11
Having recently returned from Malaysia, where
he was an invited speaker to address the 2016
DIGI Malaysia SME® Congress, Scott Kington
conceded that he felt good being driven around,
seeing himself in posters, and talking on the
radio about THE umbrella. Yet it took him, and
his two partners, years of trying and enduring
multiple setbacks before they brought their
product and the brand to the spotlight of
Malaysia and more than 40 other countries in
the world. Their Blunt journey began in 1999
when one of the three, Greig Brebner, was
taking his OE (overseas experience) in London,
where he was constantly frustrated with the
poking and easily broken umbrellas he used
in rainstorms. His wishing for a tough and
“round edged” umbrella gave him the initial
idea and design of “Blunt”. Years later, at a
chance meeting back in New Zealand, he and
Scott, who remembered similar experiences
during his own OE in England, clicked over the
potential of perfecting standard umbrellas
sold on the market, and turning the project
into a revenue-generating business. Yet while
their science/engineering background enabled
them to work out their ideal product relatively
quickly, their aspiration to capture 1% of the
1.5 billion umbrellas sold worldwide annually
began to materialise only in 2008, when
they managed to get some private investors
on board and revamped their strategy from
marketing technology to building brand. Scott’s
advice to the audience on building a brand
was to challenge the normal, think differently,
recognise the environment, be a solution, and
be patient.
Chintaka Ranatunga is a first class honours
MCom graduate from Auckland’s Business
School. Since he was always interested in
business start-up, he went to the Silicon
Valley upon graduation, where he was greatly
impressed with the scale of both the industry
and the market. He then worked as a strategy
consultant in New Zealand, Australia and
Singapore. The corporate experience and
cultural exposure became a springboard for
him to begin his own seed and early-stage
tech fund, Global from Day One Fund II. He
noted that there were plentiful of potentially
competitive, niche companies in New Zealand
still under the radar; and he currently invested
two million dollars in some of them. He pointed
out that New Zealand’s per capita capital
supply level was comparatively low, about
ten dollars in 2015. He was therefore striving
to grow his Fund’s seed capital to ten million
dollars in the foreseeable future. Besides
increasing financial support to early-stage
Kiwi concepts and ventures, he also wanted
to expand the Fund’s business portfolio to
include more investments in Asia and the United
States. From his observation, New Zealand
companies often found Asian markets more
challenging and involving more trials and errors
than those of the US and Australia. Yet once
a company made an entry to Asia, it would
usually leverage on the highly competent, but
still relatively cheap labour in tech sectors of the
region. He concluded his talk by encouraging
interested participants to start early “when
your opportunity cost is still low” in terms of
personal commitments.