Hamish and Hannah Acland of Mons Royale. Photo / Mons Royale
Mons Royale co-founder Hamish Acland talks to Tom Raynel about how he and his wife and co-founder Hannah have taken Merino wool sports apparel worldwide as they launch new retail stores, including one where they started in Wānaka.
What is Mons Royale?
We’re an outdoor apparel brand famous for using natural fibres and bringing a sense of energy and style to our clothing. We make apparel for mountain biking, snow, rock climbing to trail running - a lot of people just have a Mons for everything. We’ve got fans all over the world that keep coming back, so we’re doing something right.
What inspired you to start the business?
Before Mons, I was living in Wānaka. It’s this really cool melting pot of people. It’s a destination that attracts people from all over the world for skiing, mountain biking and being in the outdoors, and so I got to be a part of that.
Then I was travelling and competing in freeride skiing globally for about 10 years, and just saw this opportunity, this gap, that on one hand, there was a synthetic base layer that had graphics that were more attuned to pyjamas. And then on the other side, you had a Merino wool base, which was essentially pretty boring.
It had earth-tone colors and blacks and kind of lacked the energy and the culture of the mountains I enjoyed, so I could see there was an opportunity. Essentially, it was about creating that vision and then trying to work out how to make it all happen.
After 15 years in business, what was the experience of expanding to offices overseas?
The intent was always to go global from day one. New Zealand just doesn’t have a big enough market. My ambition was always to create a global brand. I really wanted to help New Zealand action sports go global, so it was a big driver of mine.
The first trade show we went to was in Munich 15 years ago, and the big brands were spending a quarter-million euros on this sort of event to talk to retailers. So we went over there, and the brand completely failed, and we had to come back, really reassess and take this humble knock-back, and then come back a little bit better for the next year.
What happened during that time, in 2009, we launched into about five stores in New Zealand. Then my old ski sponsor, Volkl Skis, my team manager and my boss introduced me to a Swiss retailer and distributor, and that kicked us off into being in Switzerland.
In year one, we sent up all of the stock we had left here in New Zealand and added multiple countries quickly after that. We hit this gap in the market and scaled pretty quickly in Europe. With that scaling came a lot of pain, because we weren’t quite prepared for it.
Was scaling up the biggest challenge the business has faced?
It was one of the big early challenges. We had one of our distributors change, and the new owner withheld paying us for the purchase order he had placed with us, which was in the hundreds of thousands. In the end, we decided to move over to Switzerland to deliver the goods ourselves, and that was a pretty big learning curve.
Hannah and I had a 3-month-old baby with us. So, you know, you look back and you’re like: Probably shouldn’t have done that. But we made so much ground in Switzerland - it was such a strong market for us that we didn’t want to take a step back.
We always had this vision of sitting in our own offices and being able to run the business from there as well.
Does your wife Hannah still create all the designs for the business?
Yeah, she’s got this amazing touch regarding coming up with what she believes the world needs. And often that’s not from a trend book, it goes against trends, but she has this amazing touch. She has a full team now, but Mons has always been really renowned for our colours, our prints and our graphics. That’s what’s really driven the brand.
Since then, we’ve started to add new materials and new innovations. In the beginning, it was about taking this amazing fibre of Merino wool and creating a connection with a whole new customer group who really weren’t looking to wear Merino wool because they saw it as such a boring and tired category.
How do you source your Merino Wool?
Today we work with New Zealand Merino, our sourcing partner. We have about five stations we work with.
We have this direct farmer club, which is really good. Both Hannah and I are actually from farms - Hannah grew up on a Merino sheep station, which gives us this really cool connection with the farming community because we grew up in it. It probably surprised both of us that later on in life, we would come back to work in connection with it.
How big is your team now?
We always wanted to set up shop, like a lot of the big brands, in the big cities like, say, Munich. We didn’t want to be in the big cities, we wanted to set up our offices in mountain towns. So we’ve got an office here in Wānaka, that’s the headquarters with about 30 staff here. We have an office in Innsbruck, Austria, and that’s an amazing city.
Many moons ago in my ski career, I ended up sleeping in a park because it was a cheaper alternative than the expensive hotels. That town is really cool, and it’s, you know, just a place where we enjoy being. We have a team of eight there, and that’s running all of the European sales support and marketing.
Then we have another office in North America, and that’s in a small Canadian town called Squamish. It’s not that small, it’s much bigger than Wānaka, but that’s our other home right now, which is really exciting.
What’s next for the business in the years to come?
We’ve just opened our brand flagship store here in Wānaka, which is pretty cool, and we’re about to open a store in Whistler in Canada for this winter, so we’re just sort of publicly announcing that now. That’s where my wife Hannah is at the moment. She’s up there to look at the store and work out how we bring the Mons Royale brand to life in that in that space.
Opening that store is important in order to share and create a community in a very cool place. I spent time in Whistler skiing for many years, and I’ve got a lot of friends there, including one who slept on my couch in New Zealand who I’ve been friends with ever since.
It’s about creating that community and being able to create a physical space where people can experience the brand. We’re going to be doing the same thing in Innsbruck, so we’ll have these three flagship stores to really build community around and introduce a lot of people to Merino wool natural fibers, and, of course, to Montreal. So that’s the big mission, from that point of view.
What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs?
Find something the world needs, and look to solve a problem. I think that’s the main thing that we need. We don’t need more stuff, we need people to solve real problems. I think if the entrepreneurial spirit can be directed in that place, then we’re going to see some pretty amazing things.
Do you have a Kiwi small business story? Email newsdesk@nzme.co.nz with the subject “Small Business Q+A”.
'I’ve always wanted to be called an institution – that’s my goal.'