Case Study: SureFire
SureFire is a worldwide supplier of flashlights and weapon-mounted tactical lights designed to meet the demanding needs of law enforcement, military, and emergency professionals. Known the world over, SureFire products lead the industry with unsurpassed quality and reliability.

San Diego Media began its relationship with SureFire in February of 2001. At the time, SureFire was a small company primarily focused on selling to its specialty market through an established vendor network. Though the company had an existing web site, SureFire had no eCommerce and did little to target the retail market.

The Challenge
The challenge for San Diego Media was to take a product primarily utilized by law enforcement and military and expand the marketplace to include retail consumers both online and offline.

The MaxEXP® Solution
Utilizing MaxEXP®, San Diego Media created an eBusiness solution for SureFire capitalizing on knowledge of SureFire's audience, industry, and potential opportunities. Having assisted SureFire in repositioning the brand and expanding the target market to include the web consumer, San Diego Media helped leverage an entirely new, higher-margin market segment for SureFire.

Inventory Management
Using MaxEXP®'s inventory management system, SureFire was able to categorize their products so that both the retail consumer and the military or law enforcement consumer could find products and content relevant to their particular flashlight need or requirement. For each flashlight SureFire could now associate related accessories to help educate the consumer on other recommended products, but also to increase exposure to some of the other items SureFire offers.







Content Management
With MaxEXP®'s content management system true stories, testimonials, and different applications could be submitted by customers through the web site creating a more interactive, engaging experience for the consumer. This allowed customers to actively participate in the site's branding, but also allowed consumers to educate other consumers on the many uses of their products.







My Account
Using the My Account feature customer service was automated, allowing the customer to check their order status, view past orders, and update their account information online improving customer care and reducing costs for SureFire.





Shopping Cart
Finally a streamlined shopping cart and a secure checkout experience made purchases on the site easy, increasing revenue for the company and building consumer confidence in SureFire.







Marketing Tools
With MaxEXP®'s marketing tools SureFire was able to increase profits by spotlighting products, offering discounts, and participating in other marketing campaigns. Sophisticated technology in MaxEXP® allowed SureFire to track the results of their marketing efforts, in order to make educated decisions on how best to sell their products and services in the future.



The Result:
Utilizing the features within MaxEXP®, SureFire now had the capability to expand into new channels, including the highly profitable channel of web retail. They had a direct, high-margin retail channel to their core market, as well as new consumer groups such as avid boaters and aviators. And with the use of traditional print advertising, online promotions, and a search engine friendly site, SureFire was successfully driving traffic and sales to the new web media.

San Diego Media launched SureFire in August of 2001. By December of 2002, SureFire.com had more than proven its success, captivating the B2C and B2B markets and enjoying a monthly revenue in excess of 600% of the first month's revenue.

Since SureFire began using MaxEXP® the company has experienced exponential growth both offline and online, experiencing over a 1000% increase in sales over the last 4 years.

With the continual development of new tools, features, and programs SureFire is consistently exceeding monthly revenue expectations and gaining in both profitability and market share.

"MaxEXP® is a rock-solid foundation for eCommerce and will enable SureFire to offer a full range of Web Services to our customers worldwide. Open standards technology has greatly influenced our business model, grown our market share, and has enabled us to better support all our customers. The MaxEXP® technology, originally developed specifically for SureFire by San Diego Media, is playing a key role in the growing success of our company."

John Matthews
President, SureFire, LLC