Jaimee Lupton of MONDAY with partner Nick Mowbray. Photo / Supplied
Multibillion-dollar New Zealand entrepreneurial business Zuru has built and opened a new southern Chinese factory to make more than 100 million bottles of successful haircare brand MONDAY annually.
Jaimee Lupton, beauty entrepreneur and partner of Zuru co-founder Nick Mowbray, said the new Zuru Edge Beauty plant opened last month.
It makes haircare products that are sold all around the world. The factory is thought to have cost around $10 million to build.
Lupton forecast US$200m sales this year and said the factory was a game-changer in growth.
“Development took a little over 12 months. It was officially opened about three weeks ago,” she said.
The Coatesville-headquartered billionaire Mowbray family own Zuru.
The new Zuru factory for MONDAY developed a highly automated plant built in Zhongshan, “considered the centre of manufacturing in southern China”, Lupton said.
The factory is making Lupton’s global MONDAY Haircare brand, nicknamed genius in a bottle due to its incredible rise.
A project team of around 35 people developed plans and saw those to fruition, she said.
That group of people has considerable experience in making cosmetic products, she said.
“This team covered all areas of functional expertise, from facility layout design, production and capacity analysis, environmental solution design, machine selection and development, as well as the actual construction,” Lupton told the Herald today.
The factory’s first phase is 27,000sq m or 2.7ha but plans are to more than double that to 50,000sq m in the next two years. The factory has considerable manufacturing capability, she said.
It makes packaging via injection and blow moulding as well as products that go inside via mixing, filling, and packing of any form of liquid-based chemical consumer product.
“Phase one capacity will enable us to produce over 100,000,000 bottles of MONDAY per year, with long-term plans to substantially increase as the demand of our brand continues to grow,” Lupton said.
She wanted a pink theme in the factory to match the soft pink bottles and MONDAY branding, “but I was told it’s non-compliant and makes it hard to see production lines”.
Around 80 bottles of MONDAY can be produced a minute with the use of automation and Lupton thanked Mat Mowbray who she said was instrumental in the new factory’s development.
The video shows reception and office support with the branding “Zuru Zhuyan Biotech” on a bright red wall, meeting areas, the manufacturing plant with lines of large stainless vats and platforms to get above those big vats, bottles of the haircare product being manufactured and filled on production lines, then getting caps and labels.
A Herald profile of Lupton in 2021 said the business had sold 5 million bottles of MONDAY since it was launched in 2020.
Two years ago, around 10 bottles were being sold every two minutes around the world.
Last year, the Herald reported how MONDAY had renewed its contract to sell in the giant United States-headquartered Costco Warehouse. She initially got a three-month contract.
She said the brand pitched to Costco US and quickly became “very successful” with American customers.
Lupton said it’s “great to be a truly global brand”, but said getting the products into the US market was “extremely hard. They only take brands they know will be a success”.
Coincidentally, today in the High Court at 9am, Zuru New Zealand and others v Lego Juris was set down. The Herald’s Chris Keall reported in 2019 how Zuru was countersuing Lego in what he called an escalating toy war.
Zuru said then it was appealing an injunction against its figurines, won by Lego in the United States, and that it was launching a countersuit, alleging the Danish toymaker is abusing its market dominance in a bid to smother new competition.
Justice Graham Lang was hearing arguments in chambers this morning.