Konei founder: Economic development cuts will make outcomes worse for community

Manawa Udy has used her skills in community development to empower fellow Māori and Pasifika business owners to thrive in business. After bringing small business owners together in 2018, she launched e-commerce site Konei in
2020 to help the community continue working through the pandemic.

However, she says Auckland Council’s potential cuts to economic development funding could make business opportunities even harder to access.

What is Konei?

We’re a marketplace providing authentic, quality Māori and Pacific products to Aotearoa and the world. We collaborate with brand owners across Aotearoa to help enhance and maximise their businesses. It’s a community and a space for small business owners to grow their capabilities as business owners and to work together towards common goals.

We have close to 50 different brands that sell with us from all over Aotearoa and a few based in Australia that are Māori-owned. We work with a lot of smaller businesses that might not be ready to stand up on their own or who see the value in collaborating with a group of entrepreneurs.

We make our own products where we collaborate with different business owners. We launched a product called Kāri Māori which are Māori playing cards. Those have been a big hit – we sell them wholesale to different art galleries and other businesses around New Zealand.

When did you start Konei and why did you choose this kaupapa?

Kōnei was launched in 2020, the first year of Covid.

The broader mahi that we do in South Auckland is to support the growth and development of Māori and Pacific creators, innovators and entrepreneurs. We started in 2018 and in the two years prior to launching Konei, we connected with a lot of small business owners and who had products they wanted to sell.

We started doing pop-up shops every Christmas as a way for our brand owners to build their confidence and get their products out to the market.

Then when Covid hit and we couldn’t do much mahi, we decided to finally take what we were doing and put it online.

We had already been working with 20 to 30 different brands at that stage, so we decided to create a marketplace. There was a good appetite at that stage for shopping local and for curating that experience to make it easier for people.

In 2021, we launched in Australia as well. We have a base on the Gold Coast as well as one in Manukau. That was to help get our brands in Aotearoa into exporting and to have a better distribution channel for our customers in Australia.

What is your background and why did you get into business?

My background is in photography – I’m a visual storyteller but I’ve done a lot of work in community development.

Business and e-commerce can help communities improve their socioeconomic status, help get more money in the door, help them use the skills and resources they have to build a better future and achieve what they want to achieve.

What feedback have you had from your community?

Honestly the people that shop with us just love it. They love the fact that it’s easy, whether we are doing it online or when we do pop-up shops. Last year, when it was the first Matariki public holiday, we ran a kaupapa called the Top 50 Māori Products.

To be able to put that kaupapa on and to celebrate the growth and the achievements of our Māori people in e-commerce was amazing. We still have people who are proud to be chosen as our top 50, so I think it’s really enhancing the mana of our people within e-commerce and brand building, which is not an easy pathway.

What issues have you had in your supply chain?

Supply in and of itself is just tighter now. You can’t always expect to get what you want. Things are often sold out or there are months-long waits for some products.

Luckily the products we create are all manufactured in Aotearoa, but some of the brands who sell through us have some challenges to keep their stock levels up.

When we launched in Australia, shipping was a real mission. Shipping rates had gone way up and the shipping times were twice as long. We don’t ship bulk anymore, we send smaller packages over. It’s a bit expensive, but it’s fast.

Shipping is the biggest challenge for e-commerce and so trying to go international from New Zealand is quite hard unless you go for a model where you sell on Amazon, for example. Then you can hold your stock in China or America and they’ll ship it for you from there.

But if you’re trying to do it straight from Aotearoa, it’s just so f*****g expensive because we are so far away. It takes forever and we don’t have the size of supply to make us a high priority for shipping.

What can be done from a Government-level to support Māori- and Pasifika-owned businesses?

From my perspective, the things we’re always looking at and trying to fight are barriers our people face to succeed in business.

That can be capital to get yourself off the ground and grow your business. Quite often our people lack the capital and those resources that allow you to jump to that next stage. If you don’t have money, it’s so much harder to grow.

Even trying to get a loan is super hard.

Governments can make more resources available to our people so they can get ahead and can live a life that’s not dependent on others.

People who are successful have capital to begin with, so of course they’re going to be able to scale their business faster and crack into new markets, whereas we’re just trying to f*****g pay the bills.

What advice do you have for people looking to get into business?

It’s a really exciting pathway and it’s challenging as, but it’s really rewarding. I honestly feel like everyone should give it a crack at some stage in their life because of the things you learn about yourself and others.

If it’s something you’re interested in, get connected with a mentor or a group of people. The journey can be quite lonely. There’s a lot of shit you need to learn. There’s language that you might not understand.

There are heaps of networks and communities out there that you could be a part of. We run a programme called Tukua which is all about supporting business owners – from how to set up your business, right through to managing a business 10 years in.

What do you want to see in the Māori business space in the future?

I just want to see Māori cracking it in all the different sectors. I want to see our people owning big businesses that make a big impact in a meaningful way for our environment, for our whānau, for our communities.

I’d love to see our Māori approach to hauora (health and wellbeing) come through strongly in the business world.

It’s not about greed, making the most money or selling a business off the fastest, but how we can use business to provide for ourselves and our families, and to heal our land.

Wayne Brown decided he wanted to cut support for economic development in Auckland, which means the initiatives we are running in South Auckland to help our people are also going to get cut.

It’s important that we continue to invest in small businesses and environments where our people can thrive, where Māori and Pacific people can come together to work on their businesses together. It’s important that there’s funding and professional support because if we don’t invest in that, it’s not going to grow. It’s not going to get any better. If anything, it’ll get worse.