Moana Road: How Paul Ballentyne built a souvenir empire after being $2m in debt

I was a property developer in 2008 and that definitely kicked my ass really bad. I owed $2 million at a 10% interest rate, and I had to go back to relief teaching. While I was relief teaching I started going on to Alibaba’s website and looking at ideas of new businesses to get into, and someone told me about getting pictures oil painted in China.

I bought a little camera and started taking photos of New Zealand and sending them to China and getting them oil painted. I was working on these in my garage with four little kids upstairs, and the first shipping was just three paintings.

For the next two years I was slowly building that idea up, and we held 18 pop-up shops around New Zealand with mini art galleries. Those trips told me a lot about what Kiwis were into and what got people interested.

Then someone told me about the Canton Fair in China, which is a massive trade fair they run every year. That gave me some inspiration for other products and product lines I could build up, so we started putting prints on tea towels and coasters, and the brand’s grown from there.

Paul Ballentyne started the business by selling oil paintings of photos he had taken across the country.

How many products do you make, and how do you come up with designs?

I think I have a good feel for what looks good, but I’m not necessarily a designer, I’ve just got the ideas. We’ve now got about 800 different products we’ve designed and have them in about 1000 retailers around New Zealand.

The way we’ve landed on really quality products is not by letting me have a go at it, but just hiring talent instead. We have an amazing artist, Miriama Grace Smith, who does a lot of our Māori designs. We just signed three new Māori artists as well, and we’re giving them direction on what to work on each year.

I was originally making these little tiki salt and pepper shakers, and then I learned at the Auckland Museum that the kaupapa is really bad on food and the tiki shape. I learned the hard way I was doing it wrong, so I swallowed my pride and let someone who knows better do it instead, and it’s worked well for us.

How did the business fare during Covid?

I remember the day that Covid hit, we had unloaded 15,000 of these little woolly sheep that were targeted for the Asian market, and I freaked out and thought what are we going to do? But during Covid, New Zealanders were travelling around and buying our souvenirs.

The first year was pretty stagnant, but the country was shut down for a chunk of it. The next year we grew about 30%, and then 20% the year after that. We didn’t have any international visitors, but Kiwis loved our brand, so we just kept on growing.

Moana Road designs and sells a range of products that take inspiration from Kiwiana and Māori culture.

What comes next for the business?

Souvenirs have been performing really well for us, especially since the country has been opening back up. We are now starting to design souvenirs for other countries as well, so taking some of our ideas and adapting them for a different market.

I’ve been working on ideas for Fiji at the moment, so using that design flair and innovation that we have quite strong in New Zealand, but seeing if we can do it for other markets.

What would your advice be to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?

You need to keep thinking, “what would my competitor come along and do and kick my ass in”? When I first started my merchandising was terrible, so it’s working out what area you’re weak in and focusing as much as possible on it to get better at it.

Do you have a small business story you want to share? Send your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business, retail and tourism.