Zuru is a Kiwi business success story, the toy company behind Bunch-o Balloons that has taken it to some giddy heights.
Now the company is doing a bunch of other things, which includes venturing into the world of pet food.
It’s a billion-dollar industry, and in charge of getting this new project airborne is a 21-year-old, Alistair King.
“What we really want to do is build something that is pretty big and pretty special," says Mr King.
That special something is pet food which is an industry that this young man intends to bring to heel.
Zuru Co-Founder Nick Mowbray discovered the budding entrepreneur after he won Young Enterprise New Zealander at just 17.
“I got introduced to him and told that he was this exceptional young talent and after talking to him I pretty quickly realised that he had some pretty special attributes.”
Mr Mowbray made a mental note from that point to remember Alistair King from Nelson and the following year as he roamed the hollow halls of university, Nick got in touch.
“I was just convincing him that he would learn far more in a year or six months working with me on a project than he’d learn in four years at university,” Mr Mowbray says.
That project is Nood, and just like the balloons it has lofty ambitions.
“We’re looking for something that we thought we could do genuinely just better and in many ways we kept coming back to it because it was one that we noticed was dominated by a couple big companies. Two big chocolate companies basically sell all the pet food in the world.”
The pair set out to make a “heavily ingredient focused” pet food that was pivoted towards creating a product of comparable quality to the big brands but at much more accessible prices.
Mr King, who was at that point 18, followed that ambition by travelling the world; scouting for factories, setting up production lines and learning hard lessons along the way.
His first big order came from US retail giant Walmart, but amid the euphoria of finding a client he got a call from his factory in Arkansas.
“We found out four weeks out from launching that all our bags weren’t going to work on the equipment we had at the factory.”
He jumped on a plane to the United States and had to drive almost 500km to the warehouse but as he was too young to rent a car, the only option was a very expensive Uber ride.
“I was in there for a month, packing for 14-15 hours a day, sleeping on the factory floor.I kinda just had to made it work.”
He did, now the company’s pet food is on shelves across, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as being on its way to France, the US and Britain.
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