Then I was traveling and competing in freeride skiing globally for about 10 years, and I saw this opportunity, this gap, that on one side, you had a synthetic base layer that had graphics that were more suited to sleepwear. And on the other side, you had a merino wool base, which was basically pretty boring.
It had earthy, black colors and lacked the energy and culture of the mountains that I loved so much, so I saw an opportunity. It was basically about creating that vision and then trying to figure out how to make it a reality.
After 15 years in business, how was the experience of expanding to offices abroad?
The intention was always to go international from day one. New Zealand just doesn’t have a big enough market. My ambition was always to create a global brand. I really wanted to help take New Zealand action sports international, so that was a big push for me.
The first fair we went to was in Munich 15 years ago and the big brands were spending a quarter of a million euros on these kinds of events to talk to retailers. So we went there and the brand completely failed. We had to go back, really re-evaluate and accept this humbling setback, and then come back a little better for the following year.
What happened during that time, in 2009, was that we opened about five stores in New Zealand. Then my old ski sponsor, Volkl Skis, my team manager and my boss introduced me to a Swiss retailer and distributor, and that’s what enabled us to establish ourselves in Switzerland.
In the first year, we shipped all of our remaining stock here in New Zealand and then quickly added several countries. We took advantage of that gap in the market and scaled up quite quickly in Europe. That scaling brought with it a lot of problems, because we weren’t quite prepared for it.
Was expansion the biggest challenge the business faced?
It was one of the big initial challenges. One of our distributors changed and the new owner did not pay us for the purchase order he had placed with us, which amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the end, we decided to move to Switzerland to deliver the products ourselves, and that was a big learning curve.
Hannah and I had a three-month-old baby with us. So, you know, when you look back you think: we probably shouldn’t have done that. But we gained a lot of ground in Switzerland, it was such a strong market for us that we didn’t want to take a step back.
We always had the vision of sitting in our own offices and being able to run the business from there as well.
Does your wife Hannah still create all the designs for the business?
Yes, he has an incredible gift for proposing what he thinks the world needs. And he often doesn’t do it from a trend book, he goes against the trends, but he has an incredible gift. He has a full team now, but Mons has always been very well known for our colors, our prints, and our graphics. That’s what has really driven the brand.
Since then, we have started to incorporate new materials and innovations. At first, it was about taking this amazing merino wool fiber and creating a connection with a whole new group of customers who weren’t really looking to wear merino wool because they saw it as a boring, worn-out category.
How do you get your merino wool?
We currently work with New Zealand Merino, our sourcing partner. We work with around five mills.
We have a direct farmers club, which is really good. Both Hannah and I come from farming backgrounds – Hannah grew up on a merino sheep farm, which gives us a really interesting connection to the farming community because we grew up in it. It probably surprised us both that later in life we came back to work in relation to it.
How big is your team now?
We always wanted to establish ourselves, like many of the big brands, in big cities like, for example, Munich. We didn’t want to be in the big cities, we wanted to establish our offices in mountain villages. So we have an office here in Wānaka, which is the headquarters with about 30 employees. We have an office in Innsbruck, Austria, and it’s an amazing city.
A long time ago, during my skiing career, I ended up sleeping in a park because it was a cheaper alternative to expensive hotels. That city is really cool and it’s a place we enjoy being in. We have a team of eight people there and they take care of all the sales and marketing support in Europe.
We also have another office in North America, in a small Canadian town called Squamish. It’s not that small, it’s a lot bigger than Wānaka, but it’s our other home at the moment, which is really exciting.
What does the business have in store for the coming years?
We just opened our flagship store for the brand here in Wānaka, which is great, and we’re about to open a store in Whistler, Canada, for this winter, so we’re announcing that publicly now. That’s where my wife Hannah is right now. She’s there to check out the store and see how we bring the Mons Royale brand to life in that space.
Opening that shop is important to share and create a community in a very nice place. I spent many years skiing in Whistler and have many friends there, including one who slept on my couch in New Zealand and with whom I have maintained a friendship ever since.
It’s about creating that community and being able to create a physical space where people can experience the brand. We’re going to do the same in Innsbruck, so we’ll have these three flagship stores to really create a community and introduce a lot of people to the natural fibres of merino wool and, of course, Montreal. So that’s the big mission, from that point of view.
What advice would you give to other budding entrepreneurs?
Find something that the world needs and find a way to solve a problem. I think that’s the main thing we need. We don’t need more stuff, we need people to solve real problems. I think if the entrepreneurial spirit can be directed in that direction, we’ll see amazing things.
Do you have a kiwi? small business history? Email newsdesk@nzme.co.nz with the theme “Questions and Answers for Small Businesses.”