Sistema founder Brendan Lindsay. Photo / Jason Oxenham
The man who created Sistema from his garage and later sold it for $660 million opens up on his extraordinary back story, the sudden surge of wealth, how Kiwis reacted, political donations and his new ventures. Shayne Currie reports.
Brendan Lindsay sits at a table in his Viaduct office with, I suspect, the “real” boss near his feet – Louis, an adorable Maltese shih tzu – and recounts a story about playing hardball with US lifestyle TV magnate Martha Stewart’s team.
Lindsay, 68, the founder of Kiwi plastic container firm Sistema, was in the final throes of a lucrative deal with the American celebrity’s team for a new line of Martha Stewart-labelled Sistema products.
Stewart’s people wanted “Made in New Zealand” removed from the base of the containers.
“We were trying so hard to get on shopping networks with our products,” says Lindsay.
“To get Sistema into the American market, home shopping seemed to be a good avenue because we couldn’t afford to advertise on national TV. We had a product – a lunch box – that Martha Stewart’s organisation wanted to buy. The numbers were good but they came back and said you have to take ‘Made in New Zealand’ off the base.”
That raised his hackles.
“I said no, I won’t take it off.
“Their procurement team came back and said we’re not going to place the order with you.
“My sales team were all saying to me, ‘Are you mad? Do you know how much money we’re going to lose?’
“I said I don’t care if it’s Martha Stewart or the bloody Pope. I’m not taking it off.”
The point is, says Lindsay, that once you lose your point of difference – that unique selling point which allows your product to stand out – you lose it forever.
“I’d have to take it off the container for everybody,” he says.
“It’s not just made anywhere. It’s not made in China. It’s not made in the street. It’s made in New Zealand.
“We should be proud of it. That’s what we do as Kiwis. We’re proud of where we come from.”
So what happened?
“Three weeks later, they came back and placed the order. We did hundreds of thousands of units.”
Lindsay is a Kiwi patriot, a theme that constantly resurfaces – through his business and charity work – as we chat in his well-appointed waterfront office before lunch.
He remembers ensuring that his overseas-based staff at Sistema wore silver fern lapel pins whenever they were at business meetings – “They used to take them off when I wasn’t there!” – and he talks of his pride in the black jersey and seeing New Zealand athletes perform so admirably at the Olympics.
His and his wife Jo’s passion for New Zealand also came to the fore in the biggest business deal of their lives, when they sold Sistema for $660 million to American giant Newell Brands in 2016.
Newell initially tried to buy the firm in 2014 but would not agree to the Lindsays’ insistence that manufacturing of Sistema products would stay in New Zealand for another 20 years.
Two years later, the US giant was willing to accept those terms.
Aside from the obvious security that arrangement gave Sistema staff, Lindsay reckons it’s given him a pass from the public. In its most recent estimation, the NBR placed the Lindsays’ wealth at $825 million.
Lindsay had been worried about the possible public reaction when he sold the business. Like any society, there are knockers.
“I want to live in New Zealand; I want to stay here. I want to go down to the supermarket and buy my bloody groceries the same as everybody else.”
So what’s been his experience then?
“Mate, it’s been fantastic – it’s made no difference.
“I went to the Karaka store the day after the piece was in the paper. It was front page of the Herald; the Herald was still there [on the newstand] and the girl in the store said to me, ‘I see you sold your business’ and I said, ‘Yes’.
“She said, ‘Anything else you want?’ She just completely ignored it.”
He had a similar experience at his gym at the time.
“I was frightened about going to Les Mills and going into the public forum and people would say something. They weren’t, but it was me, you know? It wasn’t anybody else; it was me.”
The lack of any reaction caused him to wonder if anyone had seen the news.
“Can’t someone say, ‘Hey, well done’ or ‘I read about your business’ or something?” he laughs. “No one said anything. I was like, ‘bloody hell!’”
Later, he spoke to his personal trainer, who revealed he had spoken to his gym colleagues about the sale but to continue treating Lindsay as normal. “He’s just the same as everybody else – ignore it. And I was going, ‘Oh shit, that’s really nice’.”
He has no doubt there have been knockers.
“But the fact that I kept the business in New Zealand gave me and the family a pass – ‘your dad’s done the right thing’, ‘your brother’s done the right thing’.
“And that was the whole thing that made a big difference, I think the public perception of it wasn’t about money: ‘He sold his business, good on him, but at least it’s still here rather than going somewhere else’. I think that’s really important.”
Kiwis also love battlers and a rags-to-riches story.
Pukerua Bay-raised Lindsay struggled at school, missing out on many of his exams – he once described himself as the “dunce” of the family who couldn’t spell.
“My father used to say to me, ‘You will end up on a park bench with a newspaper over you’, so I don’t think they held a lot of hope,” he told the Herald’s Jamie Gray in 2016.
But after leaving school he joined the Air Force, an experience that helped bring structure and discipline to his life.
Later, as he told the Herald’s Liam Dann in 2021, he followed his father’s lead and became a travelling salesman.
A client spoke to him about a potential opportunity.
“He had a little square plastic disc the size of dice and he brought them in from England. They go on top of coat hangers to designate the size. And he said to me you should make these little sizing discs,” Lindsay told Dann.
“Then I made the coat hanger that went underneath the sizing disc. To this day, most of my friends call me Hanger.”
Lindsay created his empire from scratch in a half-built garage in Cambridge in 1982. He then moved into plastic containers, creating Sistema.
While he had difficulty at school, Lindsay says he is good with numbers and reading people. Many of his closest staff have been with him for decades.
“The reality is that I had a natural ability to look at numbers and get every single number on the page and yet I can’t remember people’s names, but I can look at the balance sheet and just get it straight away. I don’t know why, but it just comes naturally.”
Lindsay describes himself as a good judge of character, happy to call a spade a spade.
“I’ve had a natural ability to make a decision about people relatively quickly and over a period of time and say, ‘You know what, I don’t like that person or there’s something there that I’m not sure about or whatever’. I’ve just had a natural ability of picking the right people or surrounding myself with the right people.”
He also prides himself on working closely with his staff.
“When I sold the business, I had 800 employees working for me and I only ever had two employment disputes in 34 years.”
He says people know if they fit or not.
“I look at it like this: everybody’s got a life outside of work – they’ve got a mortgage or if they haven’t got a mortgage, they’ve got some sort of problem in some form or another. When you come to work, leave your problems at the front door and when you leave, pick them up, and take them home with you.
“When we’re at work we’re all equal but we don’t bring our problems together.
“What we do is we solve problems when we’re together. I can’t solve people’s personal problems. I can only help them with them.
“It’s quite a simple philosophy. I say it a bit too directly at times.”
Lindsay reveals he and Jo left the money from the Sistema sale in the bank for many months.
“I don’t think I’ve told many people. When we sold, there was obviously a fair chunk of money but we didn’t touch it. It was six months before we even did anything with it.
“I didn’t know what to do. We looked after staff and all the other bits and pieces but we didn’t go and buy a new car, I had a car.
“And we didn’t need a new house, I already had a house. We didn’t buy a plane – I don’t want to have a bloody airplane. I hate helicopters, I’m not going to buy a helicopter.
“We had everything that we wanted. All of a sudden this money came along.
“It’s nice to look it on your bank account. But it’s actually irrelevant to life because I can’t eat another steak.
“I can go and buy a $5000 bottle of wine but I’m not going to drink it because I feel like, ‘What a wanker’.
“You know what I mean? So, what am I going to do? Just drink lots of $100 bottles of wine? But you’re not. There’s only certain things you can do.”
The Lindsays are active today through the Lindsay Foundation and the Lindsay Investment Trust.
The foundation is at the centre of their incredible philanthropic efforts. It disburses between $6m and $7m a year, notably in the family, education and animal welfare sectors.
The foundation’s mission is to support Kiwi individuals and organisations who aspire to make a positive difference to New Zealand. His entry in the Business Hall of Fame tells of him and Jo helping more than 50 charities in total including Pet Refuge, Assistance Dogs NZ, Autism NZ, Anxiety NZ, Starship air ambulance and Downlights.
The foundation has also donated $3.5m for the New Zealand memorial museum in Le Quesnoy, the French town liberated by Kiwi troops in extreme conditions in the final days of World War I. More than 120 Kiwi soldiers died in helping free the town from German rule.
The New Zealand Liberation Museum, Te Arawhata, has been open for almost a year and is now in its next development phase, focusing on making it a must-visit destination, alongside other European remembrance sites, for New Zealand travellers.
Lindsay – one of two foundation partners for the museum, alongside Richard Izard – was moved when he visited.
The museum fulfils his and Jo’s dream of a legacy for future generations, including their own.
“Particularly our children and grandchildren. I don’t think there’s anybody in New Zealand that hasn’t been touched by war, whether it be the First, Second, Vietnam or whatever war.
“The whole thing is about remembrance and not forgetting. Not just the sacrifice that these guys made, but what our whole country made.”
The Lindsays’ son Cameron is also a trustee for the foundation.
Brendan Lindsay has previously said that Cameron will also move into the Lindsay Investment Trust and become a big part of the family’s succession plan. His three daughters would also be involved in succession planning. “We have a plan to have them all involved going forward,” he told NBR.
Meanwhile, the trust this year invested in The Peninsula Credit Fund. It lends to companies with proven business models, primarily those operating in the agriculture, corporate and commercial sectors. Loans are typically in the range of $5m-15m.
These days the Lindsays live comfortably, spending their time between their expansive Remuera home, Karaka and Cambridge, where they bought Cambridge Stud from Sir Patrick Hogan in 2017. It’s a short distance, yet a long way from that half-built garage.
Lindsay has donated $50,000 to each of the National, Act and NZ First parties. He is impressed with the direction of the coalition Government – he’s described it as doing an “absolutely tremendous job” – and the performance of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. He was very worried about where the country had previously been headed, for his grandchildren’s sake.
He knows Luxon personally.
“I don’t have any influence on his thinking, trust me on that one,” he told NBR’s Dita de Boni earlier this year. “But if I met him 10 years ago, we’d be good mates. I like the way he thinks.”
After the sale of Sistema, Lindsay was worried that he might be a one-hit-wonder.
“I was more worried about whether I could do anything else rather than what I’ve actually already done. ‘All I can do is make plastic boxes’, you know, that type of thing. It worried me quite a bit.
“At the back of my mind was that relevance. It was there all the time. What am I going to do? Can I do it again? Can I do something else?”
He helped mentor others and, without being unkind, he realised after meeting some people that he would be okay.
“I remember people coming in saying to me, ‘Oh, you know, we’re gonna do this, we’ll do that and da, da, da, da, da’.
“And I was like f***, you must live in a world different from me. Not that they were wrong but they hadn’t done their homework.”
It boosted his own confidence.
“It made me feel straight away that, well, I can do anything. I found out quite quickly that I could adapt my skills to other things.”
That reading of numbers, and recognising good people, have continued to catapult him forward.
Meanwhile, the Lindsays, like many Kiwi households, have a lot of Sistema products at home.
“But we have to buy them now!” he laughs.
“When I left, I could have easily written into the contract Sistema products for life. It seemed a bit silly at the time. I prefer to go and buy them at the supermarket like everyone else.”
After Lindsay and I have talked for almost 90 minutes, his EA Rachael Pointon knocks on the door, offering lunch. We wander to the kitchen area.
Pointon produces one of the finest bacon-and-egg pies I’ve ever eaten, a family recipe from her late father, a baker.
The conversations continue with staff, before a pièce de résistance for a dessert, a homemade caramel slice.
Two tasty Kiwi staples, a fitting reflection, perhaps, of our conversations of the past couple of hours.
And what was the caramel slice served up in?
A Sistema container, of course.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor. As well as a weekly media column, he has a regular interview series featuring noteworthy and leading New Zealanders including Wayne Brown, Ruby Tui, Paddy Gower, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Scotty Stevenson, Chlöe Swarbrick, Simon Power, Josh and Helen Emett, Sir Ian Taylor, David Kirk, Sir Ashley Bloomfield, Paul Henry, Simon Barnett, Sophie Moloney, Brian and Hannah Tamaki, Sir Grahame Sydney, David Lomas, Carrie Hurihanganui, Sir Russell Coutts and Steven O’Meagher.
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