• Oruga is an industrial design studio that manufactures sound effect accessories for percussion instruments.
• With the trade promotion assistance provided by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Mining through ProCórdoba Agency, the firm has gained a new market.

Oruga was born in 2014 out of the entrepreneurial vision of musician and industrial designer Nicolás Robledo. The company manufactures a unique product that has from the very beginning caught the attention of the music industry both in the local market and around the world.

Robledo, Oruga's Director, explained,

"What we did was to take a resource much used among drummers, which consists in adding sound to the instrument with tambourines, chapchas or seeds. We realized that this rustic element had not been thought of in terms of industrial design, so we developed Oruga, a plain tambourine that does not disturb the drummer's beat, with magnets that adhere to the drum ring and allow the musician to easily place it and remove it between songs."

The product is easily adapted to any ring size and can be used in other parts of the instrument, such as the cymbals.

"Oruga can be used in a number of ways. Drummers are playful folk, and our tool offers a wide range of possibilities so that musicians can use it as they please to find new sounds," continued Robledo.

He added,

"Our main strength is that we are musicians. The tool has therefore been designed and developed from a user's perspective. At the same time, being designers, we were able to identify aspects that had not been truly addressed by the market, and we then found there existed a gap that we could fill. In the wake of Oruga's wide acceptance in the market, we have developed other accessories, and our current catalog comprises ten products."

The company exhibits its products at NAMM, the biggest fair in the industry music, which takes place yearly in Los Angeles (USA). For the past three years, it has attended the event with the support of ProCórdoba, an agency under the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Mining of Córdoba. At present, it exports products to the USA, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Uruguay. Exhibiting the products at the stand set up by the Argentine Investment and Trade Promotion Agency (in Spanish, AAICI) has allowed them to come into contact with their clients and major international players.

The NAMM show takes place in January, and it was then, this year, that the Cordobese entrepreneurs met a distributor in Japan, who expressed an interest in Oruga. Even against the backdrop of the pandemic world crisis, the firm was able to close a deal with this client and export the product, thus expanding its international presence to a new market.

The Fabless Business Model

The firm works on demand and does not have a constantly-functioning workshop. A firm like this can concentrate all efforts on R&D, without the need to invest in the establishment and maintenance of a factory. This also allows the company to have overall control of the project, but with services being outsourced. Working by batches with a scalable design enables the manufacture of both small and large series, using industrial dies, without the need to introduce changes.

Robledo said,

"We invested on getting the brand out there, marketing, advertising and participating in international fairs which make it possible to connect with others face to face. Without ProCórdoba's assistance, we would not have been able to travel to the USA for three years in a row, and we would therefore not have penetrated the different foreign markets. We started exporting in our second year, because the first step is to allow buyers to get to know the firm. When buyers see you are present on more than one occasion, they begin to trust the firm."

Last year, the company's sales were 60 percent domestic and 40 percent international. But with the recent shipment to the Japanese distributor and in the face of Argentina's situation, exports have become the first source of business. Having opted for this business model has allowed the company to survive the current economic crisis.

Regarding the latest sale, the company's Director explained,

"By April, we were ready to send the shipment, but the lockdown made it impossible to do so. With the support of the Argentine Chamber of Musical Instrument Manufacturers - which at the time had referred us to AAICI and ProCórdoba - we had the help we needed to ship the products and simplify the export process."

ProCórdoba's Trade Promotion Department has planned a very busy event calendar including international fairs and trade missions. Although all trips have been canceled, most events are being reorganized to be conducted online.