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Statesville welcomes lubricant company Jig-A-Loo
Regan Hill
Local business and city leaders were on hand Wednesday for the ribbon cutting for the new Jig-A-Loo office on Cooper Street in Statesville.
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Published: October 2, 2008
When Canadian company Jig-A-Loo hired Cindy Sutton away from Lowe's and made her its marketing executive, it did so without having an office for her to work in.
For six months Sutton worked out of her Statesville home, devising ways to put the company's flagship lubricating spray and other product lines on the shelves of stores like Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Ace Hardware.
Last month the company, based in Montreal, opened a five-person office on Cooper Street. On Wednesday company executives and local business and city leaders were on hand to cut the ribbon on the new location.
David Gilmour, Jig-A-Loo's president and CEO, said company leaders looked at a opening U.S. offices in "the obvious places" like Atlanta or New York.
He decided on Statesville when he knew that's where Sutton would feel best.
"We are not a huge company," Gilmour said. "And family matters a lot to us. And Cindy's quality of life is important to us and to the success of our business. So we're in Statesville and we're going to expand."
Jig-A-Loo and Jig-A-Patch — a spray-on spackle kit — are the company's two main products. A second, more powerful lubricant will be on shelves soon and two other products are "in the pipeline" said Jean-Loup Barbeau, the company's brand manager.
Sutton said expansion south of the border propelled the move.
"Although we have been selling here for the last year, the growing market demand for the Jig-A-Loo family of products warrants the opening," she said.
The name of the product comes from a corruption of the French Canadian phrase "ti-gi-dou," which Barbeau explained, kind of equates to that light bulb-above-the-head moment of clarity.
"It sort of means, 'I got it,' " he said. "But it's also a good, catchy phrase."
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