Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Matt Butler. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Matt, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Prior to Covid-19 I was a fly fishing guide based in Wanaka, New Zealand. This meant I spent at least 150 days in summer on the river and in the mountains, putting all the gear I had to the test. Whilst on these trips I found a glaring gap in one category that made life as a guide cumbersome; gear and accessories that ensured I was prepared for whatever the wild had to offer.

This initially began with looking into my ‘survival kit’ situation which at the time was just a plastic container stuffed full of all the bit and pieces I needed, no labelling, no organisation. If something went wrong I would just have to tip it all out and find what I needed and worse, if something happened to me and someone else needed to use it, they wouldn’t know where to start.

NZ’s covid border closures meant that my guiding business went to zero overnight. So rather than fret, I took it as a perfect opportunity to use this time to create a better products for the problems I was experiencing as both a guide and casual adventurer.

The KEA KIT was then born as a rough sketch, broken down into the 5 categories of outdoor survival and organised into one, easy to carry case. After several missteps with factories, I finally found one that could help realise my initial vision and that’s when things started to really take shape.

As I was doing this on my own, Kickstarter was always going to be the best options for launch as it would allow me to test demand and raise the capital to manufacture the first production run. I did a lot of planning for this, building a community and a narrative around the problem I was trying to solve and then pushed the ‘live’ button on Kickstarter on June 1st 2021. I raised over NZ$25k in the first day and at the end of 30 days had raised over NZ$300k from over 1400 backers.

We have also launched several other products over the past 2 years to compliment our range, including one other on Kickstarter called the KEA STASH, the leak-free, smell free, trash compacting bag for mess free adventures. This is quite a novel product and combines the function of a ziplock bag and dry bag to provide a new solution for storing trash and other nasties on your adventures.

Kickstarter has been a core part of our business to date and will continue to be as we move towards our latest campaign launching in May. We have taken the feedback from our thousands of KEA KIT customers worldwide and funnelled that into designing two new KEA KIT models that cover a wider range of activities and adventures.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in small-town New Zealand and was always a big fan of the outdoors. I was also a rebellious and self assured, so left school early to work. It was soon clear that I was not born to be an employee and founded my first company at 18. This saw me moving to the NZ’s largest city and doing deals with some of the countries largest retailers.

After bringing on investors early and losing control/passion for the business I decided to leave and go focus on enjoying the rest of my twenties. I spent a few years travelling before moving to the mountain resort town of Wanaka to pursue my biggest passion, fly fishing. This quickly lead to becoming a guide for high-end clients, mostly from the US, flying in helicopters and having a great time. Although the money was good and I only had to work the summer, I felt a yearning to get back into a business that could scale and could create exponential value for people. Tie this in with my love of the outdoors and this is when KEA Outdoors was born.

KEA was founded on the principle that ‘every adventure matters’ and that it didn’t matter what you do or what your skill level was, you should still be able to buy reliable and quality gear to help you better prepare for adventure.

We are casual adventurers at heart, hiking one day, fishing the other and biking the next. That’s why our gear is thoughtfully designed to be versatile and reliable no matter where you are using it.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

There have been several pivotal times in my life where change was essential and ended up being the best option in hindsight.

The first was when I left my first business. I had spent several years building it to a point where it was ready to scale but required significant investment to do so. This mean I had to give away a majority of the company to fund growth and I didn’t know at the time that this would negatively effect my involvement and passion in the business. It was soon evident that I needed to leave, although the easiest option would be to have stayed. Now looking back it was a decision made at a very important time that directly benefited both my quality of life and taken me to where I am now. The moral of the story is that taking the hardest option will often become the easiest in the long term. The hardest thing you can do is stay put in a place you find no joy and the sooner you end it the better.

Another came during Covid, initially it was a big shock having my livelihood go to zero literally overnight as all tourists were locked out of the country for 2 years. However I decided to use it as an opportunity to build something new, always knowing that I could go back to guiding one day at a last resort. This turned covid into a positive for me and something that has changed the course of my life for the good.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

Manufacturing was a totally new concept to me as all my previous businesses had been serviced based. I had no clear idea where to start other than just to get started, looking back I now see I followed these steps:

1. Rough sketch of the idea and features/iterations
2. Deciding on the best of the initial drawings and adding more detail
3. Using Canva to build a basic prototype model with specs and details
4. Used this prototype model to approach factories on Alibaba to further development
5. Realised after 2 failed attempts with factories that they need exact instructions on what to create and are not that helpful with designing or protoyping.
6. Managed to find a manufacturing agent who could help with the development and then take care of the sourcing (best thing I ever did)
7. Put all my trust in this agent to deliver the best product possible whilst being strict on what I wanted to achieve.
8. Worked out my logistics well in advance of the production being ready for shipment, minimising errors and delays.

This is the system I closely follow today, minus step 4/5 and I have trust in my manufacturing partner to deliver good results.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.keaoutdoors.com
• Instagram: @keaoutdoors
• Facebook: @keaoutdoors
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-butler-b6003664/
• Youtube: youtube.com/keaoutdoors