The iconic Kiwi brand is stepping up its global ambitions.
Blunt’s founder Greig Brebner was travelling in London when he stumbled on the idea that would go on to occupy the next quarter-century of his working life.
Walking through the city’s heaving streets one typically rainy afternoon, the Kiwi inventor
was struck by the sea of poor-quality products all around him.
“I saw umbrellas and thought, ‘this is a product that really needs some work’,” he recalled in the latest episode of Common Grounds, an NZME podcast in partnership with Nespresso Professional that steps inside Aotearoa’s most loved small and medium businesses.
“Being in London, everything seems so expensive, but these umbrellas were just crap… I nearly got my eyes poked out a few times, for sure… those spikes are dangerous!”
“It felt like everyone was putting up with this product and they didn’t need to. I felt if I could design a better product, and actually get it in people’s hands, they would pay good money for it.”
Brebner was right – they would.
But it wouldn’t be until seven years later – in 2006, after securing investment and making countless prototypes in his father’s plastic factory – that his vision would become a commercial reality.
Blunt is now a sensation in New Zealand and overseas, revered for umbrellas that blend both form and function. Its sleek, fashion-forward canopy does away with sharp metal points and can survive the blusteriest of days, with its most premium model able to withstand 115km/h winds.
While the company has expanded to more than 20 staff off the back of its success, in the early days of the business – before there was a product to sell – it was a tale of setbacks and disappointments for one-man band Brebner.
Greig Brebner (left) and Scott Kington, founders of the Blunt Umbrellas company with Wilhelmina O’Keeffe (right).
“The first 18 months, I thought the umbrella was just the worst product in the world, and I had to fix every single thing about it. I was having all these radical ideas, trying to invent this absolutely new thing, and I got nowhere,” he told Common Grounds.
“It was just a huge lesson not to start from scratch on things. After a while, I worked out that I needed to get the traditional umbrella and just work out what were the good bits and what were the bad bits – and work on the right stuff.”
That approach – of refining the umbrella rather than reinventing it – was what struck a chord with consumers, allowing Blunt to sell their products at $99 back in 2006, when most other umbrellas were significantly cheaper.
“If you do something totally radical, everyone’s like, ‘eh, it’s not for me’ – especially umbrellas, because they’re fashion products,” Brebner told Common Grounds.
“People need to be seen with them, they need to look like something they’re actually comfortable with – and I think that’s where Blunt’s won: we’re still quite a classic-looking product, but we have that facelift to us with our curved edges.”
While Blunt now has a loyal customer base and an established product range, that doesn’t mean innovation has slowed; Brebner and Graydon say they are always finding ways to improve their product and reach new consumers.
They credit some of their ongoing innovation to the organisation’s coffee culture, which has been supercharged with the installation of a Nespresso Professional coffee machine in their new central Auckland headquarters.
“The quality of a good organisation sits on the quality of the conversation – and the conversation always starts at the coffee machine,” says Graydon, who starts each day with a Ristretto capsule.
“The check-in at the coffee machine is not rocket science, it’s connecting before correcting. We just scrum down every week. We’ve got a small team, but they’re powerful.”
The Nespresso Professional coffee machine has also played a role in bringing people back into the office when working from home had become the norm during Covid.
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“Being together is so crucial – just those small little communications that don’t happen when you’re at home… the actual human element of being together, you can’t replace that.”
Graydon says the next big ambition for Blunt is to take the brand truly global. It’s something that was attempted earlier in the brand’s existence, to mixed effect.
“The story of a new umbrella was quite attractive to a lot of people,” says Brebner, “so we had a lot of people wanting it. But it went out to the world probably too fast. We went quite thin around the world and had to pull back.”
When Graydon came into the business in 2018, Blunt was in 57 markets around the world, and he made the decision to cut that by more than half, focusing mainly on Australia and New Zealand for a few years.
Now, however, Graydon believes Blunt is ready once more to attempt to “conquer the world” – albeit taking a less scattergun approach this time, starting with the US and UK markets.
“That’ll take years to build to what we want to achieve there. We’re building every year. Are we building at the right rate? Probably never. But we’re building.
We’ve got a massive Australasian following up there [in the UK], so it’s helping a lot – but we’re only just getting started.”
For now, though, Graydon is just pleased to helm one of New Zealand’s genuine business success stories.
“Iconic Kiwi brands… weren’t [iconic when they] started. You’ve got to stay at it – it takes longer than you think and costs more than you plan. But at the end of the day, Blunt is an iconic Kiwi brand.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Brebner and Graydon discuss Blunt’s rollercoaster journey to date, the impact of their new Newmarket base, and how they are using AI to supercharge their business.
Discover how Nespresso Professional can transform your workplace coffee experience here: www.nespresso.com/pro
Listen to the full episode of Common Grounds here:
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