My Account
What started as two mates mulling over a problem on a family camping holiday has grown into a global export platform that has just won a major prize at the New Zealand International Business Awards.
Matakana-based Moa Holdings & Friends won a special award for Extraordinary Growth in Emerging Business at the NZ Trade & Enterprise ceremony that was held online last month.
Judges described the development of Moa’s simplified manufacturing, marketing and global distribution system for Kiwi products as a phenomenal success story, with “impressive export growth over the last 18 months achieved through operational excellence, a team culture that ties their global model together, and a wider vision of helping brands from Aotearoa to find lasting success internationally”.
Chair and co-founder Jason Neely said it was pretty cool to get recognition for his and co-founder Phil Walters’ efforts to make exporting goods from New Zealand a much easier process.
“Selling on the internet is supposed to be easy, but selling stuff online from NZ is actually really hard,” he said.
“Technically, you can do it. But the US alone has 10,500 different sales taxes; no two jurisdictions are the same.
And sending stuff from here costs too much, takes too long and is bad for the environment.
“The old system is find a local distributor and give them the job of sorting all that out. But we thought there must be a way to do it ourselves.”
With Jason’s extensive background in retail and Phil as an industrial designer interested in getting products to market, the pair chewed the whole online export issue over while camping at Whananaki in 2019.
“The issue was that the internet is such a dynamic space, it’s always changing so quickly, so we needed somehow to be very agile,” Phil said. “So we looked at how we maintain control and visibility, while also being agile enough in different global markets, and then how do we allow other Kiwi brands into that space, too?”
They decided to have a crack at it using Metalbird, which Phil started as a street art project in 2009, making decorative metal bird silhouettes and installing them around his Auckland neighbourhood. People quickly wanted their own metal birds, so the project became a side-hustle that subsequently grew into a sizable business with huge export potential.
Phil said the key was ensuring the business could be scaled up and specialised for each export market, so he and Jason focused on establishing pay gateways, manufacturing facilities and distribution warehouses in each country.
“We’re trying to work with products we can make in each country,” he said. “So, New Zealand-founded, but brands that are proudly made in local markets – localised global retail – and we have local websites and product in each market.”
Metalbird also supports bird conservation groups in each of its markets, such as Forest & Bird in NZ.
Moa Holdings is now at the point where it’s almost ready to roll with two further NZ products that have potential to succeed using their export platform – a health supplement range and an artificial intelligence training system for dogs – and they have a staff of 10 based in Matakana and Auckland.
But the entire premise of the business remains its simplicity, its ease of use and the ability for its founders to run the whole thing from home if necessary.
“We just built it as we went. There’s a complex amount of knowledge built in, and we made a lot of mistakes along the way, but it’s easy to run now and in years to come I can’t see why we can’t replicate it and provide it for others,” Jason said.
