Anna Mowbray: people don't want to know about my money
Abigail Dougherty
Anna Mowbray has parted ways with Zuru, her family business, to start her own tech company.
Anna Mowbray made big bucks off balloons, and now the entrepreneur is starting all over again. Steve Kilgallon finds out how you go from small town farm girl to business big gun - and what showering over a toilet has to do with it.
Her bedroom was an office with no air conditioning in a dirty factory in a distant suburb of Guangzhou.
The unlit shower was suspended over the mosquito-plagued staff toilet, so she had to stand with her feet straddling the bowl to wash. She ate noodles twice a day, until she realised McDonald’s combo meals could be delivered for about four bucks, and began living off them. A 12-hour workday was standard. She was certain she was the only white Westerner in town, and she spoke very little Chinese. “Where we lived,” she says, “you would not live there.”
Anna Mowbray tells her origin story with verve. The early days of the Zuru toy empire, with 21-year-old Mowbray following older brothers Mat and Nick to China to start what became a multi-billion dollar business, undoubtedly involved hard graft, and a mountain of perhaps unjustified self-confidence.
It paid off. The National Business Review estimated the three siblings had a combined wealth of three billion dollars.
And now Mowbray has exited Zuru - “a significant cash out”, she says - and begun her own venture, Tinder-for-jobs app Zeil, which has already signed up Mitre 10, Les Mills, Downer and Fisher and Paykel, which she describes as a huge risk she’s sunk significant capital into to take on the big players.
Given her profile and accomplishments, the 40-year-old has done relatively few interviews and some of those have leaned heavily towards gushing praise. Does she like giving interviews? “I find it an energy zapper rather than an energy giver,” she considers.
Dan Eaton/Stuff
A young Anna Mowbray, centre, with brother Nick, right, and cousin Simon Rushbrooke three years into their Chinese adventure, with some of their original line of sports balls.
The trade-off, of course, is publicity for Zeil (“my goal is to be the most-loved recruiting app in the world”) and she’s happy talking about that, business and childhood, but less so about the controversies surrounding the toy empire. The interview becomes a gentle skirmish, which, I think she enjoys, and from which, I think she emerges the winner.
“It’s because I’m a good person,” she says. I shouldn’t be surprised. A humble journalist hardly matches up to the corporate rivals she’s stared down in the courtroom.
Getting your hands dirty
Harry Mowbray was working as an engineer at the local paper mill, when Anna, the third of his four children and only daughter, was born in the north island forestry town of Tokoroa.
Linda and Harry moved their family to a five-acre lifestyle block near Cambridge when Anna was six because her parents wanted to give their children the best possible education, at the nearby private school St Peter’s.
“I always thought of ourselves as the poorest kids in the school,” she suggests. “We didn’t have new mufti clothes. I had one pair of jeans I wore every mufti day. I grew up in hand-me-downs.”
Harry, she says, started with nothing, and slowly built a portfolio of property and farms, and taught them “the power of getting stuck in and getting our hands dirty” and the appetite to take risks.
A pivotal moment recounted in every Mowbray story is when eldest brother Mat invented a miniature hot-air balloon for a school science fair, and the siblings began constructing more out of old Coke cans and selling them.
“We all had to go down the path of entrepreneurship - dad wasn’t going to give us any option,” she says.
Supplied
A young Anna Mowbray with her family.
It seems strange that all three decided to go to China despite knowing minimal Mandarin and having no business experience, but Mowbray sees it as absolutely logical.
Mowbray was 21 when she left, and says it was vital the siblings went so young. Yes, she says, they were naive, had no business acumen, and “no idea of what we were doing”, but they also had no personal responsibilities. She says they never countenanced it not working.
“It was always going to work. I don’t remember having any self-doubt….there was no other choice. And if it didn’t, we would keep working until it did. Failure is not an option…I don’t even like the word failure. What is failure?”
Each kicked in $10,000 from an inheritance, and they persuaded their parents to take a six-month loan and moved to Huadu, a remote district of the city of Guangzhou, where the nearest ex-pats they knew were a 90-minute bus trip (they had no car) away.
Those early years, she says, were a “hand-to-mouth” struggle, “but we didn’t care”. Staff were even asked to return some of their wages to fund growth.
She finally left those miserable living conditions in the factory shortly before having her first child, who slept in a portacot at the end of her desk and was changed on a mat atop it.
Abigail Dougherty
“Money has never been a driver. I am not someone driven by money. At all,” says Mowbray.
The unicorn
Zuru’s first major range was a series of light-up sports kit - frisbees, footballs, basketballs - which they sold to a major Canadian distributor, Spinmaster. Sales were disappointing and Spinmaster tried to break the deal, prompting Mowbray to fly to Toronto to confront them.
“I had no idea what I was doing, but I bold-faced told them they couldn’t pull out, and if they did, we would have to begin legal action.” Mowbray says she extracted $250,000, cash which boosted production.
Their breakthrough toy was RoboFish, a plastic fish which moved when it came into contact with water, which sold 30 million units inside the first 18 months and broke them into the North American toy market for the first time.
Then their golden moment came with Bunch O’Balloons, a revolutionary advance for water fights worldwide: licensed from a US inventor, Josh Malone, it was a bunch of 30 balloons with plastic nozzles attached that fastened directly to a tap. The toy market is fickle, but Mowbray says they knew immediately they had a unicorn (it still holds a US spring-summer sales record); so too did the copycats. With relish, she tells the tale of litigation against the “king of knock-offs”, telesales king AJ Khubani, who rolled out three successive variations on Bunch O’Balloons. She says she met Khubani, and was told: “I suggest you just walk away.” When she declined, he said: “This is probably the biggest mistake you’ve made.”
Instead, they went to court. “He looked ashen the whole time.” Mowbray says they extracted $43m over several actions from Khubani, who ended up suing his own lawyers.
Good story. And a good example of her ruthless determination. So too an anecdote from an old clipping - that while puzzling out how to make a specific part, they got one of their engineers to take a job in a rival factory to study their machinery to work out how to make Zuru’s better.
Mowbray takes a different lesson from it: that they were always learning and always wanting to do it themselves, just like dad did.
In this case, specifically, they wanted to learn about rotational moulding, but philosophically, says Mowbray, it was a desire to take complete control of the entire process of making and selling toys. She knew everything from the cost per kilo of plastic to the per meal cost of feeding the staff and expected the same line-by-line detail from factories competing for her business.
After Bunch O’Balloons, Zuru cemented its standing with Mini Brands (miniaturised replicas of everyday shopping items) and X-Shot (their definitely not Nerf-style dart gun). But it’s about there that Anna Mowbray’s part in the story ends.
Abigail Dougherty
Entirely unruffled.
Hungry and humble
When Covid came, Mowbray, by now single but embarking on a long-distance relationship with the former All Black Ali Williams, had shifted to Hong Kong. Home in New Zealand on holiday with her three children (with a ten-month-old puppy waiting behind) when the borders closed, she realised she wouldn’t be going back soon, and instead got involved in advocating for border closures and flying in emergency stocks of PPE.
While the three Mowbray siblings had spent $32.5m in 2016 on buying Kim Dotcom’s Coatesville mansion (and hosting a lavish Great Gatsby party there), Mowbray and Williams spent $24m on film director Andrew Adamson’s home on the Westmere waterfront.
We don’t meet there, but on neutral ground - a friend’s immaculate home in Pt Chevalier, Mowbray immaculately groomed to match.
She and Williams have demolished the Westmere pad, and she explains that the rebuild is at the muddy earthworks stage. I can’t, though, discount the aspect of not wanting a nosy journalist inspecting her soft furnishings.
The couple and their combined brood of five are temporarily confined to a three-bedroom secondary home, and sharing the muddy section with her dog and two pet lambs, Al and Brad (named after their builders). Rearing lambs, she says, with the confidence of one who raised a champion Pet Day lamb at the age of eight, teaches kids discipline and responsibility.
She’s clear that her children (aged six to eleven) will be raised the same as she was - she wants them to be well-mannered, reliable, driven, independent, and hopefully, entrepreneurial.
Denying, with a laugh, rumours that she quit Zuru in part because of a frosty relationship with brother Nick, she says it was the kids that drove her to leave the “behemoth”.
“I struggle with the notion of how to build them [her children] up to be hungry and humble when we are living in this environment of such excessiveness,” she says. “I wanted to show them what it took to build something.” She says it’s worked: they’ve been to sales meetings, helped her make up influencer packs and her youngest came home excited after seeing a Zeil billboard outside school.
“Money has never been a driver. I am not someone driven by money. At all.”
When I start a question about what duty she has, as someone of extreme wealth, to regular citizens, she essays a sigh, and argues nobody wants to know about her money. Later, she gives me a tall poppy argument, and says: “Can’t we celebrate success a bit more around here?”
Being rich, she says, “doesn’t make you a bad person. You get out what you put in.”
We are into the arm-wrestle now. She bats away enquiries about Zuru’s legal action to force the job-review website Glassdoor to give up the names of anonymous former staff who’d given the company bad reviews. “I was not involved with that at all.” But I bet she has an opinion? “No, I don’t. There was zero involvement. I am a people person.”
She laughs. “I am getting better at not answering questions, aren’t I? I answered it truthfully though.”
No, she doesn’t want to talk about how we handled Covid. No she won’t say how she voted. No, she doesn’t want to talk about why she wants a helipad (despite neighbours’ objections) at her new home. Nor if she has a helicopter to land it on.
Her PR had asked for a question list in advance, and now she jokes about wanting to take a look at it. But actually, she’s entirely unruffled, and I think, despite her protestations about the sapping nature of talking to hacks, enjoying herself.
“I’m very authentic,” she explains. “You get what you get from me.”
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