Why did we move manufacturing from New Zealand to The USA?
As beautiful and creative as New Zealand is the fact of the matter is that the market there is way too small for us to run a factory and a small team in isolation from other countries.
Manufacturing and exporting from New Zealand to the rest of the world is extremely expensive and unsustainable; so we made the hard decision to move manufacturing to the USA to allow the company to grow.
We really want to keep the great artists that have supported us and love our products in supply in New Zealand so we have partnered with a wholesaler based in Melbourne. They purchase from our US factory and sell to art stores across Australia and to New Zealand. The price in the New Zealand store reflects all the additional costs added by freight forwarders, customs brokers, the wholesaler, shipping companies and the art stores themselves. Previously we were selling direct to customers with low postage costs. Now we sell to a third party at a much lower price point and the supply chain adds all the extra cost.
We are working with the wholesaler to get volumes up in Australia to enable us to look into reducing costs. This will reduce the shipping costs and ultimately the sticker price in New Zealand.
What we have done is to ensure our product is still available at all in New Zealand.
We have no control over the prices in New Zealand - all we can do is to continue to grow so we can gain efficiencies in scale and shorten supply chains.
We feel blessed to have been able start our journey in such a beautiful place as New Zealand and find it a pity that the price paid for this beauty is the isolation and distance from larger markets.
Hopefully you can understand that our only goal is to make sure that we continue to make the creation of permanent art – accessible and fun.