading about them.
Where a mandate takes us somewhere we have not worked before, we bring in specialist support on the ground: people who already know the regulatory position, the trade structure and who is worth meeting. It is how we keep no market out of bounds without claiming expertise we do not have.
We did it the hard way for a long time.
Hub was not a pivot into software. It came out of being tired of our own process.
The same problem kept recurring. Every project began by rebuilding a list someone had built before — trade directories years out of date, chamber of commerce rolls, a few names from an embassy contact. Six weeks of assembly before anyone could compare two candidates on the same basis. When the project closed, the research went with it.
The methodology was never the problem. The delivery model was.
So we built DistributorIQ Hub: the same work, done once per market and kept current, rather than rebuilt per client.
Collection runs on automated pipelines against registries, licensing bodies, customs records and tender portals. Language models turn filings, licence records and local-language pages into the same fifty-plus structured fields, so two companies in different countries can be compared on the same terms rather than on the quality of their sales pitch. An AI scoring engine reads your brief as weighted criteria and ranks every distributor in the market against it. Analysts verify what a company claims and sign the ranking off before it reaches you, and markets refresh on a rolling cycle rather than freezing at the date we first built them.
Automation is what made it affordable to maintain a database rather than rebuild a list. Knowing what to look for, and whether a claim stands up, still comes from having run the projects.
- A list rebuilt from scratch, every client, every time
- Capability taken on trust in a first meeting
- Licences and coverage rarely checked
- The research discarded when the project closed
- The market already collected, and kept current
- Licences, capacity and coverage verified before inclusion
- Scored against your brief, not a generic ranking
- The work compounds instead of being thrown away
The methodology sets out each stage, and what it can and cannot be relied on for.
Our principles.
We show the reasoning
Every score carries the criteria and the weights behind it. Disagree with a weighting, change it, and the ranking moves. Nothing is a black box you are asked to trust.
We say where a partner is weak
Profiles carry the drawbacks as well as the strengths. A shortlist on which every option looks excellent is not a shortlist, it is a brochure.
Rankings cannot be bought
Distributors can pay to be listed as open to enquiries, and every paid placement is labelled. None of it touches match scoring.
Your brief stays yours
What you are launching, and where, is commercially sensitive. It is not shared with distributors, sold on, or used to tip anyone off that you are coming.
Talk to us about a market.
Most conversations start the same way: a product, a country, and an open question about who is actually out there. That is a good place to begin.