"A close-up look at a company in Lyon that is a pro at exporting! Interview with Eric Baesa : Manager of Take Off who explains his international choices..."
- How did Take Off start up, and what are its operations today?
Take Off sees itself as a graphic creations studio specialized in the leisure and entertainment industry market, especially video gaming. For the last 9 years our operations have been mainly focused on product launches in Europe and worldwide.
Take Off first began in Lyon where it started as a spinoff of Infogrames, a French video game editing and distribution company founded by Bruno Bonell in 1983. At present over half of the Take Off team derives from Infogrames and, with it, the ingrained DNA of video gaming!
- What made you want to go out and conquer international markets?
It all started with a simple observation: above all I see Take Off as a “master craftsman” working in a state-of-the-art niche. Like most niche sectors we quickly reached market saturation and had to decide how we wanted our operations to progress. Either we needed to find other growth sectors with diversification in mind, or we had to seek out new customers in our stronghold niche, and then enlarge our core customer base. After a prospective study in Canada – sparked by Imaginove – we decided to use Quebec as our worldwide venture’s springboard. (Language counted, among other reasons, but also the ease of implantation, and the market dynamics, with Montreal being the video gaming hub for the sector.)
- How did the move to Montreal go for Take Off?
We had two possibilities for settling there. The first would be to buy out an entity already established in the area and change its operations. The second would be to start all over “from scratch”. What counted most for Take Off was to preserve this DNA, our know-how, the experience which was our strength and which we’d built up in Lyon. So we found ourselves a lawyer, local contacts, office premises, and started from nothing.
- Today you chose to open a subsidiary in Los Angeles. Why?
Well, Montreal Take Off has been around for 3 years already, with continually exponential turnover. So, to strive higher we decided to repeat the adventure in the United States, once again in the aim of expanding our customer base.
Why Los Angeles? You have to realize that today 50% of the world’s video game companies have their headquarters in California. For us, it was a necessity to have representation on the spot.
Actually, because we started up our international operations in Montreal, this helped us a lot in penetrating the American market – setting up a prospecting unit, working with native-born English speakers, establishing contacts through regular participation in the most essential trade fairs such as E3, Game Connection, GDC in San Francisco, Casual Connect in Seattle – but even that was not enough...
In spite of everything, the fact of our main location being Montreal remained a major hurdle. There were no two ways about it: we needed a US presence. We decided on Los Angeles because San Francisco is prohibitively expensive, with the presence of such big players as Google or Apple which tends to excessively inflate market price.
- Were you obliged to do work differently once you’d set foot on American soil? What are the market opportunities for a French company like Take Off?
As I said, we kept the same DNA which is our inner force, and used exactly the same work processes as in France or Montreal.
Meanwhile, though, we developed a new label over the last month: “French Flavor”, which is surfing the micro-niche of American indie movies. The latter would like to move closer to French culture in their communications and marketing, and would like to distance themselves from Hollywood protocol, seeking more subtlety and finesse. This time, we hired a French native in order to better convey French culture to our targeted clientele. It’s a different strategy than for Take Off, which intends to be local and identified as such!
For Take Off, we’re able to stand out favorably from the competition because of our past experience. We came in with world-class references emanating from our past history in Lyon, with contracts for Ubisoft or Activision…names that really strike Americans and make all the difference. We call it our “unique selling point”!
We’re also a team coming from video gaming and, for me, that’s the best school of all: to anticipate ahead of time what customers expect from us, since we ourselves were also customers in the past.
- After Canada and the USA, do you foresee other destinations for Take Off?
For the time being, I’d like to concentrate on developing our American operations, but later on why not Brazil and Qatar, with the entire Arabian peninsula? Things are moving so quickly today; it’s important that we maintain this perpetual motion and predict potential rebounds.
www.takeoffstudio.com
