GGBAILEY In The News
Skidmore Scope
Ginger Cannon Bailey can tell you why it pays to have decent floor mats in your car. Her reasons are simple – they protect the carpet, and they are nicer to your shoes- but Bailey is perhaps a bit more convincing in her arguments than the average person.
Bailey is CEO of GGBAILEY, an online subsidiary of Racemark International a family-run business that produces high-quality end automobile floor mats. For more than thirty years, Racemark has supplied mats to manufacturers in Europe, Japan and the US – including Audi, BMW, Honda, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Mits, Porsche, Saab and Volkswagen.
It used to be that car owners could only purchase Racemark mats only through a dealer. For a least a decade, Bailey says, she’d been trying to find “ a way to reach the end consumer more directly.” As of November, individuals can now design and order their floor mats directly from GGBAILEY @ www.ggbailey.com, selecting from about a dozen carpet, trim, and heelpad colors, and personalizing them with embroidered initials, words, or logos. (Racemark designed a one of a kind “007” floor mat for the BMW Z3 Roadster in the James Bond Film GoldenEye.)
Racemark headquarters are just south of Saratoga, in Malta NY, with additional manufacturing facilities in Georgia and Switzerland.
As overseer of the online store’s front-end, Bailey has had to learn a few things about online advertising and marketing tactics. “Doing business on the internet requires immediate response time, 24/7, she says. “We have to move at warp speed,” since orders ship within 48 hours of receipt. Finally, as a woman in the “ultra-conservative” automotive industry, Bailey knows her company must rely on technological and business savvy – not gender – to be a success.