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Left, Manawawharepu Udy and Sandra Gavet are two Māori businesswomen not letting Covid hold their business aspirations back. (Photo: Tina Tiller)
Left, Manawawharepu Udy and Sandra Gavet are two Māori businesswomen not letting Covid hold their business aspirations back. (Photo: Tina Tiller)

SocietyNovember 23, 2021

How a South Auckland shopping site expanded to Australia in the middle of lockdown

Left, Manawawharepu Udy and Sandra Gavet are two Māori businesswomen not letting Covid hold their business aspirations back. (Photo: Tina Tiller)
Left, Manawawharepu Udy and Sandra Gavet are two Māori businesswomen not letting Covid hold their business aspirations back. (Photo: Tina Tiller)

Despite border closures, Covid lockdowns and a global pandemic playing havoc with shipping, a South Auckland retail site has decided now is the time to expand into Australia. 

Two childhood friends separated by the Tasman Sea for 20 years have reconnected as business partners to give New Zealanders in Australia a taste of home. Manawawharepu Udy and Sandra Gavet plan to sell Māori and Pacific-made products from a Gold Coast base, expanding the e-commerce site Konei into the Australian market.

The site sells handcrafted gifts, clothing, jewellery, skincare and home products made primarily by female-owned Māori and Pacific businesses. Launched by Udy and her Ngahere Communities team two years ago, Konei operates successfully from its South Auckland base but is now looking for new opportunities across the Tasman. Udy says the challenges of juggling local Covid restrictions, a global shipping industry in turmoil, and finding an Australian warehouse – all via Zoom – mean the Gold Coast expansion will either “go down in a blaze of glory” or be the first step in establishing Konei as a global brand. 

Konei NZ manager Amanda Kirkwood (left) with Ngahere Communities co-founders Manawawharepu Udy and Mel Tautalanoa getting stock ready for sending to Australia. (Photo: Ngahere Creators/supplied)

To help launch the move, Udy tapped former schoolmate Gavet to run the Australian operation, starting with a two-week pop-up store in the Gold Coast suburb of Nerang, opening this Saturday.

Udy says expanding Konei into Australia has been partly driven out of necessity, given the plethora of options already available to New Zealanders wanting to buy products that are indigenous or distinctive to the Pacific.

“We just felt like we either needed a half a million [dollar] marketing campaign or we thought let’s jump to Aussie and investigate what that might look like, and we found out pretty quickly that our offering, especially to Kiwis in Australia, was super attractive – and we’d have almost no competition.” Udy says Māori and Pacific wares available in Australia tend to be the type of tacky items you might find in an airport departure lounge.

From left; Poto Tuisamoa, Sandra Gavet and Ngavarah Barker were born and raised in Aotearoa and will be running Konei in Australia. (Photo: Supplied)

But what sounds like a good idea on paper is a different proposition when there’s a global pandemic unfolding. 

“We couldn’t have found a worse time to learn the ropes around exporting, so it’s been a wild journey to be honest,” Udy says with a sigh, over a work-from-home Zoom call during Auckland’s latest lockdown.

Getting her suppliers to make extra products for Konei Australia, arranging a warehouse for storage, and hiring Australian staff to manage sales has all proven challenging. But the greatest hurdle has been navigating the international logistics industry. Udy says Covid-related restrictions mean shipping companies have quadrupled their prices, while altering routes and ports they deliver to. 

“Because we make up less than 2% of the global industry, it’s quite easy for companies to take their Australia and New Zealand stops off their routes. Even getting containers onto a ship can be tough because a company might decide Chinese products need to be prioritised. What’s happening with the shipping industry is something that’s never happened before, and so we’ve had to learn a lot about that.”

Manawawharepu Udy, centre, held a wananga at Te Tahawai Marae with KMPG and NZTE for all the brand owners who would be selling products in Australia. (Photo: Ngahere Creators/supplied)

Despite the crash course in shipping logistics, Konei has managed to get a 20ft container filled with products into Queensland and Udy is now in the process of planning a second shipment for early January. She says the last few months have included many long days and some sleepless nights, but her friendship with Gavet has made it all possible. 

The pair went through intermediate and high school together in Rotorua, before Gavet joined the thousands of other New Zealanders seeking a new life across the ditch. The duo have kept in regular touch over the years and Gavet says it was while Udy was on a Gold Coast getaway earlier this year that they first discussed the idea. 

“I’ve been following closely what she’s been doing with Ngahere Communities and always admired what she’s done,” Gavet says. “We got talking about how cool it would be to do something similar over here. We talked about it with a few other people and it wasn’t long before Manawa said: ‘let’s do it’.”

Gavet says it’s been special seeing how little Udy has changed despite becoming a business mogul of sorts. 

“It’s definitely cool to see her in her element,” Gavet says. “She was always my brainy mate, but it’s cool to see how she still likes to have a joke and a laugh which is the person I know.”

Ngahere Communities also runs a South Auckland co-working space called GridMNK with the support of Auckland Council’s economic development agency Auckland Unlimited, and the agency has also provided some help with this initiative. However, Udy admits there’s still been times “when we were ready to call it off”, but she eventually decided the potential for success outweighed the risks of failure. 

“It has huge potential and it’s our first step towards going global. This is just going to be the start of helping our Māori brothers and sisters achieve over there, like what Ngahere [Communities] has been doing here.”


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