“He can borrow a tennis racquet until he’s proven he loves the sport enough that he’s going to be committed to it, and that the tennis racquet is actually something that he’s going to respect and care about,” says Mowbray.
“I took the tennis racquet away and he had to keep borrowing one.
“It’s the principle. I probably go to the extreme, but I expect them to have a hole in the toe of their shoes before they get a new pair.”
Mowbray is part of a tight-knit family that now tops New Zealand’s rich list. According to The NBR List in 2024, the Mowbray family is worth $20 billion, a fortune built on more than two decades of establishing and operating the Zuru toy company by siblings Mat, Anna and Nick.
Anna exited the toy business in 2023 to pursue new business dreams – while NBR did not estimate her own specific wealth, it has been reported previously she received a significant payout. She is considered by many to be New Zealand’s richest businesswoman.
Anna Mowbray, as depicted by Rod Emmerson.
Mowbray is still extremely close to her brothers – she has rock-solid family values that soon become apparent over lunch today at Auckland waterfront restaurant Soul – and lives in wedded bliss with former All Black Ali Williams and their blended family of five kids, aged 7 to 13, in a Westmere home valued at $24 million.
So, picking up on the tennis racquet story and her earlier comment, I ask her directly: Is she indeed a bit of a Scrooge?
“I’m definitely a Scrooge! And I’m okay with it,” she says.
“Mainly it’s because I just want the value to be understood. It’s something that is really hard. I think I go to the extreme because I’m so nervous about the children not having the respect for money or the care for money and the passion and desire to get up and do something for themselves.”
It was one of the reasons Mowbray also exited Zuru – she wanted the children to witness her embarking on new ventures, and the associated hard work.
Zuru, which Mat first set up as a fledgling business in a Cambridge garage before relocating to China, was virtually Anna’s entire life for almost two decades.
Siblings Nick, Anna and Mat Mowbray.
She spent 16 years living, literally, in the factory in a small rural city near Guangzhou, with her bedroom next to the factory office. Aside from a weekly visit to Guangzhou, to play touch rugby, eat burgers and enjoy a drink with expat Kiwis, Aussies and South Africans, it was all hard graft – minimum 12-hour days of slog.
That experience further instilled in her the values of hard yakka – principles handed down from her working-class parents, and constantly reinforced during her childhood.
When her own kids came along, she did not want them to just simply observe – and benefit from – the fruits of Zuru. She also wanted to climb another business mountain.
She and her brothers – there is also another, Andrew, who is successful in his own right – remain extremely close but her departure from Zuru was “definitely a surprise, I’d say” for her siblings.
Anna Mowbray is a force of nature, described by friends and acquaintances as tenacious and highly energised. She is a woman who knows what she wants in life – and from the menu for lunch today.
“I don’t even need to look at the menu to know what I like!” she says.
She orders the scampi pasta for a main and we share black tiger prawns, beef tartare and whitebait fritters for starters. No alcohol today – we each stay parked on a glass of lemon, lime and bitters.
One of her best friends, Liv Carter, is Soul’s general manager. We don’t see her today, but dining at the next table – by chance – is Auckland FC chief executive Nick Becker.
Mowbray and Williams own a 15% share of the club, alongside American billionaire Bill Foley.
Mowbray might well be seen as part of the Auckland “set” – she and Williams feature semi-regularly in the society pages – but this is not a description that is sought, or even fits comfortably.
“I didn’t grow up in Auckland,” she says. “Born in Tokoroa, raised in Cambridge. I think you’d always look at Auckland and just think, ‘Oh, the Jafas’, but really I just don’t think I was ever invited into the circle, into the network.
“Now that I’m back here [in New Zealand], I love the city. It’s such a neat place. I’m a country kid at heart but I definitely love Auckland.”
Family values consistently come to the fore during our conversation. She says she’s striving to ensure the family sit down for dinner every night. That means trying to confine social events and evening business occasions to once a week – 2025, she says, is learning to say “no” to more invitations.
Two days earlier I’d bumped into her at the SailGP event on Auckland’s waterfront. Like today at lunch, she was a whirlwind – cheek kisses, handshakes, constant conversation. She’s just as comfortable talking to the mayor as the hospitality staff.
She is a person of many layers. Over our two-hour lunch, she trots out a fair number of business philosophies that she lives by – “It’s really important to be forward focused – I’m a perpetual optimist”; “The second you become stuck in a rut, [and] focused on what has gone, you really can’t keep innovating”; “fear is the best motivator”.
Anna Mowbray exited Zuru in 2023 and now has several other investments.
She quotes others, too, such as American business leader Ray Dalio – “he who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass”. Books such as Jim Collins’ Good to Great have played a formative role.
Her father was an engineer at the Kinleith paper mill, later going on to be a very successful engineering consultant. He built the family home with his own hands – “he was the electrician, the plumber, the builder”, says Mowbray – and was constantly pushing his kids to think about the types of businesses they wanted to run.
As a child growing up, she says, there was a note on the fridge, stating there was no such word as “can’t”.
“Dad all the time would quote, ‘If you think you can, you can and if you think you can’t, you can’t’. We couldn’t say ‘can’t’ in the household.”
Anna Mowbray with her parents and three brothers in her early days in Tokoroa.
She is the same with her own children today, although the fridge is free of the catch-cry.
“There were so many principles … how we were raised is such a testament to who we are now as people and to how we approach business. We just had this innate belief that we could do anything.”
She says she is driven by fear – “failure is the most important impetus for innovation” – not money.
“It’s not the money. I’ve never been driven by money. I never will be. It’s a byproduct, I think, of the hard work and the effort that we put in,” she says.
“Where I get my joy is seeing us make traction. In the early days of Zuru, it was that first week of sales when a new product launched and you saw it starting to build. You get behind that, you start to amplify it and you get all the momentum. That was so, so exciting.”
She has, she says, always been frugal, recalling working at The Fitz bar in Palmerston North while she was studying at university – she was still part of the social scene, but managing to make money rather than spending it. And she had the added benefit of not having any hangover the next day.
About seven or eight years ago, Mowbray happened to meet by chance – in a bar while she was on a trip to a toy fair in New York – the chief financial officer of Procter & Gamble. He was in his 70s, and regaled her with his company’s own operations in Guangzhou.
“We really hit it off – by that point in time, I’d been living in China for 10-plus years.
“We talked for two to three hours – we shared vulnerabilities and we expressed thoughts and our stance on different matters in a pretty broad and dynamic way. I just remember really opening up to him because it was a very safe and trusted environment.”
At the end of the night, he called Mowbray one of the most interesting people he’d met in a long time and hoped that she would share her story with more people.
She told him she had no such intention: “I don’t have time to do that. I don’t want to be sharing my story. That’s not where I’m happy.
“He stopped and thought about it for a few moments, and then turned around to me: ‘I now consider you one of the most selfish people I’ve ever met’.”
It was, says Mowbray, a “rude awakening”.
“I was incredibly affronted. It was a really impactful, pivotal moment for me to stop and reflect and say, ‘What is my role?’”
At that point, she hadn’t considered her own impressive rise. She is not one for reminiscing.
“I was still living in this place of humility. Everything came down to working hard and solving problems and really caring about and respecting those around me – and being really driven and tenacious about everything that we did.
“But I didn’t see that as being a great success, or I didn’t look at it and reflect upon it as being this incredible story to share and to tell.”
That’s not to say she’s now fully comfortable speaking to media or fronting up to speak to a business audience.
”I still prefer to be in the business. I love solving problems. I love being on the tools.”
Anna Mowbray learned a salient lesson about needing to share her business story with others.
Mowbray’s brother Nick is a somewhat outspoken figure, most noticeably on X, formerly Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk. In recent weeks, he’s had cracks at the likes of former Prime Minister Helen Clark and current Labour leader Chris Hipkins. His right-wing politics are laid bare.
Social media is not a major focus for Anna Mowbray, and she says she could never get into politics. But as we chat, it’s clear she has reasonable access to “Chris” and is supportive of the Prime Minister’s business-friendly policies and the KPI approach to holding his Government ministers to account.
“I’m not a huge social media advocate. I just think, stay true to yourself, stay true to who you are, and your personality will come through and shine.
“People can either love me or hate me, and I’m fine with that either which way.
“I think ultimately my role now, being a female in a leadership role, having had and done what we’ve done … my role is to empower and motivate and encourage others for what’s possible, rather than to necessarily force down my opinions.”
Her major business focus now is Zeil, a digital platform for job-seekers and would-be employers.
The Zeil app works similarly to Tinder’s swipe-right, swipe-left routine – it is designed to disrupt the recruitment market, with a modern-day interface and programmes such as a CV builder and an AI interviewing tool. Zeil, she says, is all about “democratising the path to employability”.
It’s exciting, she says, but “we haven’t got a complete product market fit, yet”. Marketplace businesses are tricky and the job market especially so. Bringing candidates and employers together “at the right time, at the right scale” is everything.
Zeil is out to break the monopoly hold of Seek. “They don’t love us,” says Mowbray.
The company now has almost 30 staff and – according to Mowbray – customer sentiment is off the charts. Staff conduct five interviews a week with customers to measure those feelings.
Among other investments are her part-ownership of Auckland FC and a shareholding in aluminium can manufacturer Recorp, which was founded by former Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe and has a $100m factory in Manukau.
Former All Black Ali Williams and Anna Mowbray at SailGP in Auckland. Photo / SailGP
Mowbray says she can’t imagine doing life without Ali Williams by her side. The pair married last year, surrounded by family and friends, at Kokomo Private Island resort in Fiji.
The couple met several years ago at a mutual friend’s wedding – he threw her in the pool. Mowbray says it was “definitely not” love at first sight.
“He sort of had this look of shock of ‘like what have I just done’. Then he tried to redeem himself,” Mowbray told podcast host Dom Harvey last year.
Life with Williams, she tells me over lunch, is “amazing”.
“He’s such an incredible person; a big softie – he’s so open, so vulnerable, so real. He has this conviction, determination, and desire that are impenetrable.”
His return to rugby after suffering several career-threatening Achilles injuries is proof of his mental fortitude, she says.
She says he is a big and bold “ideas guy”.
“We just get along so, so well. It’s really easy when someone compliments you and gets the best out of you every day. There’s not a day I don’t wake up and he says, ‘How are you setting the world on fire today, babe? Let’s go make it happen’.”
The pair might struggle, however, to get one of their private projects off the ground.
They want to build a helipad at their Westmere home, which overlooks the Waitematā Harbour.
According to reports this week, the majority of public submissions – 1277 of the 1397 that have been filed with Auckland Council – are opposed to the idea. Many of the submitters are concerned about the environmental and noise impact of helicopter flights. The matter will go to an independent public hearing later this year.
In her podcast with Harvey, Mowbray said of the media coverage of her private life and helipad plans: “All of that’s very invasive. I just think that New Zealand media has got a long way to go to be more constructive … and I think there’s so much we can celebrate. Why not enable more, empower more, celebrate more and engage in ways that are truly pushing society forward?”
(In the same podcast, Harvey asked her if she was New Zealand’s richest woman: “Don’t know – I don’t care about that sort of stuff.”)
One of Mowbray’s most recent investments has been in Auckland FC – the club has had a stunning opening season in the A-league, sitting atop the table, with 10 wins and three draws after 15 matches.
She, Williams and the club more generally have worked hard to ensure fans and families enjoy an enriched experience for home games at Mt Smart stadium.
Auckland FC playing the Brisbane Roar at Go Media Stadium, Mt Smart, on Saturday, October 19, 2024. Photo / Photosport
“We were literally the biggest established city in the world to not have a football team, so the opportunity was always there,” says Mowbray of the couple’s investment.
The club’s owners and staff did a huge amount of homework before the launch, listening to the football community’s wishlist.
Auckland’s winning start has certainly helped fan adulation, but “the second you become solely reliant on what the boys are doing on the pitch, you don’t truly engage”, Mowbray says.
“I talk about customer obsession in my businesses and innovation obsession but this is about fan obsession. You’re competing against what’s on the telly on a Saturday afternoon or going out and having a barbecue or going to the beach.
Anna Mowbray and Ali Williams have a 15% stake in Auckland FC.
“It’s not short-termism. It’s about saying, what do we want to achieve through the sport? It’s uniting communities. It’s about bringing people together.
“It’s about entertainment and then it’s about building the best team we possibly can with an incredible culture and allowing for New Zealand talent to get international exposure.
“It’s all about the pipeline, it’s all about talent pathways, it’s all about empowering our youth to get into sport and to stay active and to feel like they have the opportunity down in New Zealand, because you can feel quite removed down here.
“So a big part of our play is to open up those doors of opportunity. Everything that I’m doing is about that in some way, shape or form, whether it’s Zeil or AFC or even Recorp where it’s like deeply looking at how you can be more sustainable.
“I think that’s where anything I go into has got to be triggered in some way by supporting us as a nation to get ahead.”
Having spent 16 years in China, and now being back in New Zealand, Mowbray says she spent time thinking about “what my impact was going to be in New Zealand”.
“I think there’s so much opportunity to make a big impact from down here. You’ve just got to know where that is and know how you can do it and who you want to impact and in what way you want to inspire.”
She says she hopes her story can inspire others.
“My story is all around working hard, getting ahead, doing something I loved, feeling confident from that, and then being able to pass that confidence on to others.
“That was my story, and so I don’t see why it can’t be others’.”
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, Steven O’Meagher, Juliet Peterson, Brendan Lindsay and Tony Astle.