In famously fastidious Japan, urinals that don’t flush are seen by some as a health hazard. In the strict city-state of Singapore, it’s illegal to fail to flush a traditional public toilet.

So how do you sell a waterless urinal in those countries, or dozens of others, where laws and mores can stand in the way? Well, it helps to have a trusted brand name with trusted faces doing the talking.

That’s what Falcon Waterfree Technologies LLC has found as it has grown its global sales by licensing its signature waterless-urinal technology to foreign manufacturers.

That’s a shift for the West L.A. company, which used to insist on selling Falcon-branded urinals but now allows its products to be sold under the names of regional giants in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. It now expects foreign sales to exceed its domestic sales within two years.

“In Colombia, we were selling like 40 (urinals) a year,” said Chief Executive Marc Nathanson, whose Mapleton Investments has majority ownership in Falcon. “Suddenly, we went from 40 a year through local distributors to thousands a year sold.”

Founded in 2000, Falcon was one of the first companies in the business of making waterless urinals. Instead of using water to flush urine down a drain, the company’s units use gravity to let urine flow through a replaceable cartridge filled with liquid sealant and into the sewer system. According to the company, the urinals not only save on water bills but also lead to cleaner restrooms.

By partnering with major manufacturers and distributors, Falcon executives said the company has not only boosted its sales but also has gained experienced and well-connected allies who can help overcome public skepticism and local regulations that previously have slowed sales.

Perhaps just as important, the strategy helps insulate Falcon from growing competition in the global waterless-urinal market. In the 12 years since it helped pioneer the waterless concept, big international players in the plumbing business, such as Kohler Co. in Kohler, Wis., have introduced their own flushless systems. By partnering with the likes of Bogata, Colombia’s Organización Corona S.A. and Tokyo’s Lixil Corp., Falcon ensures big players in their respective regions will be customers not competitors.

Eben Jose, an analyst at San Jose’s IBIS World who covers plumbing-fixture manufacturers, said Falcon is wise to create partnerships with potential rivals.

“Every company with any size is getting into this market,” Jose said “There’s a time frame for licensing. You want to get out ahead before companies just patent their own technology.”

Executive shakeup

Nathanson, a former cable TV entrepreneur whose estimated net worth of $1.05 billion put him at No. 36 on the Business Journal’s list of Wealthiest Angelenos last month, has been an investor in Falcon almost from the company’s start. He took over as chief executive 15 months ago when he and other board members decided management wasn’t cutting it.

“They were not making money, if you want to go to the bottom line,” Nathanson said. “So we made a change.”

The biggest shift under Nathanson and new Chief Financial Officer Matt Korcinsky has been in the company’s overseas strategy.

Falcon urinals, which are made in-house and by contract manufacturers in various countries, have been used at high-profile sites such as the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, and Beijing’s Olympic stadium for several years, but the United States has remained the company’s largest market. As recently as 2009, about 80 percent of revenue came from U.S. sales, Korcinsky said. The privately held company does not release exact sales data.

Company officials said the lack of market penetration overseas was partly because the company was plenty busy with domestic sales during the real estate boom of a few years ago. It also didn’t help that Falcon’s foreign distributors were mostly small, specialty outfits working with little assistance. Falcon sold urinals and cartridges to distributors that were then responsible for the marketing, installation and customer support.

Falcon would have liked to work with larger companies, but until Nathanson took over, the company only sold its urinals and cartridges under its own name. He said that was a turnoff for many of the world’s largest makers and distributors of porcelain bathroom fixtures, which didn’t want to give up their place in the market.

“Here are all the companies in the porcelain business, and they have huge market shares and huge pride in their names,” he said. “And we were saying, ‘No, you can’t use your name.’”

Under the new licensing agreements, companies will buy Falcon’s disposable cartridges, which sell for between $30 and $35 and must be replaced every few months, and the housings that hold the cartridges in the urinal. The companies will pay a licensing fee and manufacture urinals with Falcon-approved design using their own brand names.

A urinal and cartridge in Japan might carry Lixil’s Inax brand, while one sold in the Middle East would be branded by United Arab Emirates manufacturer RAK Ceramics.

There is a downside to the arrangement. When Falcon sold urinals and cartridges through smaller, independent foreign distributors, it took the lion’s share of the profits. Now, it has given up the revenue generated by the urinals and is content to take just the profits from cartridge sales.

“We went from a high-priced product to a low-priced component product,” Korcinsky said. “We’ve made that up. The (number of) units are ever increasing.”

Hot market

But there also is ancillary benefit: Falcon gets a network of major partners that are well-connected in their regions. That can help the company in places such as Singapore, where laws or codes might need to be altered to allow for Falcon’s product.

“Working with such important players, it gives you leverage to do lobbying work,” said Armando Camarillo, Falcon’s vice president for global sales in Latin America. “The local recognition of those players gives us a better approach when we’re trying to develop plumbing codes.”

Having partners to do such work is critical. In the domestic market, Falcon spent years lobbying state regulators and legislators to update plumbing codes to allow for their urinals.

What’s more, new global partners can help Falcon by tailoring their marketing of the company’s products to local needs. For instance, in many Asian countries, water rates are low and water savings isn’t a high priority, said Paul Liang, Falcon’s vice president for global sales in Asia.

So rather than market waterless urinals as saving water, Liang said Asian marketing is more focused on design – the urinals don’t have a flush valve, giving them a cleaner, modern look. But hygiene is an obstacle. Falcon has studies that show its urinals are cleaner, in part because water doesn’t splash out of them, but it’s having to work to spread that message.

“The Japanese are very neat about keeping the bathroom clean. To them, it had to flush,” Liang said. “We’re working with Lixil, one of the biggest sanitary companies in Japan, to go through marketing campaigns to let people know it’s more hygienic.”

Still, all the ground work Falcon has laid also helps the company’s growing list of competitors. When Falcon was founded 12 years ago, there was just one other player in the waterless urinal market – Waterless Co., now based in Vista.

Big players such as Kohler and American Standard Brands of Piscataway, N.J., have since developed their own systems as they’ve seen that waterless urinals are not only viable but growing more popular.

“That’s what’s in demand right now: ways to save energy and money on utilities,” said Jose, the IBIS World analyst. “It’s definitely a competitive market. The barriers to entry have definitely decreased, which has allowed competition to increase.”

Jeff Mayerl, a senior product manager for Kohler, even claimed his company’s waterless system is superior to Falcon’s because it doesn’t use cartridges that have to be replaced. Instead, the company’s models have a permanent system that allows urine to pass through a liquid chemical sealant before flowing into the plumbing system.

“We think we’ve got a compelling product, and it is a growing portion of our business,” Mayerl said.

Despite increased competition, however, Korcinsky said Falcon expects that it will be able to continue dominating the waterless urinal market, both through its brands and with partners. Currently, the company claims to have installed about 375,000 of its urinals worldwide, giving it control of about 70 percent of the relatively small global market for waterless urinals. (There are an estimated 75 million urinals of all types worldwide.)

“Why would they reinvent the wheel when they could partner with an established firm like Falcon?” Korcinsky said of potential partners. “If they look and do the research on the water-free products, they’ll approach us and recognize us as the leaders in the field.”