Businesses growing at home

Matt and Hope first started OtherNature as a side hustle while they were living and working in London. The couple had long been fans of mushroom supplements as a way to support their own health and wellbeing, and Matt says they wanted to not only build a brand that took a science-based approach to efficacy but also allowed them to move into an area of business that was much more purpose-led.

“We really wanted to create a brand that goes above and beyond just products. Sustainability is important to us and really links back to our products and the importance of fungi in the environment. Although just at the beginning of our journey, OtherNature already has a circular packaging model, partners with 1% For the Planet, and is working to become a carbon-neutral and B-Corp business.”

The sustainable focus of OtherNature was one of the key reasons the couple wanted to launch their brand in New Zealand. Matt is Canadian, but Hope is originally from Christchurch and so the couple began to look at the support offered to startups in the Canterbury area. Hope says New Zealand Trade and Enterprise were hugely valuable in connecting the couple with other people and when they arrived, they found the support provided by organisations like ChristchurchNZ incredible.

“We were lucky enough to be accepted into The Founder Catalyst Incubation Programme, run by the Ministry of Awesome, which is designed to support, nurture, and accelerate the growth of early-stage startups with global ambition and that was a huge boost for us. We were also paired with two incredible mentors at ThincLab out of the University of Canterbury, who worked with us on a fortnightly basis, which was also a huge benefit.”

Hope and Matt say there were some definite hurdles to overcome ahead of the initial launch of their business. OtherNature’s mushrooms are grown in China and imported to New Zealand where they are then blended with native New Zealand ingredients and finished into supplement form by a specialist lab based in Hamilton. When they arrived back in New Zealand, pandemic restrictions and supply chain issues were still very much a problem.

Despite the challenges, their business has started strong, in part Matt says because of the time they took with their team of industry experts to design their product and the increased focus on the benefits of mushrooms and natural supplements in general.

“Lately the science has really caught up and there’s been a renewed interest in all facets of medicinal mushrooms from psychedelic ranges to functional mushrooms. Mushrooms can be beneficial for all sorts of things from gut health to sleep to stress. The global medicinal mushroom market is worth $25 billion globally, and it’s growing at around 9% a year.”

Hope and Matt launched OtherNature with one product designed for focus and cognitive health but have several others in the pipeline. The feedback on their business has been amazing and they are seeing a really strong sales growth and return rate from customers.

Outside of work, the couple both agree that living and working in Christchurch has given them the lifestyle balance they were lacking in London and while Hope is enjoying being closer to her friends and family, Matt is enjoying the outdoor options that Christchurch offers and says the city has offered the couple a lot more long-term options.

“Compared to London, the cost of living in Christchurch was a welcome change, it’s also a lot more affordable in terms of getting around. We were expecting the start-up scene to be a lot more of a grind, but we do notice that people work hard all day but tend to be gone from the workspace by 5-6 o’clock. There is a far healthier culture here in terms of building your business but also making sure you have time to step away from it.”

Hope says coming from London, the couple definitely had to adjust to life back home and that adjustment took some getting used to, but the support they have received has made the move more than worth it.

“When we first moved, we knew we were going to be in Christchurch for at least a year, but because we received so much support through various organisations and we had this amazing workspace with Founder Catalyst, it made the city a really great place for us to continue to be based. We would like to expand as the business grows and we are looking at setting up an office in Australia or the UK, but we always see the business as having a base in New Zealand. I really love the new scene in Christchurch, there are great restaurants and cafes, and the city is really vibrant – the only problem is that we are pouring everything into the business so we can’t enjoy the food and wine scene as much as I might like to.”

Tram in Christchurch city New Zealand — Christchurch has a lot to offer Kiwi looking for a change of lifestyle

Matt says he wants other founders to know about the amazing support on offer in cities like Christchurch and would encourage anyone looking to launch a business to put the time and effort into making connections in their chosen area as it really pays off in the long run.

“I would tell others to have a list of people that you need to connect with, organisations like Kea, NZTE, the startup communities and the startup accelerator programs. These connections immediately insert you into the community you need to be in and it just makes everything so much easier. This is my number one thing, because if you’re going to make that jump to becoming a founder, you need the additional support and a group of like-minded people around you because entrepreneurship can be lonely. Both Hope and I came from big teams and big corporations and then all of a sudden it was just the two of us and that was a huge shock to the system that we hadn’t truly anticipated, and it was hard. But people here are so friendly and willing to chat, it’s not just a transactional conversation they really want to help.”

We’ve all been there, driving round and round the block looking for a parking space while becoming increasingly frustrated by the empty spaces you’re not allowed to park in. That was a problem Toby Littin and his business partners set out to solve in 2016 and true to the Kiwi nature of their company they picked an All Blacks game as their first big test.

“At the time the sharing economy was going gangbusters and so we came up with the idea to allow people with spare parking spaces to be able to list them on an app for others to use. We chose the night of an All Blacks match at Eden Park to launch the concept and it was great fun, we parked about 120 people that night, I had all my family out in jackets and the rain and we had a blast. Originally we thought our market would be events and baby boomers but we came to realise our dynamic market is younger and it is commuters and regular users.”

The company still maintains some of their marketplace business but has since pivoted to become much more of a software as a service business where Toby says they are able to make much more of an impact.

“Our software helps businesses to manage their parking assets. If you’re a big employer, you lease a lot of office space and you’ve often got car parks associated with that. What we find is that, especially now in a hybrid working environment, those car parks are not always being used efficiently. For example, a business might have 200 spaces under their building and lease another 200 spaces down the road. Our software allows you to allocate spaces fairly between employees and potentially get rid of the ones down the road, and if you still have some left over, release those to the public and generate some money.”

Parkable’s software caught the eye of tech giant Meta who Toby says was looking for a way to increase employee experience in order to attract the best talent.

“Meta is competing for talent with companies like Amazon and Google and they realise that just paying good salaries isn’t enough, they need to create an environment where people want to come to work. They recognised that car parking is a very emotional issue for their employees and that it was often a source of negative sentiment. So they did a global search for a solution and came across our platform.”

However, it was nearly a missed opportunity for the Kiwi company who didn’t actually believe it would feature on the radar of such a global tech giant. “Meta reached out via email and we thought it was spam so we ignored it. And they reached out again and the second time we were like, ‘oh, some student with a Facebook account is playing a joke’. The third time they reached out we thought we better reply, so we did. We laugh about it now but thank goodness they were so tenacious.”

Meta reached out during the pandemic, a time which Toby says initially decreased demand for their product but long term has provided huge opportunities.

“Before the pandemic, we used to talk about flexi working and I would stand on a stage and say to people if you’re moving to flexi working give us a call and only two out of a hundred people would listen. But now that the whole world has gone hybrid we have this huge tailwind of demand, it’s been crazy but also amazing.”

Parkable has been through a lot of leanings in the past six years to get the company to where it is today. The deal with Meta is still in the early stages but Toby says it’s already giving them huge insights and learnings and has allowed them to imagine other opportunities. He says his best advice to other Kiwi tech companies is to always think big.

“The other day I heard the expression ‘If you want to win the big prizes, knock on the big doors’ and it’s so true. To really unlock scale, you’ve got to get into the big markets and approach the biggest customers. It’s how you grow to hyper scale quickly. We’re not at hyper scale yet, but we’re starting to feel some of that momentum and it’s pretty exciting.”

“For us, the key lesson has been to go hard and go early, that way you can fail fast. I wish we had gone harder at our marketplace business earlier. We were part-time founders, we all had day jobs, but looking back I wish we had gone boots and all into our marketplace business earlier so that we could learn the valuable lessons around what are the unit economics? Is it scalable or is it not? And how do we scale and into what segment? We probably could have saved a year and a half of learning if we had gone harder earlier. There were plenty of things we failed at and at the time those were quite stressful but looking back they were really key learning moments as well.”

Parkable has a global staff of 55 and is currently in the process of hiring more. Toby says alongside the business learnings Parkable’s journey has also really driven home to him the importance of great people.

“The pandemic really taught me the power of purpose and the power of authenticity and authentic leadership. During Covid we had some incredibly humbling moments from some incredibly amazing people inside our business, people were coming to work with so much uncertainty and not knowing which way up the world was. To be able to be really purpose focused and really respond to the wants and needs of our people is such a powerful part of our story and I think will really feed into our success for many years to come.”

Maz Kassis has always loved data. After graduating from Sydney University with a Masters’s in Biostatistics he worked in various health related roles across both state and federal government, before being shoulder tapped by the World Health Organisation for a job in Switzerland. While there he met a number of people in the finance sector who convinced him to come to London and use his data knowledge in the banking industry, after a few years in the sector he was ready for a more ‘down to earth’ role and was contacted by some former colleagues from the UN who were looking for a way to use data to help them best distribute funds to Syrian refugees crossing the border into Jordan. It was during his time in Jordan that Maz met and married his wife and the couple moved back to Australia, but after the birth of their second child, Maz says they decided to move to New Zealand.

“My wife said neighbours in Jordan had told her that New Zealand was a really great place to raise kids and we were looking for a lifestyle change. I had a great job in Australia but the hours were long and we wanted more balance. I started looking around for work and found this role steering the Data Analytics team, and indirectly leading the IT function of Foodstuffs.”

Maz is the first person in the 100 year history of Foodstuffs to officially have the words data and analytics in his title, although the Kiwi Co-operative has been working in this space for quite some time. He says the recognition of his title showcases how data is becoming a larger and larger part of all businesses’ operations, regardless of what kind of business they are.

“At Foodstuffs, we are using data to help us become one of the most customer driven retailers in the world. It allows us to drive better decision making and keep the ship afloat as efficiently and as effectively as possible. Even though we sell groceries, we are essentially a data business, every decision we make from what stock we have on our shelves, to what price it is, to the layout of the store, to how does the product get to the store, all of that is based on a whole heap of data and information.”

Foodstuffs get around 2.7 million people a week coming into their stores or through their online
platform and Maz says that the volume of data creates opportunities that are equal to any role he
has held offshore.

Maz says the data opportunities for companies like Foodstuffs are really exciting.

“Sure we don’t have as much data as the big UK or USA retailers but the culture here is just so empowering that the opportunities it creates are as exciting as anything happening in other markets. As New Zealand continues to evolve I think we are going to need all of the expertise that we can get our hands on. The role of that data and analytics is not to replace human beings, it’s to supplement their capabilities. We have just hired our first official first data engineer role in the hundred year history of Foodstuffs. Tomorrow we will need privacy professionals and data ethicists. The day after that we will need experts in machine learning and data science expertise. So rather than taking away people, we’re actually adding people with different skill sets and growing that capability and growing the culture.”

“There’s never been a better opportunity that I can see, to take full advantage of the opportunities that New Zealand is offering right now, particularly if you’ve got that overseas experience, and have worked for organisations that are perhaps ahead of the game in certain areas. Bringing what you know back here means that you can not only fully leverage your knowledge and expertise, but you can also branch off into different areas and improve and augment your own capabilities.”

Maz and his family have settled in well in New Zealand and say they already think of themselves as honorary Kiwi. The family hope to make this their permanent home and Maz says they can’t imagine living anywhere else.

“Moving to New Zealand and taking the job at foodstuffs was the best move I’ve ever made career wise. I’ve enjoyed everywhere that I’ve worked, but this place, I think it was the right place at the right time with my kids, the city, the culture and the country. We are so privileged to be able to call New Zealand our home.”

This content was created in partnership with Foodstuffs North Island. If you would like to know more about the job opportunities that are available at Foodstuffs please see Kea’s job platform.

In the early days mountain biking was anything but a family affair for Dan, his wife and their three boys.

“Our kids were 3, 7 and 9 years old, and we’d have to split up to go riding. I’d ride the longer trails with our older boys, whilst my wife would stay near the carpark with our youngest son on his balance bike.”

It wasn’t that the family didn’t want to ride together, it was just that Dan and his wife couldn’t find a suitable seat for their youngest son, one that would let him enjoy mountain biking, fit their bikes in the way they wanted and keep their son safe all at the same time. After some searching they decided to solve the problem themselves, asking a friend, Tom, to design a custom seat for them.

The Kids Ride Shotgun seat designed by Dan and Tom

“Once we started using the seat out on the trails, people kept approaching us to ask where they could get one – that’s when Tom and I realised there could be an opportunity here. We decided to do a road trip around New Zealand and Australia to see what interest we could get from bike retailers, and that’s how Kids Ride Shotgun was born.”

Since its beginnings in 2017 Kids Ride Shotgun has enjoyed phenomenal growth. Today the company employs 18 people, and its products are sold in over 20 markets. Dan attributes the company’s success to two key factors – one finding a gap in the market and two, being the customer.

“Because it was a product we designed for ourselves, it meant we really knew what the problems were, and were able to design something that solved a lot of problems and delivered an amazing customer experience.”

Having never run a retail product business before, Dan and Tom had to quickly get up to speed with all the facets of the business, including branding, marketing, finance and supply chain. Dan says the onset of the pandemic provided incredible growth for the company with the Government mandating mountain biking as an approved outdoor activity.

“Like everyone else, we did face supply chain challenges, but we were lucky that we had understanding customers and we also placed some pretty big bets early on. We saw what was happening and invested really heavily in stock, which was a bit scary at the time, but ended up working out to our advantage.”

Dan says from the start Kids Ride Shotgun has always had a global mindset and so expanding into international markets was a step they took fairly early on.

“We had to think pretty big as we knew there weren’t enough people in New Zealand to succeed here, so we’ve had to be global from the start. Before we did that initial road trip, we had already looked at what was on offer globally and we knew there was a gap.”

As the company has grown it’s also evolved. In the beginning, Dan says he and Tom thought starting up a business would be a great way to help set up their families. However, they quickly realised what they were doing had a much bigger purpose.

“I think being purpose-led is smart business. What we’re doing is a genuinely good thing for the world. We are getting kids off screens, onto trails, into nature, getting exercise, and spending quality time with their parents. When I open Instagram and see all the people tagging us in their photos from their rides – all these families out riding together. It makes you feel great inside to know you’re helping families to do that.”

And despite their success to date, Dan says the company has lots of plans for the future including creating a generation of mini mountain bikers.

“No one in the world has really looked at mountain biking as a journey and thought ‘how do I best raise a kid into the sport of mountain biking’, particularly in that zero to five-year age range, so that’s our mission now. Our product development team is looking at different ways we can give parents and kids what they need to get out on the trials together.”

“In 20 years, we want to be known as the brand that helped create this mini-mountain biker movement. We want to help raise the next generation of mountain bikers and get millions of kids onto the trails with their families. If we could look back in 20 years and say we helped do that, then that would be success.”

Kids Ride Shotgun came to Kea Connect for advice on providing customer support across multiple time zones, languages and platforms. Kea Connect was able to connect them with a fellow Kiwi CEO who had been through a similar challenge and could provide advice and guidance. The company then utilised Kea Connect a second time when images of their product were being used without their permission on fraudulent sites. They were looking to speak with someone about brand protection for online consumer goods. Kea Connect were able to offer a connection with our legal partners DLA Piper for advice.

Many people will be able to identify with the early journey of Six Barrel Soda Co-founder Joe Slater. After graduating with a BA from Victoria University, the Wellington born Kiwi left New Zealand for the traditional OE, and like many young Kiwi explorers took a job in the hospitality industry first in Australia and later in London and then Paris.

“I was working predominantly as a cocktail bartender in France when my long time friend and now business partner Mike Stewart, got in touch with a business proposal he was keen to partner with me on. I decided it sounded like a good idea and subsequently packed up and headed home to New Zealand.”

That particular business proposal never actually got off the ground, but Joe says it wasn’t long until the two came up with another idea – this time to open a cafe in one of Wellington’s most popular areas.

“We opened a little cafe run out of a caravan, which at the time was a pretty out there idea. We had some tables and chairs and a bunch of plants. It was actually really cool. We ran that for a few years before opening Monterey, which is our bar and diner in Newtown. It was there that the idea for Six Barrel Soda was born.”

Using his offshore experience as a cocktail bartender Joe had been experimenting with a bunch of different syrups and concentrates for Monterey customers and began thinking about how they could expand on the idea.

“Mike and I thought this is actually a really interesting way for people to make drinks without lots of unhealthy ingredients and that was the start of Six Barrel. We refined the process and decided to focus on a soda, for us it was about offering an alternative that’s better for you.”

The idea originally started as a soda shop with products people could take home and over the past decade has grown into the syrup and carbonated soda company that they are today.

For some people taking on a market that is dominated by global giants like Coca-Cola and Frucor might be intimidating, but Joe says Six Barrel has always found success in focusing on what they do best rather than what their competitors are doing.

“I don’t think anyone needs to take over the whole market. I mean, the market is big enough for 100 companies to be huge, you know? We are not trying to take on Coke and what we do is not a direct swap, It’s a different kind of thing. We’ve got a really good business we’re proud of and it’s more about challenging ourselves rather than comparing ourselves to our competition. Just because something works for another company it doesn’t mean it will work for us. It’s better for both your sanity and focus if you concentrate on what you do best, not what others are doing.”

“The big way we differentiate ourselves is that we are a syrup company. Plus we have always been really experimental with our flavours which also helps set us apart.”

One of Six Barrel’s experimental flavours

Reflecting on the past decade, Joe says the business has achieved a lot of its goals – even if they didn’t necessarily make a hard and fast list.

“I think a lot of the things we have achieved were goals, even if they weren’t necessarily written down as such. That’s things like having a good team around us, working reasonable hours and getting paid properly, having a dedicated kind of production space and having opportunities with collaboration partners and export partners.”

During their decade of growth they have seen huge changes to the non-alcoholic beverage market and part of the company’s ability to grow has come from being adaptable.

“I think if someone tried to launch an alcohol free gin in 2012, they would have been laughed out of the shop. But nowadays there are so many available. Things are always changing. Our flavours have also adapted, in the beginning we were quite American like, whereas today we are a premium New Zealand brand with an identity that reflects that. For example we have a Kiwi fruit and Kawa Kawa soda coming out soon, we do feijoa and other Kiwiana flavours.”

While it hasn’t always been plain sailing Joe says the key to staying sticking around is to trust the process and keep trying.

“We’ve definitely tried a lot of things along the way that didn’t work, but at the same time, we keep coming up with new ideas and keep hunting out new opportunities with people and brands, so it’s really about having the faith that things will work out.”

His advice to those starting out is to be selective and focus on a few things at a time rather than trying to do everything.

“We’ve definitely got a lot better at not just immediately leaping into every idea. Sometimes when people talk about success they talk about staff numbers or how many markers they’re in. But if you’ve got 100 staff and your business is a mess, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the same with markets, we’re in five countries at the moment, two of them are pretty little and just starting and two of them are kind of focused ones and one could be good. So I think not overstretching yourself is key“

Another piece of advice would be to really think about the money you need. We’ve always financed the company ourselves, that’s something I’m quite keen on. Every now and then we meet people who are just starting and they say ‘we’re going to raise all this capital and it’s going to be great. And I’m like, that’s cool but what are you going to spend all that money on? and they say, ‘oh I don’t know yet.’ In the early years you only want to raise and spend what you really need to or else you create a whole other set of problems.”

While Joe and Mike may not have written down many short term business goals they do have a definite long term one, and Joe says it’s one that’s really important to him.

“I really just want to create a legacy business. something that is going to be around for 100 years, whether or not we own it or not. To create something really enduring, that would be the biggest achievement of all.”
Joe is one of Kea’s many ‘solvers’ – Globally experienced Kiwi who are keen to provide in-market advice and insight to other Kiwi businesses through our free Kea Connect service. If you’d like to speak to Joe or any of our other solvers then get in touch with Kea Connect today

It highlights the immense opportunity that exists to support New Zealand export businesses through services like Kea Connect. It celebrates the strong desire of our Kiwi community to give back to New Zealand by providing in-market advice and insights and highlights the growth and hard work of New Zealand export businesses during a particularly challenging time.

Kea Connect retrospective – 2021

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Businesses growing at home

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