kiwis flying high/the exporter
a g o od keen man NEW ZEALAND IS AWASH WITH PRODUCERS OF BOUTIQUE PRODUCTS SUCH AS OLIVE OIL, LAVENDER ESSENCE, NUTS OF ALL VARIETies AND HONEY, BUT WHO TAKES THEM TO MARKET? wo r d s k at e c o u g h l a n
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P H OTO G R A P H s a a r o n m c l e a n
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TAKE-HOME MESSAGES FROM DANVERS What drives you? You have to believe in your products. I am passionate about how great each of my hero products is and I want other people to have a chance to use them. What are your insights into marketing New Zealand products successfully? Start at the beginning with the great ingredient – don’t start out with what you want to take to market. The Great Barrier Island Bee Co. grew out of my realization of the quality of the manuka honey and the manuka oil from the island. A multinational
Sven Stellin
great barrier island manuka oil & honey
possum-free manuka stands. He discovered the island’s honey history and a brand was born. “Manuka honey was being exported in 1895 by forebears of bee-keepers Les and Bev Blackwell of Claris. Les inspired a new hand cream under the Great Barrier range.” Bruce and Cilla White, bee-keepers from Fitzroy, also supply the Great Barrier Island Bee Co. with honey. The market for manuka honey is developing rapidly as consumers become aware of its apparent medicinal properties.
DANVERS DEVEREUX describes himself as the owner and managing director of a body-and-bath-fragrance manufacturing company but he isn’t – not really. In truth, the man is a storyteller. Not the porky sort of storyteller but a Hans Christian Andersentype lover of good stories with a Barry Crump eye for colourful characters from whom he weaves a golden tale … one entrancing enough to beguile a roomful of Japanese fragrance buyers. His court on this occasion is the New Zealand Travel Café in Tokyo. His cast includes Sven Stellin from Great Barrier Island who, on a home-built still, extracts pure oil from possum-free stands of manuka and Les Blackwell, a fourth-generation Great Barrier Island bee-keeper who débuts to the fascinated Japanese clad in hoist-high walk-shorts with a metre-long yellow squash draped about his neck and another cradled in his arms. On this warm Tokyo night Danvers is talking about Great Barrier Island, its fish and its inhabitants. Up on a screen, following Les and his garland of squash, is an image of a grinning Danvers embracing a massive pinky-orange snapper. His audience goes crazy about the fish so Danvers shows more snaps of himself and his fishing buddies ankle deep in a day’s catch of snapper and crayfish. There is an excited hum in the room as fish-fuelled dreams open the buyers’ hearts to the story and characters behind the Great Barrier Island Bee Co. This product range, one of the 10 separate brands owned by Danvers’ company Les Floralies, came to life while he lay dozing in a hammock at a friend’s bach at Medlands Beach, reading about the island’s bee-keeping history. All he could hear was the hypnotic hum of bees in the manuka. In an idle, daydreaming kind of way he started thinking about honey and the aroma of the heavy trusses of white manuka blossoms. Danvers thinks with his nose in a way that not many of us do and this is the legacy of his upbringing. His mother is the dynamic and innovative businesswoman Colyn Devereux-Kay who, 21 years ago, began a home-fragrance revolution drying potpourri in a basement bath beneath Danvers’ bedroom. Not only did the then-young Danvers have to work for his mother, so too did his friends on the odd occasion when they wanted him to go surfing but had to help out with bagging potpourri before he was free to leave. t
Long-time Great Barrier Island resident Sven Stellin has built a steam still with which he extracts manuka oil from the local bush. He slashes the manuka, carts it back to his shed, puts it through the still and then distils the powerful oil – every step by hand. The growing market for manuka-oil antiseptic and antibacterial products keeps Sven busy producing enough oil for his own boutique range called Barrier Gold as well as Danvers’ Earths Organics Gardeners Manuka Oil brand. The undersides of manuka leaves have oil glands which, when rubbed, release the aroma. Oil yields are poor, however, with Sven needing 500g of fresh manuka leaves and flowers to produce one litre of oil. New Zealand manuka oil is reputedly 30 percent stronger than its Australian rival, ti tree. The Great Barrier Island Bee Co. grew out of Danvers’ belief in the high-quality manuka honey being harvested from the island’s
Bruce White
company would start with a product-development meeting when some research had shown that gaps existed in the market and they would then go and make a product to fit. It is probably a whole lot easier that way. Do you have a key message about your work? Stick to the authentic. When I get creative block or have trouble writing the text for the packaging, I go back to the product – its story will help me get to where I need to go. It is the producer’s message and I respect their talent and skill in making the product.
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LEFT: Tomboy twins, nine-year-olds Georgia (left) and Madison, have just started learning guitar and ukele which they love to take to the camp-fire for jam sessions. Sausages, drawing and hanging out with Dad are the happy pursuits of seven-year-old Ellamia. BELOW LEFT: The fireplace surround was built from stones lugged 70 steps up from the beach below.
How does Danvers balance his life? Successful family life/work balance is an important goal for Danvers and his wife Lara, a busy HR consultant, but it’s one they feel they are not as successful at as they’d like to be. “Lara is a real homebody and loves being at home with the kids. However, she has a very busy life juggling a full-time five-day-a-week recruitment consultancy job and three kiddies.” They’d both love to spend more time at The Ship, the extended family’s seaside cottage at Leigh, but for this photo shoot
Lara was caught up at the office. Danvers is a surfer with a classic long board and a man with a serious fishing habit. “Lara is great at giving me a fishing pass and I am passionate about it. I enjoy the whole hunting and gathering aspect of fishing and also the preparation and cooking afterwards. “We hang out with the girls, building tree huts, cooking sausages and having simple adventures which the kids love. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated – just us all being together.”
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Colyn launched several brands including the long-lasting Earths Organics as well as the Les Floralies body and bath products. All family members were expected to help and, in addition to a valuable work ethic, Danvers credits his nose for business, as well as his nose for aromas, to his mother. Meanwhile, back on Great Barrier Island those hard-working bees got to Danvers. “There is a story here somewhere,” he thought with a sense of excited anticipation. Later that day as he drove to Claris, the island’s only town, he noticed a sign saying “Milk, Honey and Grain Museum”. “That’s it,” he thought and swerved the car into the driveway. Not long after, he met the island’s fourth-generation bee-keeping family, the Blackwells, who provided inspiration for the birth of a new brand. For Danvers this is pure gold. And this does not refer to money but to the opportunity to create a brand based on an authentic ingredient created by genuine artisan growers. The truth of the matter is that without Danvers and his ability to develop product lines and take them to market, many of these boutique producers would not receive a premium for the quality of their products. “There are a lot of people out there producing great things like lavender, honey, olive oil, macadamia nuts and limes, for example, because they love the lifestyle and are proud of their products but they don’t really know what to do next,” he says. Lavender producers Richard Cade and Wendy Relph of Taupo are unlikely to have had their lavender starring in the Hilton Hotels in New York and Paris and in the first-class section of the Emirates airline without Danvers creating the Sniff Box. 28 www. nzlifeandleisure .co.nz
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The rocky coastline at Leigh, north of Auckland on the Matakana headland, provides hours of endless fossicking for the intrepid trio plus Jessy, the loyal lab.
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Opposite: Danvers used a pallet from work as the basis for the tree hut and added plywood walls. It is on to its second roof after a big storm earlier in the year; he says it rocks like a ship in the wind. An old wooden ladder, hinged on a pulley, allows the girls to pull up the drawbridge. LEFT: When several generations of the close-knit Devereux and DevereuxKay clan gather at the beach house, the basket-on-a-rope message system can contain anything from a bottle of good pinot to an invitation to a grandmother to come and play. Ellamia retrieves a note from her sisters.
Richard Cade and Wendy Relph’s lavender distillery
taupo lavender farm Earths Organics is a 20-yearold range launched by Danvers’ visionary mother, Colyn DevereuxKay. She initially called the range Earths Origins but the American beauty giant Estée Lauder had acquired a range called Origins and retaliated with a legal threat, insisting the range be discontinued. So Colyn’s fledgling company recalled all product and relaunched as Earths Organics – a name which Danvers says 20 years later has more market power. Curiously, Estée Lauder recently withdrew the Origins range from the New Zealand market. “They probably did us a favour in the long run, though it didn’t seem so at the time,” says Danvers. Harvesting the two types of lavender (Pacific Blue and Grosso)
grown by Taupo lavender growers Richard Cade and Wendy Relph takes place in February and March each year. Richard and Wendy, like Sven with his manuka oil on Great Barrier Island, distil their oil in their barn. Huge still pots are heated with LPG to reach 90°C. Then 100kg of flowers are fed into each pot – approximately five wool sacks in volume. Several minutes of steaming yield between three and five litres of oil from each pot. Richard and Wendy’s organic farming practices and highly pungent oil inspired Danvers to create a new product within the Earths Organics brand called Gardeners. After all the back-breaking work of hand-weeding 40,000 plants, Richard and Wendy are pleased that their product returns a premium price.
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This innovative little winner of a product is filled with the powerfully aromatic high-altitude lavender organically grown by Richard and Wendy who distil the oil themselves in their barn. Their gutsy lavender powers the Earths Organics Gardeners range too. Danvers’ skill in spotting raw ingredients, developing products to utilize those ingredients and then taking them to market isn’t the whole of the story about this man. The quietly spoken and modest chap, a father with three young daughters, also creates the brand look and feel right down to the artwork and to building and designing packaging and merchandizing. When we interview him he is holed up at the family’s Leigh seaside cottage working on creative ideas for brand extensions. But what does this mean … “creative ideas for brand extensions”? He’s so pleased we asked. He ducks into a bedroom and returns with an armful of product prototypes. He had an idea about introducing a new Great Barrier Island Bee Co. product to the Japanese market – where he is, incidentally, currently finalizing the details of a Matakana Valley trade show he is taking to Tokyo in October. Anyway, his idea is to use local manuka honey to produce “Barrier” lip balms carried in a unique pod. The night before our visit, Danvers had designed three versions of the product and built a branded wooden box to function both as a despatch carton and a merchandise stand for a retail counter. He built the most impressive prototype from “bits and pieces I got from Mitre 10”. “I love this aspect of the business almost as much as I love meeting the people and picking up on their vitality and energy.” 32 www. nzlifeandleisure .co.nz
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The twins play Scrabble on a table made from a piece of driftwood their grandmother came across while picnicking near Pakiri beach many years ago.
matakana olive & macadamia oils A massive new olive Ross and Margie Legh press at Whangaripo near Matakana, developed by Margie and Nuts Ross Legh, has revolutionized Nuts About New Zealand the pressing of local olives macadamia grower Henk van for oil. Production from their Wijk from the Kaipara interests state-of-the-art commercialDanvers because in the Les capacity press allows Danvers Floralies stable of body and to develop a virgin olive oil bath products there is always product specially for the a demand for the perfect body Japanese market. oil. Danvers has discovered A shipment of selected koroniki that oil extracted from the late-harvest oil was recently macadamia nut is close in pH dispatched to be taste-tested. levels to that of the human skin. The Leghs are working closely Danvers, inspired by a sprawling with Danvers, utilizing his wild fig tree at The Ship, extensive knowledge of the created a macadamia and wild export business and the fig brand (within the Matakana Japanese market to develop Valley range) to utilize Henk’s market-oriented product. macadamia oil.
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We accompany Danvers on a visit to the commercial olive press established by Margie and Ross Legh at Whangaripo north of Matakana at which most of the valley’s olives are now pressed. Danvers is helping Margie and Ross establish an olive oil brand for the Japanese market. There are various samples, produced at early and late harvest, to be tasted and there is a significant difference. Danvers names the olive variety – koroniki – and says he believes the Japanese palate will prefer the late-harvest oil. Either way, he arranges for a shipment of samples to be dispatched for formal tasting in Tokyo. Then it is on to artwork, branding and choosing the bottle for the export oil. With his experience he knows which bottle can be labelled by machine, which is the best size to take the required product information plus price sticker and how many will fit snugly into a standard carton. This is valuable advice for a fledgling exporter. Danvers is keen for us to meet another of his hero producers, Henk van Wijk from the Kaipara, who produces macadamia nuts (under the Nuts About New Zealand label) and macadamia oil. Danvers is very excited about the oil. “It is the closest of any oil to the pH of human skin. We call it the disappearing oil as it vanishes into the skin with no residue.” He thinks there is a market to be grown for the oil in addition to its use in the Matakana Valley range of body products. Even now, with 10 different brands under which there are many more individual product lines, Danvers is still keen to hear from new producers of great ingredients, particularly from the South Island. It is an almost patriotic fervour that drives him in his belief that New Zealand’s ability to produce high-quality natural ingredients can be turned into increased export receipts. NZ Life & Leisure 35