New Zealand is a country enamoured by DIY. And it’s not just in the home improvement sector; according to Statistics New Zealand data, of the 612,417 businesses registered here, 97 per cent are small and owner-operated.

Interestingly, 448,233 of these businesses have zero employees – they are one-person or one-family businesses, powered by number-eight-wire ingenuity and effort.

While some small businesses happily tick along – paying the bills and funding the occasional holidays – others are set to scale. It’s not hard to find Kiwi success stories in this space – Xero, Serato, or video games studio Ninja Kiwi, which sold to a Swedish company for $203 million in 2021.

Identifying a niche, perfecting your product, marketing to the right audience, and a good dollop of good luck (and timing) are key ingredients for transforming small businesses into major players.

We meet the founders of two home-grown businesses who have utilised creativity, clever marketing, and the power of the internet to exponentially scale up.

Clever Poppy

During Covid lockdowns, we had a lot of time on our hands. Stuck at home we yearned for ways to busy ourselves outside of Netflix and endless walks around the block.

Fuelled by a desire for “simpler times”, the need for distraction from monotony, and the mental health benefits of working with our hands, crafting underwent a renaissance during this time.

Shares in DIY crafting site Etsy almost quadrupled during the pandemic. And Julie Stuart, co-owner and founder of Clever Poppy, was in the right place at the right time to capitalise on this trend.

Her embroidery-kit business has morphed from start-up to smash-hit in less than 10 years, with Covid providing the momentum for its growth.

While Julie is the creative brains behind the business, her husband Matt – a mechanical engineer by trade – has been the force behind the company’s impressive scaling.

He’s spent hundreds of hours perfecting the art of Meta advertising, and his understanding of the algorithms has launched Clever Poppy into the highly lucrative US market. So successful has this targeting been, that they sold a whopping 100,000 kits last year – the vast majority to buyers in the US.

Learning together

While Julie was a lover of arts and crafts as a child, she learned embroidery, punch needle and weaving through trial and error as an adult.

“I had made mistakes and learned, and I could share this with others via tutorials.”

She was professional and articulate; her legal background meant she was able to distil complex information and share it with others: “basically, I could explain without waffling,” she laughs.

In the early days of Covid, she had a good solid membership with people paying their monthly fee.

Initially the supplies weren’t part of the package, but she realised that it would be great for members to have “everything they needed handed to them on a platter,” she says.

So, by November 2020, they started selling kits. Finding suppliers who had high-quality products was complex and time-consuming, but they eventually sourced (from China) all the components, which were sent to New Zealand, packed, and sent to customers.

By 2022, Matt realised that they needed to enter the US market. The joy of Meta advertising is that it can be targeted to different global markets; his investigations led to a highly effective sales strategy, which utilised Julie’s most successful videos, as the basis for targeted campaigns.

“We targeted the ads to people in the United States, and it was extremely successful,” says Matt.

Initially the orders from the States were shipped from New Zealand, which was “super expensive”.

So, they started to use a third-party logistics (3PL) operator in the US, who would receive the packs which had been kitted in New Zealand. This evolved to shipping the kits from China straight to the consumer in the US; now the US-based orders are compiled in the States and sent direct to customers.

Clever Poppy now has over 500,000 Instagram followers, and nine staff. The Stuarts have moved to their family to Kerikeri, where they both work full-time on the business.

Bump in the road

Things were going swimmingly, until Trump’s return to power this year.

With Trump’s tariffs policies in a state of constant flux, and China a particular target, Clever Poppy has had to be cautious and strategic about how they distribute the goods that are turned into kits in the States.

At the time of writing, there is a 30 per cent tariff on goods import from China, which is a significant increase from the pre-Trump, when tariffs hovered between the 10-20 per cent mark.

It is, however, a significant drop from the 145 per cent retaliatory tariff Trump announced on April 10 but subsequently dropped to 30 per cent on May 12. If this is reintroduced, Julie says “we just have to think on our feet and be really adaptable.”

When asked if they ever would consider selling Clever Poppy, Julie and Matt’s answer is considered.

“We have thought about it, but as we love what we do, we would only sell for a very high figure,” Julie says.

A number in the $20-million zone has been discussed: “but it is unlikely that anyone would pay that,” says Julie.

But given the lightning-fast trajectory of their business thus far, nothing would be surprising.

cleverpoppy.com

Easy Crypto

In 2014, Bitcoin was either: a dodgy esoteric scam that existed in the digital netherworld, and best avoided; or, a presage of our digital monetary future, highly likely to handsomely reward early adopters.

Those who tended towards the latter option have been proven correct. When Bitcoin peaked at an all-time high of US$111,000 ($184,707) in late May this year, you could almost see the crypto OGs rubbing their hands with glee.

Janine Grainger, co-founder of Easy Crypto, was firmly in the latter camp. The finance and economics graduate, who started her career in banking, had a crypto epiphany that year.

In an increasingly digital world, it made a lot of sense to her – an unregulated, global currency that superseded the strictures of traditional banking.

She started researching and was soon the expert on crypto at Westpac, where she was working: “I became an overnight expert on blockchain,” she laughs. “I was asked to give talks about it to the staff.”

At the time, it was hard for crypto-curious Kiwis to get their hands on Bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies on offer.

Most crypto trading platforms were located overseas and it was hard to access them. And while there were few small New Zealand-based platforms, the price was highly inflated.

“There was about a 15 per cent price difference buying in New Zealand compared to overseas. It was really unfair,” Janine shares.

Janine’s brother Alan, felt the same – and decided to do something about it.

While he worked in IT, he had no coding experience, but he saw the potential for an exchange that allowed Kiwis to trade without the headaches and, in 2017, decided to create one. Researching the appropriate coding language on Google, he created the exchange that was to become Easy Crypto in just five days.

But while he had the tech savvy, he needed someone who was able to turn the platform into a business – this person was Janine.

Soft launch

After a soft launch in 2017, Easy Crypto (named because it was intended to make buying crypto easy) was taken offline for a time so Janine could get all the regulatory ducks in a row.

“There is a misconception that crypto is completely unregulated,” says Janine.

“But any crypto exchange in New Zealand is regulated, in a general sense, by a number of acts,” she says.

“Crypto exchanges are considered financial services providers and are covered by rules around that. They need to adhere to the rules of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act (AMLCFT). And there’s the FMA Act, and the fair-trading standards, that need to be adhered to.”

Janine ensured the boxes were ticked and that Easy Crypto adhered to all the appropriate regulations before relaunching in early 2018.

Search, check out, pay

Easy Crypto instantly differentiated itself from the competition. The traditional model of a crypto exchange is clunky: funds are sent to the exchange to facilitate a trade, assets are purchased, and if a sale takes place withdrawals need to be made from the online “wallet”. The process can take days.

Easy Crypto had a different model, acting more like online shopping: search for a product, check out, and pay. And this happens in seconds.

While the model was simple, setting it up as a business was not.

Crypto was not something bankers or insurers wanted to touch; they struggled to find a bank and they weren’t allowed to advertise on places like Google or Facebook because they had “no-crypto” policies.

But even at this early stage, there were plenty of Kiwis hungry for crypto. Janine was networking like crazy, putting herself in the midst of the local crypto community.

And they liked what Easy Crypto offered: old-fashioned word-of-mouth saw the advanced digital platform record $200 million-plus in sales by 2020. Then, as with Clever Poppy, Covid saw the platform’s performance skyrocket.

Covid boom

What could have been a catastrophe ended up a boon for Easy Crypto and crypto assets in general. People were forced to work from home, and connecting online became the norm. Zoom took the place of work meetings and the world went virtual. This familiarity with digital meant people were more comfortable with crypto as a concept.

As Janine explains, 2020-2021 were massive years for Easy Crypto. The success reflected the explosion internationally: between March 2020 and October 2021, Bitcoin rose in value from just over US$6,000 to US$61,800, but it wasn’t going to last.

In 2021, Easy Crypto raised $17 million in a Series A funding, led by sovereign-backed Nuance Connected Capital. The funding round was significantly oversubscribed (by 50 per cent), with Easy Crypto having far more interest from investors than what was hoped for – and setting a new record in New Zealand, as the largest first funding round ever completed by a New Zealand firm.

It wasn’t all good news. Crypto is volatile: the “crypto winter” of 2022 saw prices plummet. Triggered by the United States inflation surge, and the sell-off of risk assets by spooked investors, crypto currencies LUNA and TerraNova collapsed, Bitcoin dropped by nearly 70 per cent, and then FTX happened.

For Janine, FTX’s collapse was “really disappointing”, but she doesn’t view the scam as related to crypto. Instead, she sees it as a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, motivated by greed and hubris.

“But it gave the industry a bad name,” says Janine.

It was a terrible time for the business. After the exponential growth during Covid, the bottom fell out of the crypto market. They had fundraised and scaled up, then the wheels fell off – she remembers being called into a meeting by the board and being told that they had to bring the company back to cash neutral.

“We had to make half of the team redundant,” she says.

“It is something I never want to do again, but I feel I managed it with integrity.”

International reputation

But despite the hardships, Easy Crypto’s reputation was growing. In 2023, they were approached by an (unnamed) international firm with an interest in buying the company. “I started thinking, ‘is this a good time for me to look for an exit strategy’?” says Janine.

This was coinciding with a period of increasing costs, which were becoming harder to manage. And there was an awareness that if they were to partner with a larger, international firm, this could make sense.

While it took over a year to facilitate, on March 31, Easy Crypto announced that Brisbane-based exchange Swyftx had taken ownership of the company, for an undisclosed sum.

The Easy Crypto brand would be retired and the Swyftx name used.

“They are bigger than us and have similar values,” says Janine. “There is a real alignment, which they can offer to customers.”

Janine is currently still with Easy Crypto, facilitating the transfer of ownership. Once this is complete (there is no fixed ETA for this) she plans to “have a bit of downtime and pick up again next year”.

“But I really don’t know what I will be doing at this stage,” she shares.

Janine’s nutshell tips for business success are simple.

“I really believe in the power of using networks. You are only one step away from anything if you use your network, reach out and then you can pay it back.”

She says she couldn’t have done any of this without her brother Alan: “we have both struggled through hard stuff and have been through it all together”.