Simon Huesser – Co-Founder and Director at Huski
Host Paul Spain sits down with Simon Huesser, co-founder and director of Huski & soon to be launched Smoco. Hear how Simon and his wife Meika transformed a simple idea—keeping beer cold for longer—into an internationally recognised brand now sold in over 50 countries. Leveraging their backgrounds in marketing, design, and business to build Huski from scratch, into a business that delivers award-winning products. Full of practical business lessons, anecdotes from Simon’s early career, and the realities of innovating and growing a global business from New Zealand, this conversation is sure to inspiring budding entrepreneurs and business leaders alike.
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Episode Transcript (computer-generated)
Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome to the show. I’m your host, Paul Spain, futurist and chief executive at Gorilla Technology. I love to see individuals and their organisations thriving. The New Zealand Business Podcast is all about this through sharing the business and career learnings from others to help you and New Zealand as a whole to do better at home and on the global stage. In this episode I’m talking with Simon Huesser, co founder and director of Huski, a Kiwi company creating performance drinkware that keeps drinks at their perfect temperature. From your favourite beer to your favourite wine. Simon and his wife Meika transformed a simple idea keeping beer cold for longer into an internationally recognised brand. Huski’s innovative coolers, including their award winning wine and champagne models, are now sold in over 50 countries and and stocked in more than 500 retail stores across Australasia and Japan.
Paul Spain:
Their recent shipment of 76,000 units to the United Kingdom marks the company’s largest single export order to date, driven by soaring demand during record heat waves. In total, they’ve sold over 1.5 million products. Simon’s journey provides an insightful lesson into Kiwi ingenuity, combining sleek design, smart marketing and a deep understanding of consumer needs. With a background in marketing and product and a passion for creating products that enhance everyday life, Simon has helped position Huski as a top selling brand on Amazon and a recipient of the globally prestigious Red Dot award, previously won by brands associated with New Zealand such as McLaren, Fisher and Paykel and All Birds. The New Zealand Business Podcast is brought to you by Gorilla Technology, the information technology services firm supporting astute mid size and smaller New Zealand businesses, helping them leverage information technology and AI effectively whilst driving down cybersecurity and data risks. All right, let’s jump in. Simon Huesser, great to have you on the New Zealand Business Podcast.
Simon Huesser:
How are you today? I’m good, thanks, mate. Paul, how are you doing?
Paul Spain:
Very good. Great to have you here in the studio. I’ve been looking forward to delving in and hearing the story of Huski, so I like to always start at the beginning. So tell us a little bit about where you were born and where you grew up.
Simon Huesser:
Sure. Born in Taranaki, went to primary school, high school in Taranaki, went to university in Waikato, not too far from home. Loved it. Studied marketing and pr. Didn’t really know what I was keen to get into and they had kind of a broad commercial degree which delved a little bit into media and design and business. So I thought, okay, that covers a few areas so we can kind of go in a few different directions. From there and then after that was looking for a job. Didn’t have anything lined up immediately.
Simon Huesser:
Ended up coming back to Taranaki and then working as a security guard for a. For a couple of months. That was a. It taught me that I didn’t want to be a security guard.
Paul Spain:
How did that come about? You just needed to.
Simon Huesser:
Just needed some. Needed some money. I’m a dad, all right. You know, so looking for a job and kind of like, okay, I need to fill, you know, fill my time and. Yeah, yeah, man, that was. It was a few hours spent looking at fences and not doing a hell of a lot night shifts at hospitals. I was like walking through morgues at 3am in the morning. I was like, okay.
Paul Spain:
Didn’t engage you in the way you needed to.
Simon Huesser:
No. Security probably wasn’t my main direction, but it did let me. Over those nights, I’d work 7pm to like 7am So I kind of always had been interested in design and learned a bit more at uni and then sort of building basic websites and doing logos and stuff while, you know, in the breaks and sometimes not in the breaks. And then after that got a job with. I was constantly kind of looking for, you know, the right opportunity, the. Any opportunity that wasn’t a security guard and got a job with Villa Maria as a sales cadet. The wine company.
Paul Spain:
How did that come about? How do you. How did you get, you know, was that something you’d seen advertised?
Simon Huesser:
It was just whatever it was at the time, seek or whatever it was pre seek. And I was like, sort of sales sounded like a bit of marketing. I wanted to get into the marketing side of things. And went up. That was in Auckland. Went up to interviews, like a standard job. Stuff known. Didn’t really have networks or connections or whatever.
Simon Huesser:
So I was just like, look, I just need to get something. And then went into that. And that was a really cool experience. That was like, you know, day one, you’re in the cellar door. And they had set up a relatively new wine operation and mangery was. Looked fantastic. I think it’s sort of gone sideways a bit now. But the, you know, I didn’t know much about wine other than red and white was, I was pretty sure were different things.
Simon Huesser:
And the. But day one, they’re like, okay, you’re in the cellar door. You’re gonna be doing tastings and, you know, tours, and there’s about 40 wines on the shelf. Let’s start at the bottom left and then work our way up. And then we’ll teach you the Difference between all of them. I was like, all right, here we go. And then so day one, you’re like tasting each one. This is a Sauvignon Blanc and it tastes like, you know, cut grass and cat piss and a bunch of other sort of literally, that is, you know, the things that they’re talking about and, you know, the smells and the aromatics.
Simon Huesser:
And about halfway up the second shelf, it all started to blend together. But I was there for a year and it was a great experience of learning about the wine industry, learning about marketing and sales. And George Fischenich was a, you know, founded it. He’s been on a, you know, on a journey himself and being exposed to him and the world that he had built. And like a few sort of interesting business takes on, you know, when people come in to buy wine that they come with a price point in mind generally, rather than a, you know, a high degree of understanding or knowledge about wine. So somebody would come in, I’m looking for a $15 bottle or $100 bottle. And Villa Maria did a great job of going, we’ve got the right bottle for you.
Paul Spain:
You know, like, cover every point.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah. So they’d have their private bin selection at sort of 10 to 20, and then they’d have their seller selection at 20 to 30, and then they’ve got their reserve at $30 to $50, and then their single vineyard. So you can find whatever you are looking for rather than if you just had one price point, you missing out on that hundred dollar spender who now has to spend $20 who might walk away and not buy it. So it was just like, man, there’s a whole. There’s a whole world here of, like, intelligent marketing. And so it was an education on the, you know, that’s.
Paul Spain:
That sounds fantastic. And how inspiring was it to work in a, you know, brand that had done so, so well and to be right in there and able to learn all sorts of lessons?
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, it was great. I mean, I guess what it showed me was you can just do it. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think he was a. I’ll get the nationality wrong, potentially Croatian, and come over and, you know, set up this business and grown it and grown it. Been relatively aggressive with the growth strategy to be able to achieve what he did. But I was like, okay, this doesn’t seem impossible. You know, being exposed to the idea that somebody can just do it, I think was pretty cool. And without me knowing, it was just kind of like, oh, okay, you can just do it.
Simon Huesser:
So it wasn’t like, oh, you can’t do something that you want to do. And it was his passion. So that was great. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
So that recognition that a founder can come in without all the knowledge and all the experience, but with passion and a mindset and all the other elements. Right.
Simon Huesser:
And I’m sure he knew more than just red and white. Right. But, yeah, he could just get into it and build it up. So that was great. And I wanted to sort of grow and learn there, but I reached a certain point where, you know, I was ready to kind of go and explore other stuff. I think I pitched him a few ideas to try to. Pitched him trying to do the Apprentice because I wanted them to kind of do like a. Okay, how can I go up within this business and do, like, an internship that didn’t hit the mark?
Paul Spain:
So what did you learn about yourself at that time in terms of, you know, what you were good at, what you liked, what, what you didn’t, what was sort of, you know, pushing your buttons?
Simon Huesser:
I. That job had a bit of everything, like. Like you were doing tours and tastings, and I, you know, the repetition of doing tours twice a day, one was quite interesting because you got to talk to a bunch of people, but two, saying the same thing all the time got a bit repetitive. So I was always looking for kind of, okay, how can. I had a wine list. I was like, how can we digitize this, you know, wine list? And sending plain text emails. Maybe we can send the email with the pictures of the bottles. And I was like, I’ll grab that and see if I can, you know, make that better.
Simon Huesser:
And they were like, oh, we’re not getting many people to these events or whatever. And I was like, well, there’s local businesses around. Maybe we can, you know, I’ll design a leaflet and we’ll go and I’ll drop the leaflets around. Half of that might have been just to get out of the building to kind of go for a walk. But, you know, and that meant that they sign up and we said, oh, you can have a free tour and tasting. And so it kind of. I don’t know, I was just kind of like, got amongst whatever I got amongst. And if.
Simon Huesser:
Even if it wasn’t on the job description, I was kind of like, I’ll give it a go if it gives me a chance to learn something. And I got to a point where it was kind of like, oh, maybe you just need to do more tours and tastings, you know, And I was like, maybe I need to head off, you Know, and I’d try to help and give back all along the way, but I was like, oh, maybe I can learn something from. From somewhere else. So it was a really cool start.
Paul Spain:
Now, just jumping back a little bit to your education, school years or university years. Was there any particular work that you did there? You talked about at university doing sort of websites and bits and pieces.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, I mean, at high school and stuff. I liked a bit of graphic design. Always liked ads, watching ads. I think there used to be a TV show where they. Was it fair go or something? Did like, you know, the best ads in New Zealand or the best and worst ads or something. And Mum and Dad, we would always like watch that and, you know, and always enjoyed that kind of visual media stuff. Technology and computers were always interesting. Mum really helped with that.
Simon Huesser:
Like we had a. Going back to primary school. There was. There was a game, man, it must have been like six or seven, but there was a game that you played that was like. It’s called like Lemonade Stand or something. I think it was made in like the 80s or 90s and it was like on a. You know, it was pretty much DOS and it was. You type you.
Simon Huesser:
I think how it worked was you. You basically had to sell as much lemonade as you could and you had. You could buy like sugar and you could buy signs and you would just type in I want to buy six kilos of sugar. Or. I’m not sure of how accurate this is, but you bought these things and then the weather would come and it would, you know, tell you what, whether you. How many glasses of lemonade you’d sold, had you bought too much sugar because the weather was not great and therefore you hadn’t sold. Was it sunny and you. Whatever the situation was.
Simon Huesser:
And then at the end of it you would go eight and you would be profit how profitable your little business was. And I was just like, oh, this. That’s pretty cool. And so that was super young. That was, you know, primary school, early primary school. And then that started off a whole gaming thing which was quite interesting. You know, Sim Farm and Sim City and Sim these kind of like. That’s really cool because those sort of.
Paul Spain:
Games are, you know, both. They’re really fun, but actually in behind the Scenes, you’re building up some knowledge and probably even a level of resiliency, sort of, you know, understanding that things, you know, things happen in business that you don’t necessarily want or have control over.
Simon Huesser:
Right? Yeah, probably right. There’s a whole bunch of sort of stuff. So that Kind of real time strategy was always kind of fun. And then mum fostered that, you know, at home she bought a Amiga 500 computer and would play computer games and copy computer games and trade computer games and sell computer games. And there was. That kind of stuff probably really helped. And there’s a lot of. I guess as I progressed and I used to play a reasonable amount of computer stuff and then that probably transitioned into business as I had a.
Simon Huesser:
When I had a normal job of which we only started Huski, I was like, Meika and I were like 35 or something up until then. It was normal day to day business. I was playing kind of computer games a little bit when time would permit. But then kind of all of that effort of that kind of just turned into the. It’s like, man, what you put this time and effort into these virtual games, you can put it into like real life, not just credits, but dollars and you get the same kind of buzz and same kind of entertainment. So I think there’s a correlation, there’s a, there’s a relationship there between that kind of early starting point and. As well as Mum sort of fostering it along the way. I remember she took me to computer club and this was early 90s ish, mid-90s maybe.
Simon Huesser:
And the. It was like an Amiga club or something. They showed the Internet for the first time. Yeah. And I remember I was there for the games and mum was like, look at this Internet thing that they’re talking. Computers can talk to each other. I was like, oh, this isn’t going to take off. I don’t know, don’t know about this though.
Simon Huesser:
See the value in this. If you could have sold me shares in the Internet, I would have said, no thanks, I’ll take double drag in the computer game or whatever. So it’s interesting to see. I look, I think about that and I go, man, you can be really wrong sometimes.
Paul Spain:
And at university you mentioned something around web websites.
Simon Huesser:
Building websites was just probably an evolution of graphics and technology. And you pull those together and you can start building websites by domain names and connect them up and then anybody in the world can see them. I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. Had a dabble with some like selling T-shirts online kind of thing, but never really, you know, never really pushed it super hard. Because at university there was the uni work and then there was the social component which was. Took a reasonable amount of my attention. So it was just kind of dabbling. And then after that then there was a few kind of designing of logos and stuff for Friends and family and other work, but they would, you know, could earn a little bit of money on the side doing that kind of stuff.
Simon Huesser:
So it didn’t, there was an interest and it was low key, kind of just, you know, dabbling in it at that point.
Paul Spain:
But it probably gave you some, some good hands on experience and expertise, even if it was.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah. I mean, you’re strengthening that muscle, right? Like getting exposure and understanding and learning what CSS is and you know, learning Photoshop and Dreamweaver at the time and that kind of, you know, stuff and realizing how difficult it is to build a good website and. Yeah, so that’s kind of early 2000s ish. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
Do you feel that some of that expertise, which is, I’m presuming you’re not sort of sitting there and, you know, needing to muck around with Photoshop and these sorts of tools these days.
Simon Huesser:
Definitely. But there’s definitely, definitely lead still. Hands on the tools. Photoshop. It’ll be a bit of canva, a bit of Photoshop. So still pretty in at the bottom level and pretty in at the top level. So yeah.
Paul Spain:
Does it help you understand what your team need to do that you’ve got, you’re able to do some of these things yourself?
Simon Huesser:
I think so. They might be happier if I was less involved at all the different levels, but I now have an understanding of how long some things can take because I’ve been through that and have had 25 years or whatever of experience of doing it and learning and building understanding of what good design might look like and that kind of thing. So yeah, I think it helps a lot. And we as a business have like a propensity to kind of practical, pragmatic doing things versus theoretical strategic thinking and that kind of thing. So I put it, you have to have the right kind of long term plan. But then pretty quickly we come down to kind of, okay, how are we gonna put this into action? Let’s test it. Let’s, you know, how can we spin up a website to test that theory of if that thing is good? And that probably came from other jobs that I had afterwards where became aware that people think they know what the right answer is a lot of the time. And a lot of experts will have strong opinions, whether they’re designers or web developers or managers, but they don’t.
Simon Huesser:
Like, sometimes they do, but also sometimes they don’t. And in later jobs there was, you saw that firsthand where you think, hey, I’m doing this right thing. This is going to be great. But you realize that actually it’s having the opposite effect. Whether it’s an incentive for a salesperson or a changing the color of a button or some words and some text on a website that you think is going to enhance conversion is actually doing the exact opposite for some particular reason. So if you can default to kind of, let’s just put it in practice and test it and see what happens. Because there’s a bunch of stuff that you don’t even think about that will happen. Do that if you can afford it.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Spain:
So after Villa Maria, you went across to. Was it Briscoes?
Simon Huesser:
Went to Briscoes. Yep. So again, that was, you know, just another, you know, found a job. I was like, Briscoe Group? Oh yeah, that. Well, I didn’t know it was a group at that stage, but the Briscoe’s lady selling toasters every couple of weeks for 50% off was awesome. Like in terms of seeing another part of another company who marketed really well and had a really good like experience and it was continued to grow and.
Paul Spain:
Thrive because this was going back nearly 20 years. Right. So it was in their earlier days.
Simon Huesser:
So I mean that’s been gone, that also been around for, I don’t know, 20 years before that or whatever. But yeah, it was earlier to where they are and I was kind of like, how long is this? You know, at that time they were like, how long is this? How long can we keep doing the Briscoes lady and you know, 50% off toasts? And it turns out quite a while. But seeing and being on the conveyor belt of, I mean these guys are a machine of, you know, retail promotion and merchandising and, you know, okay, what are we doing last year? And a slick machine of just churning through. They had a really good partnership with Ogilvy, possibly still do. I don’t, I don’t know where you know, there’s hundreds of products going into a mailer every, every week, plus layer in radio, plus layer in tv. You have to have really slick process. And every one of those hundred plus products that’s in that mailer, you know, there’s a dinner set worth 110 pieces. And at that stage, I’m the marketing assistant.
Simon Huesser:
I’m like, somebody’s like, we need to count all of these 110 pieces because if there’s an extra piece in there, Doris is going to look at her mailer and people love their mailers and she’s going to point out that if there’s an extra spoon in that Photo. She’s going to turn up to that store and be like, actually, here’s my set. It’s missing a spoon. And then we’re going to create problems. So there was. Half of my job was like, coordinating kind of the production and checking the mailers. And any one time you’ve got all these going on, but you’re counting, like, all these, you know, different products. There’s a cat sitting on a duvet.
Simon Huesser:
Is somebody gonna think that that cat comes with the duvet? You know, and. And people love those mailers. That was the other interesting thing. You would get phone calls from people and because I was kind of the front line of, you know, it was like, oh, my, I’m not getting my Briscoes mailer. Like, people love them. And then we would have to launch an investigation through the agency with like, New Zealand Post, and then find out that little Johnny has not been, you know, delivering all of his Briscoe’s mailers to his street. And because he’s been dumping them, you know, like, didn’t want to do his little paper run anyway. It was.
Simon Huesser:
It was cool and it was good. You saw the Rebel Sport thing again. Another kind of founder lead operation. Rod built the business up and built a really strong team and got exposed to the buyers and how they kind of work and pricing and all that kind of stuff. So it was. Yeah, it was great. It was just a really good learning opportunity. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
And so who were you interacting with? Were you interacting with. With Rod Duke? Were you into you? I guess it was mostly with the head of marketing.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, not much with him, but I think I told him he had a flat tire once. That’s. Yeah. Probably won’t recognize me, but you saw how the business had been built and how they operated, and the buyers had been there. Even when I was there for 10, 15 years, a lot of that core group. So I was interacting with the agency who was in charge of kind of the content and production side of things. TV, radio, print, @ the ground level of marketing. And then my manager.
Simon Huesser:
But I also was in the sales meetings. Cause I was the guy who would go through the newspapers and then pull out, okay, here’s what farmers doing, you know, this week. And here’s what’s this? And you would show them all. And then, you know, the. I think it was the MD of each of the, you know, Briscoes who was in charge of that would kind of look at them and then look at the sales numbers and be like, oh, is that maybe the reason why we’re not pumping this week because farmers is also doing some kind of summer sale. Do we need to extend our sale? So I was exposed to a bit of that, but didn’t have any, you know, meaningful input other than showing that there was a red dot sale on that week.
Paul Spain:
So any any sort of other sort of lessons that you, you took away from that, that time?
Simon Huesser:
I think process was probably the big one there. Like the having that efficient process to be able to keep those mailers moving and the, the in retail, you know, you have to. And you’ve got to print all these leaflets that go to all these stores. So efficiency of. To scale has to be pretty slick. You can’t, you know, you can’t be tweaking and changing on the flight sort of too much. You’ve kind of got to stick to these things. So there was a lot of like, okay, what did we run last year? Run the same again or something similar this year, but tweak it and enhance it if we think we need to do it.
Simon Huesser:
So it was that kind of like, okay, actually you can build these, you know, promotional plans that layer on top of last year and learn and grow bigger rather than kind of reinventing the wheel all the time.
Paul Spain:
And I guess you were relying on key external parties in terms of, you know, you mentioned, you know, Ogilvy in terms of looking after your retail, you know, flyers, brochures and so on. I guess, you know, TV commercials, you know, you’ve been relying on external printing and distribution firms and so on. Did you get involved in having to sort of look after those relationships and in different ways?
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, yeah, like the basics of, you know, making sure stocks going backwards and forwards and checking photos and tweaking stuff. So probably without me knowing it, you become aware that you can plug in, you know, other organisations to help you grow. And then like, so they had a reason. You know, the marketing team on Briscoe Group in house at that time was like maybe four or five people and responsible for. And that’s the like, top person in marketing and then two marketing managers and then two marketing assistants. And that’s then, you know, there’s buyers and other elements of the business. But this is producing TV ads and mailers and all this stuff. So the.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, I mean, the agency was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So it’s interesting how you could just plug that piece in and it’s actually, you know, now you’ve got, you know, four people here within the business and you can have however many, call it 30, you know, outside the business and it still works really well. So yeah, there’s probably some learnings in there that I didn’t even, you know, know, I learned.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, there’s. There’s a lot that you kind of learn through osmosis, being it. Being in these environments, isn’t there?
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, I think so. I think now what.
Paul Spain:
What drew you to leave Briscoe Group? And, And I think. Did you head overseas after that?
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, the classic. I mean, my story is not particularly revolutionary, I don’t think, you know, and then you’re like, okay, we’ll go on oe. That seems to be what you do. So got a couple of years experience, got a, you know, a few mates were kind of ready to go. I met my girlfriend at university. We were, you know, together. She, who was the co m. The co founder of Huski, also had some interesting learnings.
Simon Huesser:
Like she worked for a company called Vista Solutions or Group or whatever they are. They do cinema software. So there was a lot of, kind of. She was learning stuff as well.
Paul Spain:
We’ve had the founder on the. On the New Zealand business podcast so people can look that up. It was pretty, pretty amazing Kiwi success story.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah, they. They kind of power the back end of cinema software from ticket buying to websites to all sorts of stuff. So she was like the first marketing person that they had. So there was a lot of. She was also exposed to a world of kind of, you know, startup slash founder, people who were doing cool stuff. Anyway, so we both quit our jobs and you know, Briscoe for me was I’d learned a bunch of stuff there, was ready to kind of go. It was just more important to go overseas. Would have I.
Simon Huesser:
If we didn’t go overseas, might have stuck around for a bit longer. Yeah, who knows? And then went overseas and went to, you know, did the classic OE thing, went to London, traveled along the way and then when we were in London, ended up settling down, getting jobs. The plan was to stick around for a year or two and see what we think of it. I guess I had the benefit of dad as Swiss, so I had a Swiss passport. And at the time it was all kind of. It worked out all right. You could stick around for a bit longer. Meika was on a New Zealand passport, so it was kind of, oh, in two years we’ll be back kind of thing.
Simon Huesser:
I was like, ah, we’ll see. See what happens. And so then we were traveling. I got a job for a company called Think London who was a foreign direct investment agency in their sort of marketing Team and they were. They’re responsible for encouraging businesses to set up their head offices in London so. To improve the economic prospects of London. So they’re trying to get knockier in. At the time, it was big China Mobile and Bank of China or whatever to kind of be like, hey, you should choose London versus Paris.
Simon Huesser:
Because xyz, the Beijing Olympics was kind of building up at that point. So they were doing these big kind of marketing pushes to go to those events. And they would talk to these business people and be like, hey, if you’re thinking about it. And that was great. There was a guy from Brendan Dineen who was from. He’d been seconded to them because they’re kind of like a public private partnership. Yes. To them from IBM, it was like pretty high up in IBM and super smart guy and the worked in his team and that was just.
Simon Huesser:
He was like a numbers guy. He was like, metrics and growth and okay, how are we going to do this? How are we going to see if whatever we’re doing is working? Kind of these agencies were kind of a bit more fluffy. They were kind of like, you know, oh, yeah, we’ll generally do this and we won’t understand if it’s really working, but we’ll kind of. If we influence. Help influence Nokia, then maybe. And we can, then we can say that Nokia is worth, you know, so many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. This is so many to the. So much money to the new.
Simon Huesser:
To the, you know, London and UK economy and whether or not they contributed meaningfully, I don’t know. Sometimes probably, yes. A lot of the times did they. I don’t know. But Brendan was all about like, okay, I’m going to try to track this as much as possible in account. So he would have these sessions like Monday Metrics and you would sit down and we kind of. How many people have we spoken to? What are the contacts? You know, what are that thing? So there would be numbers on everything. When they did the.
Simon Huesser:
The Beijing Olympics, they got a London taxi and they drove it around China and they would collect contacts. And then. So part of my job was like, how we can. He was like, we can make these contact collections kind of better. How can we do this? And it was like, okay, your job, Simon. Part of it is the guys who are the sales guys on the ground collect these contacts. What they would typically do is they would get business cards and then they would not do anything with them for a while. And then they would come back and they would email them however long afterwards.
Simon Huesser:
It’s like, I want the best experience we can kind of get possible. And so I was like, well, there’s. How can we do it? And we ended up coming up with, like, these. Or even they were local events. How can we improve it? So they were started to do these, like, scanning of cards. I found this, like, business scanning thing where you could, like, scan the cards. I found it, or someone found it. I can’t remember.
Simon Huesser:
Don’t wanna take credit if it wasn’t me. But you could, like, get the cards, scan them, email, they could give them back, and they could, like, contact them straight away. So you could give the person this, like, really incredible experience where typically you grab a business card of someone, you may never hear from them. Or maybe weeks later, you’d be like, straight up, like, that night, they could have something back like, hey, great to see you, Mr. Whoever, and then do it. And then you. Then Brendan would be counting how many did we do? And how quickly was it? And various other things. So he was awesome and learned a lot from him and the team that he set up around doing that.
Simon Huesser:
So it was constantly kind of like just being exposed to people who. Really smart people who were doing cool stuff. And it was just kind of a fortuitous situation. Do you know what I mean? How much of that was me being in the right place at the right time? There’s quite a bit of luck, like just being exposed to these. These guys. Yeah. And girls. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
Oh, well, that’s the. That’s, I guess, the reality that happens. You put yourself in different places, you.
Simon Huesser:
Get new opportunities to learn. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
And. And then what. What happened from there? What did you move on to?
Simon Huesser:
And then. So that was quite. It was very offline sort of role. Physical events, you know, meetings and coordinating in the background. Yeah. Then I was like, I wanted to. Maybe we’re going traveling for a bit and then we’re like, come back. So quit that.
Simon Huesser:
Oh, we come back to New Zealand for a little stay. So I was there for about a year, came back to New Zealand. Amica had to renew her visa, I think, to get a highly skilled visa to go back. So when we came back to New Zealand, quit the job, came back, I was like, we’ll find a new job. This is now sort of 2007 initial, you know, just after. So there’s the kind of global credit crunch, which I think I didn’t know anything about at the time and didn’t know that it would go back to this, like, hard to find a job environment. But we were Kind of oblivious to it and we’re willing to take whatever. But I was, I was like, I want to get back into the technology side of things.
Simon Huesser:
I reckon this Internet thing that I thought might not take off seems to be going all right. So I reckon there was something. I reckon I need to get back on this like bandwagon. And so I was like, I want, I don’t know what job, but I want a job in a company who is doing stuff online so I can learn from how they operate and what they do. There was a job popped up with a company called Top Table. I hadn’t really heard of them and when I met them and they did restaurant booking software, basically online booking. So booking.com is to hotels. Top table was two restaurants.
Simon Huesser:
So if you’re looking for a, you know, pool, I’m looking for a table for two, you know, in Soho that’s great for business at 7 o’ clock tonight. And I would prefer Thai then you pump that in and it goes, actually here’s the restaurants that meet your criteria and they sort of, they knew what the availability was within those restaurants because they were connected online to them. So I was like, this seems cool. It was a, like a CRM marketing emails guy job.
Paul Spain:
And so your role was what, to find more restaurants?
Simon Huesser:
No, my job was to send. It was very consumer focused company. Okay. The technology was pretty light on the, on the restaurant integration side of things. A little bit like a, like a duck swimming on, you know, a pond where it looks all smooth and like it all works on the surface, but underneath the feet are paddling pretty hard. Like, like there would, it was as kind of rudiment, some of them. There would be an online allocation system that with the restaurant sometimes you would, they would, somebody would book online and it would come through to Top Table and then somebody would pick up the phone and call, call it through. So you know, it was.
Simon Huesser:
Looked kind of slick sometimes, but on the back end was less slick sometimes. Anyway, so my job there was sending the emails to customers. They’d built this really good consumer brand where Top Table was kind of cool and you know, you could get, you could get deals and stuff. But that wasn’t everything about it. It was before the kind of Groupon stuff. It was just a good way to book restaurants. And maybe you would get, you know, 10, 20, 50% off your meal. And my job was to send the emails to people who signed up.
Simon Huesser:
So, you know, they had a list of however many hundred thousand people and you’d be like, oh, the hot restaurant this week is this, that and the other thing. And they sold ads in those emails and you know, placements for restaurants to be, you know, higher up, et cetera, et cetera. So that was my job, sending a whole bunch of emails every week with a lot of restaurants in them. But I got to see how this whole system worked of the online, like transactional booking. Plus there was this kind of consumer facing side. Then who were one set of customers, then there was the other set of customers who were restaurants. And you had to have this kind of this network effect thing going on where you need a cluster of restaurants and then you need, you know, diners to book those restaurants. And then when they go into new cities, going into Manchester, do they have enough restaurants to make it interesting for diners? So there was a whole world there.
Simon Huesser:
And when I started, hopefully not as a result of me, but the entire marketing team sort of turned over who’d been there for a few years and then there was a few of them and then they left and then I was the only guy there who was marketing. So, okay, I’m now the marketing guy. So got to be involved with a whole bunch of different stuff than when I first might have arrived.
Paul Spain:
So there’s a lot more on your.
Simon Huesser:
Shoulders, a lot more to get involved with from dealing with partnerships and affiliate programs and other brand association. But like Michelin dining guides and all this kind of stuff we like, okay, just throw in and go, okay, this is cool. Like. And that was another company where the person who had started it, a lady called Karen Hanton, was not particularly technical. Not particularly, but she, she’d started this online restaurant booking service and I think worked really well for her because, you know, she’d got a technical people around her to help build this thing. But she was kind of more like, here’s how I want it to work. Like just, you know, this should go to that. And wasn’t kind of blocked by these restaurants don’t have WI fi or technology in them and they’re using a paper book.
Simon Huesser:
Like we’ll just call up, like just take the booking and then make the thing. She kind of just pushed through and got it to work. So that was interesting to see how you didn’t necessarily need to be an expert in all things to build the, build the thing that she wanted to, you know, create and had created the UK’s largest dining destination, you know, website.
Paul Spain:
Amazing. Yeah. When you, when you think about it and you mentioned those, those things. Yeah, yeah.
Simon Huesser:
And that’s probably played a role in Huski you know, when we’re looking at. And kind of like, okay, when we got to that stage when we wanted to design products, I’m not a product designer, Karen wasn’t a engineer or developer. But I know what a good vehicle should do, you know, and I’m pretty pedantic about stuff. So we’ll just, we’ll just try. We’ll just have to try a bit harder than everybody else to, you know, make it as good and listen a bit harder and pull the right people in. And so she did a really good job of that. And then so I’d kind of done like a year in all of these jobs at this point and then. But this job was a bit different.
Simon Huesser:
It was technology, it was online, it was developing. A few years in, a couple years in, they got acquired by a company called OpenTable. And OpenTable was like the US version of them, but a lot bigger. I didn’t have any skin in the game or anything. I’m still just marketing guy. But that was like, I don’t know what it was, $50 million or something. They were acquired £50 million or whatever. It was the.
Simon Huesser:
And then you got to see what. Working with like OpenTable is like a San Francisco kind of bit of a startup darling, early days kind of thing. They had a bit more on the technology side. So you know where the duck had its legs kind of going pretty, pretty quickly underwater. On the top table side of things, they were a bit more had it worked out because they had started with the technology at the restaurant side of things. So they basically digitized the reservation book so they had true insight into when somebody, when a restaurant used that system, they would use, they would know what tables were in what positions and how many people were sitting there. Because when you call up to book, they were plugging that into the open table system, whereas Top table was less of that. So the, and then what OpenTable did secondarily was like open up that availability in real time to consumers.
Simon Huesser:
So this is now when you choose to book a Thai restaurant at seven o’ clock in soho, you know exactly what seat because you’re going straight into that seat and you know the availability is there. We don’t have to have this like phone call in the middle of it, which didn’t always happen with top table. Sometimes it was allocations, but so they were more technologically savvy. This is a pre cloud, so they had electronic reservation erbs in restaurants and they were installing like Internet into some of these restaurants. So they had kind of, they’d been around for a reasonable amount of years. So they were, they were trying to get all these restaurants kind of set up. But once you’re in with a restaurant, because that’s the system they’re kind of locked in. So they got revenue from subscription models where they went, okay, you’re using the open table system to manage the bookings.
Simon Huesser:
That’s just got value in of itself because now I’ve got all of my people and when Paul walks in, I can see Paul and pull up his name and I know that he loves a glass of red wine and whatever he loves or he’s a bit of trouble as a customer. So let’s put him in the corner, you know, so hopefully my name’s not on any database. Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. There’s a few stories about restaurants when they get it wrong and expose the internal stuff. Yes, codes, codes was the key, I think where you would pull the number 66 or whatever it means, you know what I mean? So they would lease out that, you know, that B2B software solution stuff and then they would go, okay, now consumers can book. So OpenTable was a dining destination to find and book the right tables around the place. And then they would charge the restaurant like in the US a dollar or whatever it was to, you know, put a bum on a seat, which a restaurant was typically happy to pay because they’d come from the OpenTable website.
Simon Huesser:
So that was interesting to see how OpenTable worked and get exposed to that kind of technology side of things. And then they started to kind of. We started to build up the marketing team actually before and when it was top table, it started to build up and I was there. So I kind of got built up with it. There was a couple of, you know, they got a marketing director and above me to help with the transition and then some people below and just kind of got to grow with the company. And that was good for a few years as well. Like we were doing, you know, started doing TV ads with mobile, you know, download the app and the apps, started to launch the technology in restaurants, started to move to cloud based stuff. So there’s a whole interesting world going on.
Simon Huesser:
Mobile is really starting to take off, you know, the iPhone and then conversations of should these be web based? You know, do we need a M dot top table site or should we build an app? And it’s kind of like just around all of these conversations and it was a pretty flat structure. So, you know, you’re in the meetings and hearing what’s going on. So then Open Table has acquired. Top Table is kind of growing. There’s a brand switch from Open Table from top table to OpenTable. So that was an interesting experience where you’re going, okay, what’s going to happen here? Are people going to care or not care? How does that go? And it’s interesting. It just seemed to work pretty seamlessly. There was a transition thing that kind of went on.
Simon Huesser:
You know, it was Open Table by Top Table for a little bit. But because they could control all the channels and all that, you know, everything when you type in Top Table just redirected to OpenTable. It’s kind of like you changing your name. I guess if Paul suddenly becomes Sam, but you’re still exactly the same guy, people are still probably gonna more or less treat you the same. Now if you change your name to Cindy, there might be, you know, you might have a bit more of a difficult experience with some people. But if you keep nearly everything the same, you don’t change your appearance or your functionality or whatever. Initially it was interesting to see how that works just from a brand, how brands work in people’s minds thing. And I think they did a good job where they transitioned initially the name and nothing else and then they transitioned the technology and the, the interface.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because they could have gone the other way. Well, to some degree. But I. Yeah, I guess probably, yeah, naturally changing the brand first and then changing the technology underneath it was. What was it? Do you remember if there was a sort of particular rationale or that was just going to be the easiest.
Simon Huesser:
It could have been an easiest route and I can’t remember exactly how it worked but the. It could have just been, that’s when stuff was ready to happen. Or it could have been a smart decision of how to do it. But what was just interesting to see was how your consumer behavior around that and there was barely a blip like when you kind of change the, the brand name. So it was interesting to see the value of brand which to me taught me that brand is more than just like a name and a logo. It’s how things work and the way people interact and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, so there was an interesting things going on in that world. And then OpenTable got acquired by a company called Priceline.
Simon Huesser:
Priceline. And this is a jump. So then Priceline is now opentable was. So say Top Table was like when I started, maybe 30 people, maybe 15 of those are like customer service people who are doing the bookings. Then Opentable was a few hundred and then got up to many more hundred, maybe say 500. And that was traveling to San Francisco and seeing how the world of startups and kind of this kind of stuff, you know, worked, which was cool. Then Priceline acquires OpenTable. Priceline is they own like booking.com, rentalcars.com, agoda Kayak, I think, I think these ones anyways, they’re basically like a decent part of the travel industry.
Simon Huesser:
And they were like, well, what do people do when they travel? Well, they want to go to restaurants. So we don’t have a restaurant stream. OpenTable can be that one. So seeing how they approach things and they were just starting to get to a stage where they were starting to share learnings between the organisations that they had. I don’t think they did a huge amount beforehand. They kind of like let them operate in relative sort of silos, but they started to kind of probably because OpenTable was the one who was the least amount of revenue and the least performing. They were like, we need to bring these guys up to speed. Even though they were the biggest restaurant technology booking platform probably in the world, you know, did really well and.
Simon Huesser:
But dust on the scale of Priceline was not big enough at all and didn’t have the scale or the speed that people wanted because Top Table OpenTable might have been going restaurants on board at 50 a week or something. And Priceline’s like, we’ve got however many hundreds of thousands of, you know, maybe millions of hotels, you need to be thinking, how am I going to bring on hundreds if not thousands of restaurants online? And they’re like, we’re going to help.
Paul Spain:
You scale up on a weekly basis.
Simon Huesser:
On a whatever 50 to weekly monthly. But it was just a huge shift of like what you thought was big was just not big, you know, and speed was not speed. I heard the word scale more times in that company and I didn’t really appreciate. I needed to hear it like a hundred times to really let it sink in of like dollars spent on advertising. How many restaurants to sign up, how many? And now just kind of like we need to be whatever we build. Because they’re like, we want to take this around the world, right? And at this point I had got to a point where it’s kind of director of product marketing for International. So being exposed to how we’re going to launch OpenTable into different countries and they’re kind of like, well, if we’re going to do it, we need to like go quickly. So how are we Going to sign them up.
Simon Huesser:
Can’t just be Steve calling up, you know, do you want to join up? It needs to be online, it needs to be cloud based, it needs to be this, this and this. So there’s a lot of just going man, these guys are slick operators and getting to go to places like the booking.com headquarters in the Netherlands and they’re like, okay, we’re going to teach you how to do, you know, AdWords, Google search stuff and all the stuff that we’ve learned and we spend a lot of money like they’re significant on Google’s radar of how much money they spend because within the group, how many dollars they’re spending on. When you try to book the Marriott Wow. Hotel or I’m looking for a hotel in Fiji or whatever. Yeah, more often than not they want.
Paul Spain:
You to click on them. Not on the, on the, the entity, the hotel directly or through any other platform. They won, they wanted that business they.
Simon Huesser:
Want and they, so they, you know, when they speak, Google listens. I mean Google, they, they have a seat at the table because Google is thinking that they represent a significant proportion. So they were able to kind of even do things like go, here’s how the logic works on search when you pump in, you know, key terms and here’s buying strategies and his things to do with that kind of stuff. I was like, man, this is pretty valuable like information to be able to sitting at the table and hearing what these guys have known who are talking to the people who build the platform, which is you typically black, boxy kind of stuff. Right. You know, people are kind of second guessing about how does SEO work and how does this work and these guys have that. So it was like, man, this is, this is awesome. So I was there for like seven years and it was just like, man, this is, this is cool.
Simon Huesser:
Interesting learning. Don’t know if we’re ever going to turn this into something, but it was just like, interesting. It was just good to learn from and if the right opportunity ever came up, maybe we could apply it whether it’s another job or whatever. And I’m just a normal, just a normal guy working a normal job. Right. But it’s a cool job and it was interesting. But then eventually we were, we’re like, oh, we come back to New Zealand. Like it was either kind of go to San Francisco and be part of the open table underneath the Priceline kind of group or come back and we’re like, ah, it’s probably families getting older, we’re getting older, we should Think about, do we want to have a family? Where do we want to do it? And we were like, man, New Zealand’s.
Simon Huesser:
We love New Zealand. New Zealand’s the best place. So that’s where we’re going to do it. So financially, this is probably a terrible move, but there’s more important things in life than that. So, yeah, we’ll come back. And then we kind of thought, oh, it’d be cool to start something in New Zealand. But we didn’t know what it was and we weren’t particularly special in any way or had. It’s not like we loved mountain biking and were like, man, we’re going to open up.
Simon Huesser:
My dream is opening up a mountain biking store and, you know, doing that. So there was not like a clear thing that would be an obvious thing to do or product to sell or service to offer. So we’re kind of like, well, we’ll quit our jobs. And there’s not that often that you can kind of give up your jobs and both just have the sort of total freedom, a few dollars saved up from working that we hadn’t spent on traveling. And then we’re going to travel a bit more and then we’ll make this list of business ideas or product ideas. Hopefully we’ll see something along the way and we’ll be inspired. That was kind of it. And then went off, headed back to New Zealand and then traveled through, like, the US Grabbed a car in wherever it was somewhere in Florida, Orlando, and then drove.
Simon Huesser:
One of the bits was drove to like, San Francisco, like zigzagged and bounced around over the course of kind of six weeks or something. That’s quite, quite cool. Yeah. And we were just like, man, it’s not that often you get to quit your job and just go for it, so let’s just go for a hone. And that was when it was an interesting time because it was just before 2016 maybe, just before the, like, Trump was getting, you know, and Hillary thing. So we’re driving through the south of the US and you’re seeing like Trump flags and all this stuff, and you’re having chats in Walmarts about people’s opinions on all sorts of things. You know, politics and politics is certainly pretty interesting, pretty wild. It hasn’t calmed down, actually, has it? So.
Simon Huesser:
But that was cool. But while we were there, we saw some interesting kind of products and they kind of got put on the list and we were like, oh, yeah, weren’t thinking too hard about any of that stuff at that stage. We’ll get back to New Zealand and we’ll have a think. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
So, yeah, tell us about starting Huski back in New Zealand because there was a connection with some of the products you came across.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah. So we usually. I got back to New Zealand, it was just, must have been 2016. Just before Christmas we’re like, ah, it’s no use looking for a job and just before Christmas we’ll take the summer off. So we traveled a little bit around New Zealand, hung out with friends and stayed at, you know, our parents place. And that was an awesome summer. Then it got to the end of summer, you know, February or whatever. We’d kind of been half thinking, like, what are we going to do? We looked at, we had this list of like 50 ideas and we’re like, oh man, this list is terrible.
Simon Huesser:
Like there’s stuff on this list like ski boots that don’t hurt because your calves can, you know, they’re really painful. Like, surely we can make like a ski boot that’s like better. We knew nothing about skiing other than had been, you know, my parents skied a bit and I skied a couple of times and like duck. We had this duck food truck when we were in Asia and it was like, man, that’s cool. Like this. We could do like a duck food truck and we could have like quackling instead of crackling. And there was, they were interesting ideas, but not great in terms of the like, you know, the, the viability of long term thing. And so there was like 50 of these.
Simon Huesser:
They were all over the show, but one of the. Actually two of them. So one of the.
Paul Spain:
How long did it take you to collect this list?
Simon Huesser:
Just. Is this something we’re just writing? It was like an Evernote over a period of sort of six months once we left. Yeah. So I don’t know. Three to six months. Yeah. Okay. Everything.
Simon Huesser:
Every half baked was a one line on a trello board or an Evernote thing. It was like, that’ll go on the list. And okay. It was. That was it. And then you forget about it and then we’ll go back to New Zealand. Well, hopefully one thing on this list will be a killer idea. But we got back and we’re like, shit, none of these are killer ideas.
Simon Huesser:
And then we’re like, well, I guess we just have to get, you know, jobs. Like we’ll just. Well, we couldn’t think of a good idea, so that’s okay. And then started looking for jobs and applying for jobs and nobody really knew what, you know, OpenTable was or so. And didn’t really have any networks in New Zealand. It was like, went for a few progress but found it kind of really hard to get even foot in the door of stuff. And we were like, how bad was that list? Like, because this job hunting is pretty. Is it as bad as this job hunting thing? And we’re like, what if we.
Simon Huesser:
Because we didn’t have jobs, job hunting was the job. And then we had a reasonable amount of free time. But there’s only so many jobs coming up. Like, what if we approach starting a business like it was a job? So, well, we’ll start with this list. We’ll take a proper look at it and we’ll go, if it was our job to start a business, we’ve got this list. What have we learned? Well, we’ve learned about scale and all these other things in our previous jobs. And I was like, okay, well, let’s organize this list into buckets and let’s consider how easy they are to scale. Right.
Simon Huesser:
I’d heard scale about a thousand times in that job. So I was like, well, if we’re going to do it, we should do one that has the potential to be quite big. So we don’t have that much money. So it needs to be able to be tested on a small scale. And a few other criteria on knowledge of the industry was another one. And a few of them would kind of score them. And we went through score them, put them into buckets first, I think we scored them. And then when they scored a certain amount, they went into buckets, like the ski boots.
Simon Huesser:
One was kind of like, yeah, this is a reasonable amount of people, you know, ski. So a ski boot would be kind of handy. But it scored really low on knowledge of how to build a ski boot. Right. Like nearly zero. And took a lot of investment. We suspect all the plastic parts and stuff. So this is going to cost a lot.
Simon Huesser:
We don’t know much about it, but there’s a few people who ski. Global warming might have also shut that one down a little bit more. Ski fields are struggling, but the, you know, duck food truck scale would be a problem. How do you trying to do a lot of duck food trucks, you know, yet there’s McDonald’s, but how many more McDonald’s are there going to be? And I don’t know if the quackling restaurant’s going to be the next McDonald’s. So we did that and there was a couple that came out on the top that were kind of like, actually this is relatively low investment. To test the idea, we Know a little bit about the sort of industry or the technology or the way to do it, and it has the opportunity to kind of go bigger. The first one was an art. So top and opentable, top table, all of those.
Simon Huesser:
They basically connected restaurants with diners. Right. They were like a platform that brought these two people together and connected them. It’s like kind of interested in art. Artists on the whole don’t do. They do great art, but they don’t do a great job of like connecting with people who want to buy the art. And there wasn’t really this platform where people could see the art and buy it. And you do that online.
Simon Huesser:
So we use the technology, the open table, top table kind of idea. The margins are like 50%. So when, you know, if the artists are selling in galleries, they’re actually giving a massive amount to the gallery owner. What if we did this online and then there could be a print, you know, print based thing. So you’re an artist pool and you draw beautiful cats, but you’re not a great job of selling your beautiful cat artwork. So we go, Paul, how about we put them on your website? We’ll help you. You know, you draw one cat, we’ll do a limited run of help. You sell 100 of these, by the way.
Simon Huesser:
We’ll connect it to a printer and we’ll kind of. Well, you know, you can sell them and I can end up with, you know, one of your cats and other people can. And. And we do that with a whole bunch of artists and there’s like the affordable art show and you know, Wellington does a really good job of connecting those, but they don’t. I’m not sure if they have that platform to be able to sell it afterwards. So we were like, you would have to kind of do this event to kind of make it a thing. But the real long term thing would be this kind of this online trading thing where you connect the two kind of like, trade me nearly. But art focused like, this is something here.
Simon Huesser:
And I did know my cousin ran the affordable art or helped run it. And I was like, oh, this could be interesting. But it all got a little bit difficult. And she was tied up with her work and kind of not ready to go. And we were like, oh, we don’t know enough in the art community to kind of make it work. I still like the idea. But there’s now then Covid happened, so holy. Like, thank God we didn’t do that one because that would have been a really tough spot to run an event over the next you know, few years or maybe it would have gone great, who knows? So you never really know which path.
Paul Spain:
But, but the event seemed like a way to kind of seed that and connect, seed it.
Simon Huesser:
And there’s stuff like there’s, there’s a thing at Eden park which is quite good, but it’s not quite on the same scale. So we were like, this doesn’t quite feel like it’s working. But then the, the second thing on the list was these stainless steel double wall vacuum insulated beer coolers that we’d seen in the US and they’re in Walmart and they’re all over the show. Like Americans like loving these like thermally insulated drinkware cups, bottles, beer coolers. And I was like, oh, that beer cooler looks cool. I’ll buy one when we get back to New Zealand. While we’d been thinking about jobs and going for it, this was on the list. But it was kind of not really thought through because we thought I would be able to buy them in New Zealand, they probably exist.
Simon Huesser:
And then tried to buy them in New Zealand because we didn’t want to buy them while we were traveling because we were traveling light. Tried to buy it in New Zealand, couldn’t find them anywhere. We were like, okay, maybe they’re new or maybe they just, I don’t know why they’re not here for some reason. So we ended up buying one, just a random brand one from the U.S. it arrived, tried to use it, it didn’t work. Turns out New Zealand’s got different size bottles and cans than most other countries around the world. We run like a 330mil standard can and same size bottle. We also have a higher proportion of bottles being consumed than other markets.
Simon Huesser:
Somebody back in the day did a good job of convincing us that bottles were more premium. Maybe because tin used to be, I think, used in cans and it used to affect the flavor anyway. New Zealand, different size bottles and cans. So the other products around the world didn’t work for Kiwis, but we were kind of worried because Kiwis, it’s not super warm. And the attitude of Kiwis is when we spoke to a few people was kind of like, well, if you need a beer, cool, you’re drinking your beer too slowly. So we were like, okay, I don’t know if this has got legs on it, but.
Paul Spain:
And there’s that sort of aspect where, I mean, I’ve noticed this anyway with the demand for ice and a drink in the US Seems to be a lot higher than, than that, than it is here, right? That’s just kind of part and part and parcel. So there are.
Simon Huesser:
So maybe the demand and the user behavior and stuff in New Zealand was not quite there. And. But I was like, well, I want one and I can’t use this American one because it doesn’t fit. And we’re like, if I want one, there might be a couple of other people who also want them. So that’s kind of where Huski started was basically it was in New Zealand was like left off the map scenario. And I suspect the main reason was we didn’t have the right size bottles and cans so the products didn’t work. That was the main reason they weren’t here. And then, and then we didn’t know.
Simon Huesser:
Maybe the other stuff would also mean that the business wouldn’t work because of the, you know, the user behavior. People didn’t care. But that’s where we went through kind of like that was the kernel of the thing was kind of like, well, I want one. And we were like, maybe we can modify, shouldn’t be too hard to modify the design of this thing to make it work for Kiwis. So going back to that list of kind of like, has this got the potential to do it? Well, the product itself we could use. When we looked online, we didn’t need to do too much work to make it work for New Zealand. We just needed to change a few elements of the design to make it work. So cost was relatively low scale.
Simon Huesser:
Well, we could start with New Zealand and we can just buy a few hundred and we can kind of see how it goes because tool and costs are not too bad and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But there’s probably a few hundred or a few thousand dollars just to test the idea. Not like a hundred plus thousand dollars. So do we know a little bit about it? Well, I’ve drunk a few beers, so. And we’ve worked at Villa Maria and the kind of alcohol industry and mum was always like, oh man, you, you know, alcohol. Spending money on alcohol is not, you know, great way to spend money unless it’s research for your thing. So actually I’d been doing 25, however many 20 years of research to, you know, develop the perfect beer cooler. So it kind of ticked our box and we were like, actually, okay, this one’s got, this one’s got legs.
Simon Huesser:
So.
Paul Spain:
And were you far along on the, on the art one in the background or you hadn’t, you hadn’t really, you would. That was more just a kind of A research. You hadn’t.
Simon Huesser:
Research.
Paul Spain:
You hadn’t committed any money, bought a.
Simon Huesser:
Domain or two and worked up a logo and a concept. And then you’re kind of like.
Paul Spain:
So you were, you were, you were genuinely kind of weighing up your options and investing some time and effort.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah. But then the people part of it, the connection to the artist community kind of fell through and it was like pretty much a linchpinny kind of thing. We were like, this is gonna be a lot harder to do if we don’t have it. Cause at the beginning we had some interest there, and then we lost that connection to that group. And it was like, okay, now this became too hard. Let’s have a look at number two on this list. Yeah. Yeah.
Simon Huesser:
Okay. Yeah, so we’re at number two.
Paul Spain:
Okay, so you’ve moved down your list. Number two. Can you remember what number three was?
Simon Huesser:
No, I can’t. I’ve got the list somewhere. So maybe number three would have been even better. When we did number two, we read sort of the Lean Startup and a few other things and we were like, we were always of the mentality that like the art one, as soon as it doesn’t look like it’s working, we’ll move away from it. So we used to have these like pivot meetings where we’re kind of like, you know, we’d start off with nearly weekly, kind of be like, is this worth spending time? Is this not worth spending time? And be prepared to kind of cut it. That’s one of the hardest things is deciding when to drop and when to persevere, kind of. But we, I mean, we’re kind of, I would say we’re relatively risk adverse as people, so we needed to be convinced ourselves that this idea had legs. But we didn’t have that much to lose.
Simon Huesser:
Like, sure, we didn’t have, you know, huge amounts of money, but we didn’t have, we didn’t have to give up jobs. Right. That’s probably the biggest reason why people don’t do stuff is you’ve got to drop your job to kind of gonna go and follow this potential opportunity. Or you’ve got a family and you’ve got commitments, which means that you need to keep your job. And we didn’t have any. We didn’t have a house, we didn’t have kids, we didn’t have family, we didn’t have, like, we just had us. And so we didn’t have that much to do. So I was like, why not? You know, And I was kind of of the mentality of, well, I could go and try to do a masters potentially or something.
Simon Huesser:
But I was like, I don’t really. But too much theory for my liking. This would just be like a practical learning. How do you set up a business? How do you set up a company? And then we’ll just keep doing it until it, you know. And I think we decided to kind of go, okay, we’ll spend like $10,000 on it or something. And you know, that’s the, that’s a little course. So that’s just, this is just a real life course. And then we made the decision who was going to lead it.
Simon Huesser:
So I think like Micah was going to lead the, the art one, but then the beer, the beer cooler one was more my territory. So then. And we were going to like one of us would get a real job to have income and allow us to do this like, bit of a gamble on it. And even when we were doing it, we were kind of like, we’ll only take really small steps and like build and build slowly and kind of reinvest and build and reinvest. And we, it took a lot of like, we did a lot of validation. Like we spoke to a lot of people first when we had the American vehicle one and we were like, do you think this is good? Like we’d ask friends and family, but we didn’t really trust them because they were either too nice or they’re overly critical. But there was enough there to be like this. There’s enough people half interested and be like, if you’re like, look at this beer.
Simon Huesser:
Cool. You grab cold beer out of the fridge, keeps it ice cold while you drink. Double walled, vacuum insulated. How good is that? And they kind of be like, hey, it sounds all right. Like, yeah, I’d probably try it. And then, but we didn’t really trust them. And then we were like, well, we still weren’t convinced of the idea. And then we were like, how can we get more data that’s not like friends and family.
Simon Huesser:
Because we’re not sure if they’re telling us the truth. We’re like, well we should do like an online survey. So we asked, we’re like, how can we, how cheaply can we do this? You can do research groups and focus things and other agencies like, what about a community groups are like passionate about having an opinion. So whether that’s about, you know, your lost cat or a helicopter flying around or a whatever this dodgy looking car driving around the streets. So we’re like, these people have a bit of time on their hands and might be interested to share an opinion. So we’re like, why don’t we just create a Google form, put it live, like two minute survey about beer. Hey, we’re looking to think about developing this product. Would you share? And we’re like, what do you drink? How do you drink? Do you notice that your beer gets a bit warm? Would you be interested in a product that keeps it ice cold while you drink? And we got like a few hundred people complete this like in South Auckland.
Simon Huesser:
We were at the time at Micah’s parents Frankton, is it? I think around Pukakoe, Franklin District. Yeah. And they got a whole bunch of like feedback and we learned what people were drinking and how they’re drinking and that they were interested in a product that will keep keep it cool. Plus a bit of practical research of digging through recycling bins when we’re in various places to kind of see what actually people are drinking.
Paul Spain:
So we’re like in terms of the.
Simon Huesser:
Sort of size of bottles size, popularity because the, you know, stainless steel wasn’t particularly flexible so you need to get the sizing right. Which is why the American one didn’t work. And we were like, okay, actually we’ve validated the, you know, the idea of it at least. But we still weren’t super convinced because nobody had seen the product. We’d just asked in theory and we didn’t really like that theory part of it. So we ended up then going, well, how can we validate? We kind of validated the problem at that stage that people were like, oh yeah, I know my beer gets a bit warm. But they didn’t know what the solution really looked and felt like and whether they were prepared to pay for it. So then they were like, well, how can we validate the solution part of it.
Simon Huesser:
And again, we didn’t have too much money and we were like, well, what’s the cheapest way to do this? I don’t want. We could either go and make a thousand of these, but is there an easier way to validate that this is actually gonna work? I’d rather not have a thousand in a garage. We didn’t even have a garage. So where’s it gonna, like, where’s this stuff gonna sit? At this point we were house sitting, looking after other people’s pets to try to save money. So we’re kind of bouncing around Auckland, I think. What did we do? We went to the. We were like, well, we’ve got this American one, it doesn’t really fit, but it did fit Like Coronas. So we were like, why don’t we go down the viaduct and we’ll stop people on the street and we’ll ask the same questions with the online survey and then go, you know, what do you drink? How do you drink? We go, well actually I’ve got this thing.
Simon Huesser:
And then we pull it out and we go, so this is it. It’s a stainless steel double wall vacuum insulated vehicle. Put your, take your cold beer from the fridge, put it in. And people could then see the solution that we were proposing because you can keep your beer cold by drinking it in a freezer. But that’s not a great solution. So we were then showed the people and then we said, what do you think of this? And just listened to what they then held at and they were like, oh, this is kind of interesting. Oh, this would be great for my, you know, we’d start to get feedback and they were like, this would be great for my, you know, my husband or I don’t know what to get him as a gift, or my brother or my dad or my son. And we’re like, ah, interesting.
Simon Huesser:
Okay, we’re learning some stuff here. And then we said, we asked a whole bunch more questions. What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? How much do you think it should cost? And we asked, I don’t know, 50 people. Pretty uncomfortable. Like it’s not my favorite thing to do. But we were like, it’s.
Paul Spain:
But you got real feedback from real people that weren’t incentivised to say nice things. Cause they were your family mates and so on.
Simon Huesser:
On the front line of just do that uncomfortableness now. Because it would be more uncomfortable to spend six months and spend $10,000 than it would be to spend an afternoon down at the viaduct asking people. Brilliant. So we got that research and we’re like actually a decent amount of people like really interested in this thing. And they told us how much they were willing to pay for it. And the most. We learned two things. One was that people were interested in the product and two, that gifting would be a big part of the reason why people bought it.
Simon Huesser:
Which I don’t think we would have learned had we not got in front of people and asked them. So we had this information now and we’re like, okay, if we do do it, we should package it nicely because people are going to buy it as gifts. So gifting is, gifting is important. The product also we thought had to work really well because we just wanted to make something that Worked really well, but we’re kind of a bit risk adverse. Right. So we were like, I’m still not convinced. Because what we would do at the end of that is we would go, so, you know, would you be interested in buying it? And people more often not would say yes. But the we thought that asking people we’ve kind of assaulted, you know, not assaulted, but stopped somebody on the street.
Simon Huesser:
And then we’re kind of a barrage of questions which they’re not expecting on their way to, you know, lunch. And we’re going, you know, would you buy this thing? Like, they might just say yes because they’re being nice.
Paul Spain:
There’s always an element of that, especially with kiwis.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah. So we’re like, ah, can we trust these people? We can probably trust all the answers up to the yes, but it’s a good sign, but not quite enough. Okay, well, how can we. Now we’ve validated kind of the problem. We had the idea, we validated the problem, validated the solution broadly, but we hadn’t. We were like, we want to do one more thing to convince us that because we hadn’t taken any money from anybody, we’re like, how can we get money from people with a product that doesn’t yet exist? The Internet’s pretty good at taking money from people. What if we built a website that showed the product and made it transactional and you could then like see it. We run Facebook ads that we’d learned, you know, I’d been exposed to in previous jobs.
Simon Huesser:
And then we go, we serve ads and the website won’t be great because we’ll spin it up in like a week and the ads won’t be great. But if we can get like two people to buy them, then we should do it now. The problem was the product didn’t exist. But we had these American ones that worked for some. Yeah, yeah, American sized bottles like Coronas. And so we were like, okay, let’s do that. So we bought a domain, Gohusky Co nz. By that time we’d kind of settled on, you know, the name, you know, a name concept.
Simon Huesser:
Which dog works hard in the cold. Plus husky is the end part of Huesser. My last name and Micah’s maiden name kicker. And you put them together and you get husky and you’re like, oh, this feels kind of cool. Anyway, so we’re like, we’ll buy the domain, I’ll set up the website, it’ll be pretty rudimentary. Then we’ll spend like $100 on Facebook ads and we’ll see if we can get random people to buy this product. And if we can, that’s enough. We’ve validated this to the point where we’ll do it.
Simon Huesser:
So we filmed an ad in a friend’s backyard whose pets we were house sitting by the pool, you know, did like a thermal temperature time lapse test to show that it kind of worked. Bought the air, put it into an ads, got connected to the website, linked it, and then one night just were like, okay, spend a hundred dollars this week, we’ll see what happens. And the next day, there was a guy who had bought one. His name was Nathaniel. Won’t say his last name. I was like, well, first I checked and was like, is this mum? His mum bought this. But it wasn’t. It was some random person named Nathaniel.
Simon Huesser:
And I was like, all right. But we still weren’t convinced because it was like, maybe this is the one guy. Maybe this is the one guy who just randomly buys stuff on the Internet, you know, that he hasn’t seen before. So remember, we needed two. We decided that two was our thing. And then the next day another guy called Alan ordered one or two. And then I got a phone call from a guy called Frank because the phone number was on the website. He was like, or an email.
Simon Huesser:
It was an email. And he was like, I want to buy 10 of these to like brand them with my company, you know, logo on them. I was like, oh, Frank, man, that’s great. Really cool. But actually this was a bit of a smoke test just to sort of see whether it was kind of going to work. And if it was, and we’ve got enough, then we would, we would do them. The good news is we’ve just actually had, you know, three people now come. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna do it.
Simon Huesser:
He’s like, well, what’s the one in the video? And I was like, oh, it’s an American one. It doesn’t actually fit. He was like, I wanna come around and see it. I was like, all right, come around for a coffee. And then he drove around and we have a coffee and a. A chat. And I show him and he’s like, yep, when you make these, I want to. I want to buy like the first, you know, 10 or 20 to laser engrave them for the thing.
Simon Huesser:
And we were like, okay. Then we had like three. Two orders with money received and one as a sort of a very enthusiastic individual. And we did have the problem that the product didn’t exist. But I was, we were kind of like, well, we can sort that because we’ve decided to do it. And we kind of thought, yes, it’s a bit of a weird experience for the people who’ve bought it. But I was like, I’m just going to be straight up. So we emailed or called the first two guys, Nathaniel and Ellen, like, hey, this is a bit of a weird situation.
Simon Huesser:
I know you’ve bought this thing online. Actually, the product isn’t made yet, but. So I’ll give you all your money back. 40 bucks or 30 bucks a. A unit, or I’ll keep the money and you’ll get the first ones and I’ll double your order. But I don’t know how long it’s going to take because I never designed this product before. So we’ll see, you know, and they were like, both of them were sort of. This is a bit weird, but okay, keep the money.
Simon Huesser:
And then I asked them a whole bunch more questions about why they bought it. So then we had our first. It was like the world’s smallest Kickstarter. And we were like, okay, we’ll do it. And then that’s kind of where it started. That was enough at that point. That’s when we registered the business and that’s when we were like, okay, we’re in. And that’s where Meika had maybe had already started it for asb, I think, or some place.
Simon Huesser:
And I was like, okay, I’m husky. Your real job. And then we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. First handful of sales.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s really cool. So, you know, walk us through how you’ve got from there to where you are, you know, today you’ve got what, in the direction of 20 people. You’ve got, you know, one and a half million sales or so around the world. You’ve drawn on all that knowledge from, you know, all your previous experience. What would you say are the, you know, the key points from there now you’re doing, you know, a broader range of products as well. You’ve got, you know, products to suit keeping wine bottles cool and, you know, even a wine glass type, you know, cup and so on. How’s that played out?
Simon Huesser:
Well, I think at the beginning we were. We didn’t know if we’re going to sell sort of 100 or a thousand. So to get to the millions mark of products sold is. Is cool, is very cool like it is. But we never really put a cap on what we thought it could be because we’d been exposed to these other companies who had kind of grown so we’re just going like, we’re going to run as fast as we can and give it the best shot that we can. And if we only sell in New Zealand and it’s just a full time job for me and we build up this kind of cool thing, then that’s winning. Do you know what I mean? Equally, if it grows bigger than that, then that’s also winning and we’ll see what happens. But the reason that we started and wanted to do it was we wanted to work in a company that we wanted to work in.
Simon Huesser:
We could build a business where we can like create products or services that we enjoyed working on. So our time and investment was building sort of back to us work with people who we choose to work with, who we enjoy working with and building a brand that kind of we can feel proud of and you know, represents the kind of values and stuff that we want. So that was kind of why we did it. So the how many we’ve sold thing, we could have achieved those with 10,000 units and we could have just so happens that, you know, it’s gone bigger than that. How we got to where we are now. So that first product was about sort of localizing an international product that didn’t work. After we launched that, the feedback was very positive and we started to get reviews coming in and we’re like, people had bought it and they’re kind of like, oh, I bought this for my dad or for my brother and I thought it was a bit of a novelty, but actually it’s really good. And then they would buy more because the product worked really well.
Simon Huesser:
And we were like, man. So the important thing is the product needs to work really well. And then we were thinking about what to do next and we were kind of like, you know, there was, you know, lots of drink bottles and coffee cups and stuff out there. We’re like, the obvious choice is kind of like that kind of more typical traditional thermassy stuff. We started to get the reviews like a constant ringing or requests for like a wine because the people who were buying it I think were in the initial research that said when we were stopping, people on the street was like, often women and they were like buying for their brother, father, son, they were the ones who would leave the reviews. And the reviews would say, my husband really likes this or whatever, what have you got for wine? Because they wanted one. And so we were hearing this and we’re like, wine’s hard because it’s different shapes and sizes of bottles. And there was nothing we’d kind of taken inspiration from these other products internationally.
Simon Huesser:
But wine, there was nothing. Was like ice buckets was kind of it. So we’re like, too hard basket. But then it just kept coming and so we’re thinking about drink bottles and stuff and like, what have you got for wine? What do you got for wine? We were down in Taranaki at Christmas and Mum and dad have a small farm. And we’re like, dad, Dad’s a fitter and turner by trade and was like, man, we. Can you help me, like, think of a way to make this. I’d sketched out some kind of rough ideas for wine. We were like, if we can do this wine thing, like, marketing 101 business 101 is like, give people what they want.
Simon Huesser:
Nobody’s asking him at this stage for a water bottle because there’s good water bottles that already exist. Like, yes, we are getting a lot of requests for a wine version of our beer cooler. You know, you take a. Take a cold bottle of wine from the fridge, put it in it just keeps it cold. There’s no condensation and no hassle. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
And no doubt you’ve been watching what was happening internationally and not, not seeing.
Simon Huesser:
A solution, not seeing a wine thing. And we were like. So we were like, all right, I reckon let’s have a crack. Let’s. Let’s try to build the. Builds like the world’s first slash best, you know, beer cooler equivalent wine cooler, double wall, vacuum insulated thing. And we jumped into it and we started, you know, we sketched a few ideas and Dad’s very hands on. And it was like, okay, let’s go to Bunnings.
Simon Huesser:
So we went to Bunnings and we were. Turns out there’s 90 mil drain pipe PVC and it’s the perfect size for making a prototype wine cooler product. And we’d. We’d played with the idea of. Because the bottles are different heights, we were like, do we put a spring in it? But we were like, it needs to be super simple because if you have too many lids, they just disappear and you’re like, off you. This Alsace bottle versus this Riesling versus this whatever. Like, they’re all different. But we worked on a design which has like a thread sort of a bolt system where you can kind of twist lock thread where you can just kind of put it on, screw it down.
Simon Huesser:
You get the pitch of the thread. Right. You get the rubber materials interacting in the right way. You can just grab your bottle, put it in the base, put the lid over top, screw it down and it just kind of self locks its way in. We were like, we’ve solved this kind of like mechanical, it’s super easy. You don’t need different lids, you don’t need whatever.
Paul Spain:
Perfect.
Simon Huesser:
And so. But it looked horrendous, right? Like it was built from downpipe, from Bunnings. So yeah, but we were like, okay, we, where’s the vehicle only worked in New Zealand. We were like, we’re going to design this product for the world. So this is where all those jobs that we’d previously like been through. And you know, the first job at Villa Maria gave me exposure to different wines, different bottle types, so understood how people drank wine. The Briscoe stuff had built in this kind of understanding of like retail knowledge at, you know, scale and that kind of mentality. Plus the, you know, foreign direct investment stuff exposed to the kind of the global audience.
Simon Huesser:
And then the, then the top table, the digital, you know, component was where it kind of all came together. So it was like pulling all this stuff. So because there’s a lot of people who start their businesses early on, I don’t think could have done that because I just didn’t have that, you know, knowledge or experience. Plus my risk profile, our risk profile. So. But pulling it all together and then with the wine cooler. So then we were like, okay, we need a design partner here who can do a really good job of taking this rudimentary kind of concept because we’ve solved the kind of mechanical issue of this thing. But it looked gross.
Simon Huesser:
So we were like, we need someone who knows industrial design. So we went around to the bunch of industrial designers and found a company called Blended Design who were like similar age to us and they just got it and they were like, we didn’t have that much money, but we were like, look, you’re keen to kind of get involved. They were interested in the product, they were interested in us. We still work with them today. And they helped us build it into not just a highly functional product, but a beautiful looking product, which we thought we needed because the development of Huski came to like, okay, it needs to be this balance of like style and performance. Yeah, because it’s going to sit on tables even more so for wine. Right. Like it’s going to be in restaurants or on things.
Simon Huesser:
So they helped us evolve the product and work on it. And then, you know, the same factory partners that we were using for the, the beer cooler helped us develop the product and it just kind of. We’d reinvested the money and you know, by this point, we’d bought a house and we had a mortgage. So we just took a bit of the mortgage money and reinvested it, you know, into the business. And so that’s where we. That was the kind of beginnings of, okay, Huski, we’re gonna design our own products, and they’re gonna be the best in the world products at what they do, which is a very specific thing. Like, this is a wine cooler, giftable wine product that works really well. And so we launched that.
Paul Spain:
Was that a hard decision to make? Because your existing business that was ticking over and working right, and you hadn’t, you know, you weren’t having, as you mentioned earlier, you weren’t having to put a whole lot of things at stake, quit your job and so on, but here you were having to, you know, dip in and borrow money from the mortgage perspective. You know, walk us through what that decision was like for you. Was it sort of super easy? You could join up the dots and see how it was gonna be successful?
Simon Huesser:
It was pretty. It didn’t feel like big decision to me at the time or us at the time, I think, because we’d kind of just reinvested the money that we had earned previously, plus a little bit extra. And we, you know, we did work out the numbers and be like, okay, if this doesn’t work, can we cover it? And we got comfortable with it. So it didn’t. And it’s not like it was $50,000 or 100,000. It was like we would do it in chunks. It would be like $10,000. And ideally that would pay back.
Simon Huesser:
So, you know, the total cost of design for the wine cooler was maybe $20,000. And we were like, okay, what’s the smallest amount that we can order? When we first did the other one, then we did pre orders to help fund the tooling for it, you know, with the people who had already bought the wine cooler. So it was always sort of a low risk approach, but then just. It’s kind of like playing blackjack or something. You kind of just double down on it. But you can influence the game because it’s your. You know, how likely you are to succeed. There was a point, I think, where Meika was pregnant with our first child, and so she was gonna have to give up.
Simon Huesser:
Cause Meika was working right, and she was gonna have to give up that job. And Huski wasn’t profitable or was sort of neutral in year one or, you know, maybe lost a bit of money in year two. But we would. We were. Cause we were reinvesting it all in product and stuff. And she was like, you know, we’re just about to launch the wine cooler and she’s like, I don’t know what, you’re going to have to go and get a job because this husky hobby that you’ve got, I’m not sure, like, wow, that was, that was. There was a moment there where I think. And I was like, I reckon this wine cooler is pretty good, eh? Like, I reckon, I reckon you had.
Paul Spain:
That, you had that gut feel, had.
Simon Huesser:
The gut feel that it was, this was the key, this was good. And I always like, worst case, I’ll go and find a job. I’ll go and be a security guard again if I need to. Do you know what I mean? Like, so it was like, what is the real risk? Well, let’s just go and get a job again. Which is the risk now. So that’s where we launched the wine cooler. We, fortunately we won a few design awards for. It functioned really well.
Simon Huesser:
People liked it and we could sell it in New Zealand. Not just in New Zealand, but around the world.
Paul Spain:
When you say you won a few design awards, you make that sort of. It’s very casual. But actually that’s not a neat, that’s not, you know, it’s not an easy thing unless you’ve. You’ve got something that really stands out. Right. How did, how did that come about?
Simon Huesser:
I think like awards are funny maybe and you go back to like wine awards, right? So wines are. You pick up a bottle and it’s 15 and it’s full of gold labels. So there is, there is sort of prestigious awards and there is less prestigious awards. Like the best design award in New Zealand is a, you know, very well regarded within New Zealand one. So that’s, that’s a really cool one to come away with. And the design partner that we had helped us, you know, be aware of these and we leverage them quite heavily in marketing and advertising because nobody’s going looking for a wine cooler. So we have to kind of, you know, be like, actually this is pretty good. I know you weren’t looking for this wine cooler product, but it’s actually won a couple of design awards.
Simon Huesser:
So, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we just tried really hard to design like the best product in the world at whatever it does. And we weren’t prepared to release something that wasn’t good enough. So where there’s some companies who have release schedules with products and they have to do it. We were just like, we’re just not going to Release it until it’s good enough. So we didn’t have that external pressure because we’ve been bootstrapped from the beginning because we didn’t want. We’d been in corporate jobs and there’s so much pressure like from above and below and you know, and we were like, we just don’t want that. Like half the reason is we came back to New Zealand for a better life, you know, work life, balance, all of that kind of stuff.
Paul Spain:
So the aspect of being bootstrapped or you know, self funding your business that put you in a position from a family and a lifestyle perspective where you didn’t, you had less pressure than if you were beholden to other investors.
Simon Huesser:
Less pressure, probably work more hours. Yeah, we worked, I don’t know, 60, 70 hours a week in London and it’s probably similar if not more sometimes now, but it’s different. It’s different pressure because I can influence everything. And we could. Yeah, we just didn’t have the pressure to release something that we weren’t happy with, which I think resulted in a better product which put us in a better position to you know, be award award winning in terms of, you know, the product. Actually this is just really good at what it does. And then to have the evolution of the wine cooler eventually last year the, so the best awards is kind of one of the best in New Zealand. But then the champagne cooler which was an evolution of the wine cooler, wider bottle, has a bottle stopper in the bottom.
Simon Huesser:
Winning a red dot award which is kind of globally the best product designer, well known and recognized was like a really cool. That’s like okay, this is, that’s the pinnacle, you know, to be alongside. I mean this is the award. Apple and Dyson and Ferrari win this award for some of their products. So to be anywhere near that from starting in a shed with Bunnings PVC pipe like it were like this is, this is pretty cool. While also not giving up on the stuff that’s important to us about the type of company and the types of products that we want. So I mean we’ve been around eight years and we’ve released five sort of products. So we’re pretty slow from a product release schedule standpoint.
Simon Huesser:
But I don’t know, I don’t really care like as long as the product is really good. So if we have more people and more team then maybe we can release a few things faster. But it has to be like a really good product. If it’s not good enough, we just don’t. There’s a Bunch more products that we just haven’t released because we haven’t come up with a good idea. We haven’t done a water bottle. Cause we’re like, I don’t think we’ve got the world’s best water bottle idea yet. So when we do, maybe we’ll do it.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Now these things are never sort of a perfect straight line and you get different points where things go.
Simon Huesser:
Well.
Paul Spain:
You also get challenges. Now, when we were chatting previously, you mentioned there was another brand launch, another country that had a similar, similar sort of name, and you ended up with some challenges there. From a trademark perspective, how hard has that been to sort of walk through and to figure out, you know, what to do? Cause you can throw a whole lot of money at lawyers and processes and so on. How did that sort of make you feel when you had that challenge to start with?
Simon Huesser:
That’s probably. I think overall we’ve had a pretty good run, maybe because we do small bits and double down on things that we know that work. But there’s a few times when you’re like, you just don’t see stuff coming and. Yep, there was another company who started in Aussie and had a similar name and it’s different. They thought it was close enough to be a problem and so it resulted in like a trademark dispute. We had trademarks in New Zealand and other countries, but there was a situation in Aussie and it had, you know, five, I don’t know how many years ago, A few years ago. And it’s kind of been simmering along and trying to kind of work out an agreement to get it sorted. And that’s pretty uncomfortable because you’re like this could we do we try to invest in a few things.
Simon Huesser:
One is that, you know, the products be really good. Two is the brand is really important, especially around gifting and, and stuff in the name is important to us and we didn’t want to give it up. And so how much to invest, you know, to protect that versus, you know, the open table, top table name switch is in the back of my mind. If we needed to, would we do it? Would you have a different name in different markets that sort of screws with your scalability and, you know, makes life difficult. So we were fortunate that we had again, like a really good IP legal partner to help us navigate a few of those design things. And we protect our designs and you know, we file for trademarks and it’s just, we’re just coming out the other side of the trademark dispute now. Having reached an agreement and but it does have an impact on what Huski looks like going forward, which is pretty uncomfortable because we don’t want to be restricted in anything that we do because our product strategy is kind of like we design for ourselves and our friends and our family, and that represents a wider proportion of the public and has kind of been like, take over the cupboard. Like, look in the cupboard, look what products we use.
Simon Huesser:
And then go, can we make a better version of that? And should it be Huski? Yeah. And the issue on the trademark stuff centered around cups and a few other bits and pieces. And will we want to, you know, we do wine tumblers and flutes and stuff like that. So eventually we got to it, but the dispute was doing sort of hot drinks. Huski is more well known for coolers and, you know, wine and champagne flutes and various. But we do have, like, products like this, like a short tumbler that’s used for coffee and hot drinks as much as gnts. But we were like, look, we want to. We want to clear this pathway and we want to have a global thing, but we want to protect Huski as much as we can as a brand, and we want to continue to invest and develop in it.
Simon Huesser:
So the agreement going forward will mean that. And this is very recent news, but it will be that Huski can continue to be used for essentially like, cold drink wear and other related things. So it means that, you know, we can still sell beer coolers and big can coolers and wine coolers and all that kind of stuff.
Paul Spain:
Keep focused on.
Simon Huesser:
Keep focused on your core. What is 95% of the revenue that. Yeah, that comes in. But it’s kind of like you have to cut off a, you know, finger to save the rest of the body or a hand. And so what that means is, like, from the beginning of next year, we won’t be able to sell hot drinks products that are related to hot drinks or coffee. So that hurts, right? Because the. Our growth product. That was future.
Simon Huesser:
That was. That was it like, these are in the cupboard. I use a hot coffee. So how can we be okay with that? And the trademark dispute was around the name. So we’re like, well, we’ll be pragmatic about it. Do you know what I mean? So let’s have a think of another name. So we’ve been sort of marinating on different names now. Huski is sort of safe and locked down for that kind of core thing.
Simon Huesser:
So in the next couple of months, we’ll be releasing a new range in products under the brand Smoco. Smoco kind of has this legacy of like, you know, drinks and, you know, at work and you take a, take a break. And so we’re going to launch that and that will be focused on all of the things that we’re not allowed to do because also if somebody says to you you’re not allowed to make a hot coffee cup, like we’re going to make the world’s best hot coffee cup, you know, so that we’ll see where that ends up, you know, as a thing. But we’re going to get it out there. We’re going to rebrand the current product, single product that violates the agreement that we’ve got, that will become a Smoko Short tumbler. And then we will go and develop that. So now we’ve got a plan for kind of what this looks like and where Huski is kind of about, you know, cold and kind of predominantly like alcoholic, kind of focused and more social as a brand because you’re drinking with mates usually if things are going all right. And Smoko will be more of a hot focus brand and sort of non alcoholic.
Simon Huesser:
So think drink bottle, think, you know, coffee cups, think stuff that you might take to work, you know, to keep your, your food and drinks like at the perfect temperature for longer and more of like a personal use thing. So, you know, whereas like a, a wine cooler you’ll use with a group of friends, you’re probably less likely to share your coffee cup, you know, with somebody at work. So there’s a whole new world for us of going, okay, how do we develop this and how do they work? How does that work alongside Huski as a brand? But we’re just going to give it our best shot of doing it. It’ll have the same amount of effort and passion and care that goes into developing a, A, you know, a Huski product. So we won’t be expecting too many products too quickly, but the ones that we do make hopefully do a really good job of what they’re supposed to do. So exciting. Yeah, we’ll see where that kind of, that’s. Yeah, we’ll see where it takes us, you know, and you just kind of run, roll with the punches a little bit.
Simon Huesser:
Yeah. Yep.
Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s the next phase. Yeah, I think we’ll probably, we’ll try and, you know, track some of these future things and update there in the future. And lastly, you know, what advice would you give for others that are in business or wanting to be in business? What would be your top tip?
Simon Huesser:
I would say you don’t have to invest everything to give something a shot. You can try at a relatively small scale to see whether it’s in there. So I think for a long time, when we were first coming up with ideas, we thought we needed to be at the very beginning, the world’s best at what it is. And you have an idea and then you’re like. Then you Google it and then you find that somebody else has done something similar to your idea and then you’re like, it’s already been done. Everything has already been done. Nearly everything has been 80% or 90% always been done. So if you change the mindset a little bit and you go like the guy who did the second brand of T-shirt, if he looked and he went, somebody’s already made T-shirts.
Simon Huesser:
You know how many brands of T-shirts are out there? Like, you don’t have to be the world’s best at the beginning to test out a thing and you can focus on a slightly different audience or it can be, you know, the first T-shirt might have been a. Just a normal casual wear, and the next one’s a little bit more active wear, it’s a bit more breathable, and then the next one’s a bit this and a bit that. So you don’t have to have the best thing. So I guess I’d say to so many people at where we were, where you’d work for 15 years in normal jobs, and they have these ideas, but they. They set the bar maybe too high. Yeah, Maybe there’s a way that you can test out your idea and have a play with it. Because I bet you there’s world killing ideas that are buried away in a closet somewhere where they just kind of haven’t done it. I would pair this advice with be careful of anyone who gives too much advice.
Simon Huesser:
So, you know, grain of salt kind of thing. So, yeah, maybe there’s something in that. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
Oh, there’s a lot packed up in that chat. So, you know. Thank you very much, Simon Husser.
Simon Huesser:
Cheers, mate.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, really looking forward to following what’s Next and the Huski story. And, yeah, be trying out a few.
Simon Huesser:
More of your products. Cheers, mate. See if we can get a smoko cup in your hands.
Paul Spain:
Sounds good.
Simon Huesser:
All right, thanks, man. Cheers.
