Professor Ulrich's Excellent Adventure

Ulrich had inserted the names of competing scooters into a 200-word description of his Xootr site called a "meta-tag." He also included common misspellings of the Xootr name, as well as the words "push scooter," "kick scooter," and even "polyurethane tires." Ulrich's intended audience was the all-important search engines, which scan thousands of meta-tags and rank the most relevant matches whenever someone types in a keyword.

Ulrich had a hunch that the meta-tag would prove important in marketing the Xootr -- and he was right. Whenever potential customers typed a competitor's name into a search engine, the Xootr site popped up as well. There was no sleight of hand -- just some thoughtful code writing. "We thought that we were pretty clever," Ulrich says with a laugh.

Jeff Smith, cofounder and president of Lunar Design, calls what Ulrich did Internet "skitching" -- the term for a risky street game that involves grabbing on to the back of a car while riding a bike, or while sitting on a sled, and being pulled along by the car. "Razor was building a lot of brand awareness," says Smith. "We grabbed on and instantly became a part of the global channel. We immediately started receiving calls -- particularly from Japan, where people were eating up the Razor and were ready for a higher-quality scooter."

For six weeks, Xootr sat at the top of Yahoo!'s index for scooter sites. By the time his competitors caught on, Ulrich had established distribution deals in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, as well as in the Netherlands and Switzerland. One customer asked Ulrich how much it would cost to buy a large shipping container full of Xootrs -- more scooters than Nova Cruz had made since it went into business. "It was a huge leap of faith," Ulrich says of the company's decision to go global so quickly.

But it paid off almost immediately. "Conventional wisdom holds that a new business should develop its local market first and then expand globally," Ulrich says. "But Nova Cruz pursued the opposite approach, and it grew much faster. With the right Web site, a new company can attract international customers just as easily as it can attract domestic customers."

If They Come, Can You Build It?

Success on the Web -- especially if it comes faster than expected -- creates its own challenges. Success is already emerging as a challenge for Nova Cruz, which is trying hard to keep up with demand for the Xootr. Ulrich figures that the company can produce about 100,000 units a year -- double the number of scooters that he expects to sell in 2000. But recent deals with FAO Schwarz and with the Sharper Image have already stretched Nova Cruz thin, and if Ulrich lands another big distributor, he might have to outsource production to a contract manufacturer. For the time being, though, Ulrich argues that the small scale of Nova Cruz's manufacturing operations is a virtue: It emphasizes quality and allows for the quick introduction of design changes.

Who says there's no room on the Web for old-style craftsmanship? The Xootr is hand-built in a house located on a dirt road in the New Hampshire woods -- a house that also serves as the home of Nathan Ulrich and as the site of his engineering and contract-manufacturing business, Technique Applied Science Inc. The modest scale of Nova Cruz masks the sophistication of the enterprise, however. Three computerized machine tools run three shifts, 24 hours a day. Nathan designed some homegrown tooling fixtures that allow the plant to milk these computerized machine tools for all that they're worth. The Ulrich brothers know the cost, right down to the penny, of every one of the components that make up the Xootr -- and how those costs compare with the cost of making the same part elsewhere.

The biggest challenge for Nova Cruz now, Ulrich says, is to keep up with all of the orders that are flooding in. But the MIT whiz kid is already preparing for the day when the general-interest scooter craze starts to decline. His plan: Allow scooter enthusiasts to design their own Xootrs, using the Web and Nova Cruz's manufacturing sophistication. Ulrich envisions an online-order screen with six to eight slider bars that would enable customers to shape the scooter's deck like an ellipse, an hourglass, or anything in between. Customers could design their own logo and select a custom color. They might even be able to watch their Xootr take shape in a machine tool at the New Hampshire factory.

"We want to keep the competition from moving toward price and cost, because we can't compete there," Ulrich says. "If we want to stay in the United States and do our own thing, we'd better offer lots of variety that can't be replicated by mass producers." That's next year's challenge. For now, Ulrich must catch up to global demand for the Xootr. Thanks to the Web, he's on quite a ride.

Paul C. Judge (pjudge@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Contact Karl Ulrich by email (karl@novacruz.com), or learn more about Nova Cruz Products on the Web (www.xootr.com).