KEY POINTS:
An export business set up by two Kiwis on opposite sides of the Pacific is taking New Zealand design products to the world at unprecedented levels.
The firm, dubbed essenze, was set up not quite three years ago and is on track to do $3 million in sales this current financial year.
It is also about to open its first offshore retail outlet, in Austin, Texas.
While individual designers have long exported - essenze's "star" designer David Trubridge is a Kiwi success story - and firms overseas have imported New Zealand products, essenze is the first time anyone has focused on exporting and with a presence at both ends of the transaction.
Clare Mora grew up in Germany and studied the business of design there. She returned to her native New Zealand 12 years ago and was running a glass gallery in Parnell when the idea for essenze germinated.
Meanwhile in the US, Kiwi business consultant John Cook was testing the waters with a venture selling New Zealand design products.
"I just started selling, knocking on doors, a bit naive, bit Kiwi-style."
He realised he needed someone in New Zealand.
Clare was at the same time searching for someone in the US. The pairing was eventually formed, with the two business people investing $500,000 of their own money in the venture.
They have around 40 New Zealand designers on their books. As well as a Parnell gallery, the firm now has showrooms in New York and Miami, supplies to the 70-outlet US chain Design Within Reach, has just signed with a Netherlands-based distributor, Dutch Design Distribution, and also sells to a Mexican firm. The Austin store opens in September.
It is also beginning to win corporate outfitting work, including restaurant refits in Mexico City and Las Vegas.
Three New Zealand designers are collaborating on the Las Vegas project: "A hanging ceiling that morphs into a light and then a chandelier," Mora enthuses. David Trubridge lights have been a particularly successful product for essenze, which has been exporting several hundred of them to the US each month. The lights retail for about US$500 ($658.50).
The designer says since signing with essenze he now exports 75 per cent of his production. Previously that figure was about 40 per cent.
Trubridge says New Zealand product designers have no choice but to export, because scale is imperative to manufacture at a cost-effective level.
And he says individual designers can't do it on their own. "What they [essenze] are doing is the only wise way to do it, to create this whole New Zealand look where you're pooling the resources into one big effort."
Mora says a key to the essenze business model is to work within the designers' businesses, creating efficiencies, forging partnerships with manufacturers and readying products for the export market. It has played a mentoring role with Trubridge, who has gone from being a one-man band to employing a design team and a production manager.
A competitor to essenze is Eon Design Centre, based in Auckland's Britomart precinct. Founder Angela Roper says the company also mentors designers, but other than internet overseas sales it has focused on the New Zealand market.
However, she shares the faith that exporting is Kiwi product design's future. "It's to our advantage for Clare to be doing what she's doing, because it gets the designers to look beyond the local market."
And is there a Kiwi 'look' in product design?
"Many people have commented that New Zealand to them was like California in the 60s and 70s, when people were nice and things were a bit slower," Cook says.
Organic, yet sophisticated, are terms Mora uses.
GRAND DESIGNS
* Start-up design export business essenze is on track to do $3 million in sales this financial year
* It is about to open its first retail outlet, in Austin, Texas.
* It is also winning US corporate fitout work, with Kiwi designers collaborating on projects such as restaurant refits.
