Online marketing boosts export sales.

Robert Jackson remembers attending trade shows, peddling his etched glass products with promotional material no more sophisticated than some photographs pasted to a sheet of construction paper.

Now the 40-year-old president of Prestige Glass International Inc, of Elliot Lake scrolls through his online catalogue of some of the glass and crystal gift items that have made his company one of North America's premiere glass fabricators and e-mails digital samples to prospective clients.

When it comes time for the Canadian Country Music Awards, Skate Canada or the American Hockey League to hand out their annual hardware, the people they place their orders with is this Elliot Lake manufacturer.

And even bigger corporate fish like Pepsi-Cola, Miller Brewing Company, BMW, Gucci, Shell Oil, Sprint, Nike and Motorola all rely on Prestige Glass to craft recognition awards for their top salespeople.

Since being recognized as Northern Ontario Business's company of the year in 1998 in the 1 to 15 employee category, Prestige's export sales have doubled, and the company ranks have swelled to 50 employees. Even their work space has grown, expanding from 10,000 to 25,000 square feet and stretching across the street from their Roddis Road facility to include a. 10,000-square-foot warehouse and carpentry shop.

"And we're just getting rolling," says Jackson who has firmly set his sights on boosting his international sales (predominately to the United States) from 25 to 50 percent by year's end.

The seven-year-old company was recently lauded for its export prowess at the Ontario's government's Global Traders Awards program, receiving an honourable mention last month at the awards ceremony in Thunder Bay.

It's one of a number of accolades garnered by Jackson, a glass and metal mechanic who ran a small commercial glass shop in Elliot Lake with his brother Scott in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the mines closed and business dried up, Jackson changed with the times and segued into making glass pulpits and communion tables. After the product was published in a religion periodical, they were overwhelmed with orders from the United States and it opened up a niche market that remains especially lucrative today.

They became pioneers in the process by taking requests for specialty desktop items and slowly grew the company by pulling in contacts through word of mouth and marketing through the corporate trade show circuit.

Jackson says few people realize that the promotional products industry anything from T-shirts to ball caps and pen sets - represents an ever-widening market worth about $1.5 billion in Canada and more than $11 billion in the United States.

In building their reputation, they spend a considerable amount of money aggressively marketing their product, especially in the weeks following a trade show.

Jackson says Prestige Glass is a unique entity in the business since few companies produce both the. glass blanks and decorate them.

Prestige has further expansion plans in the works with more manufacturing space likely needed in the next couple of years to house new equipment High on his wish list is also a hot glass facility where melted liquid glass can be poured into molds to create specialty items similar to the traditional blown glass methods.