Industry Trade Group Bucks Membership Decline

SOAP & DETERGENT ASSOCIATION

In the past two months, the Soap & Detergent Association has found something that eludes many industrial trade groups these days: new members.

In December, SDA announced that Gereke Chemicals, Innophos, International Specialty Products (ISP), Kao Specialties Americas, Lanxess, MonoSol, OCI Chemical, and Warwick International had become new members. Since then, four more firms—Purada Processing, IPL Packaging, Hydra-Tone Chemicals, and Hatco Corp.—have signed up to join SDA.

Ernie Rosenberg, SDA's president and chief executive officer, attributes the association's ability to attract new members to three factors. First, because SDA members include both cleaning product companies and the chemical makers that supply them, networking opportunities abound. Second, although cleaning products and chemicals are generally benign, their makers need a voice in the legislative and regulatory community. The third factor, he says, is good service to members.

One of these services is the SDA annual meeting and convention, which takes place this week in Boca Raton, Fla. Rosenberg acknowledges that the Boca Raton Resort & Club is an expensive place to hold a conference, but he says SDA members get their money's worth by scheduling several days of back-to-back high-level meetings. "It's not a trade show where you go to get leads," Rosenberg says. "It's a place where you do solid business."

Sotiri A. Papoulias, marketing director for performance chemicals at ISP, says he long pushed for SDA membership but met resistance from senior managers who perceived the home care market as mature and not very high-tech. They changed their minds, he says, after they acquired the encapsulation specialist Hallcrest last year and found, to their surprise, that many of Hallcrest's customers were in home and fabric care.

Indeed, Rosenberg is convinced that the growth of the cleaning products industry—and of SDA—lies in innovation. "If you want to be exposed to the people making the innovations, or who are in the market to find innovation, you need a place to go, and SDA provides that," he says.