Small Business: Lofty Kites' ambitions to take flight

Lofty Kites founders Nikolai and Jo Sorensen with their two children Pia and Arie. Photo / Supplied

Husband and wife duo Nikolai and Jo Sorensen, founders of Auckland-based children's kite company Lofty Kites, talk setting up a business after a trip to Bali, working in product development and ambitions for the firm to take flight globally.

What does your business do?

Jo: Lofty Kites designs and makes kites for adventurous kids. We designed Lofty Kites as an invitation to play, and are all about getting your little ones outdoors with nature and making some of those core memories.

What was the motivation for starting it?

Nikolai: My real life job is being a product designer at Citta so I'm constantly looking at different products in a different way and how they can be improved. Jo and I would often talk about different business ideas that never eventuated, but what made this one special for us was, we were on a family holiday in Bali and we were camped out on the beach every night and this local boy and grandad every night would fly this kite up and down the beach and it just sparked my own memories as a kid, and the more we thought about it when we came back to New Zealand and tried to find one ourselves, what was available in the market didn't align with our values as a consumer and what we wanted so it kind of sparked from there. It was that ah-ha moment - a product that ticked a lot of boxes for us and a space where we could come in as a bit of a disruptor in the market and build a brand of well-designed and well thought through kites.

The product design side of things happened really quickly which is strange for me as some products I have designed in the past can take three to four years. But. with this we found a great supplier straight off the bat. We wanted to add sustainability as a big part of our product so every curly request we threw at the supplier was possible so the actual development of the product happened within three or four months.

How big is your team?

It is just us and we have employed agency help. It works pretty well as we have got different lanes that we try to figure most of the time.

How was the business funded?

It was started with our savings. From the get-go we knew the product was scalable. Our first order wasn't a crazy amount, I think we ordered 1000 off the bat, which we sold through fairly quickly, it was almost that proof of concept, and the investment wasn't too much for us which enabled us to grow-as-we-go kind of mentality.

What is your focus right now?

We're juggling that scalability. We've prove that the interest is there and that there is demand for it. We're growing fairly fast and trying to figure out where to invest our money back into. E-commerce is a bit of a beast from what we've learnt. We've moved from a DIY philosphy, where we built the website and did all of the branding ourselves, threw our hat in the ring in Google ads and Instagram ads, and what we've learnt pretty quickly is there are experts that do these things for a reason so we are trying to figure out what we should be doing ourselves and what we should get help with.

Jo: With wholesale, we have some beautiful little stores around New Zealand, which has been so cool getting them on board. We've had quite a few stockist randomly from Europe and a couple in Australia that want to stock us but we're just not quite set up for that yet so at the moment we just have 11 New Zealand stockists doted around the country.

Where do you see the business in three to five years' time?

Nikolai: We honestly think that Lofty Kites could be the leading kite brand within the world. Our goal from the get-go was to do one kite and to do it to the best of our ability so we're not really looking to expand our product range as much, we are just looking to expand into different markets.

Lofty Kites has global ambitions to be the world's top kite brand. Photo / Supplied

We've started dipping our toes into the United States and Australian market at the moment, and we'll look to grow that in the next 12 months, as well as dialling in our New Zealand base at the same time. We're starting with Aussie and the US, and we're doing a re-design of our website so that we can easily control selling through those markets. With the recipe that we learn from those markets, we will look to replicate that in Canada and Europe, through e-commerce sales and stockists. At the moment we are trying to get brand awareness in those markets and build out from there. The ultimate would be to find large stockists in those markets that would almost be a one-stop shop for us to distribute through.

Is this your first business?

Jo: This is my first business, but Nikolai has had another when he was at university when he was studying product design.

Nikolai: My experiment with my friend while I was at uni, making furniture, and what I learnt from that moving into this business is that I don't want to be the one making the product as it sucks up all your time to be focusing on other parts of the business.

How many kites have you sold until now?

We have around 7000 kites flying around right now. It started as an outlet for us to go on family holidays every year but that hasn't eventuated as we have seen the potential and reinvesting in the business, hoping that one day we can go on the ultimate family holiday.

Jo: I think the business has done better than expected, and the potential that is there to grow this is really exciting. There's a lot of hard work ahead of us but I truly feel it has the opportunity to take off.

What advice do you give others thinking about starting their own business?

Just do something. Progress over perfection. We spent six months or so um-ing and ah-ing, but just do something and get started.

Ask as many questions of the network you have already got because you;'ll be surprised at how many people have expertise you can draw off.