Transcript – Opito Bay Salt: Fresh packaging sparks a sea change

[Text on screen: ANZ logo]

[Video: Scenes throughout of Opito Bay Salt’s owners Erin and Perry, their artisan sea salt, and their premises in Coromandel. Text on screen that’s similar to what’s being said is not described in this transcript.]

Perry: We want to take our sea salt to the world.

Erin: But we need help.

[Text on screen: Erin and Perry, Opito Bay Salt, ANZ Business Customer]

Perry: Hi, I'm Perry

Erin: And I'm Erin and we are salt farmers on the beautiful Opito Bay.

Erin: So, on a road trip with some friends, I found some artisan sea salt and I brought some back as a present for Perry. And after a bottle of red wine, we decided, wouldn't it be great if we could make sea salt in Opito Bay?

From the very beginning we've kind of bootstrapped the business. What we wanted to be able to do was take our business to the next level. One thing that we identified as a really good channel will be in export.  And what we needed to have is better packaging to be able to meet that channel of demand.

[Text on screen: Challenge: Didn’t stand out on the shelves]

[Video: Perry shows the original packs, all in brown packaging with black text. The names of the different flavours are in small print. For example, it’s hard to tell black garlic sea salt from red chilli sea salt.]

Perry: The challenge is when we put more than one of these packs together on a shelf, it becomes brown and brown.

It's hard to pick out the flavours of the different salts.  And so once we put three on the shelf or four on the shelf, they look very samey.  And so it's great from a block colour point of view but it's really bad in terms of distinguishing flavour. And we need to fix that.

My main Main objective for Opito Bay Salt Company, when we started the ANZ Business Boost programme, was to recraft our packaging and our design to get rid of the sea of brown.

[Text on screen: Step 1: Redesign the sea of brown packaging]

Perry: So the kraft [eco-friendly brown paper] artisan looks to our brand and our packaging is kind of essential to who we are.

Okay whether it's the recycled paper nature and we wanted to retain that through the design process, but it created challenges in terms of how do we print on kraft packaging.

[Text on screen: Step #2: Onboard a specialty designer]

Perry: To overcome that challenge, what we did, we engaged a designer that had experience printing and designing on kraft packaging.

And it allowed us to do some mock ups and some tests in terms of the packaging so the end result was the premium packaging that we now have.

[Video: Perry shows the new packs. The brown kraft paper now has colour washes and illustrations to match each flavour and bigger text for the flavour names. For example, natural sea salt has a blue colour wash with seaweed illustrations.]

[Text on screen: Win #1: New packaging is popping on shelves]

Perry: On the retail shelves, the packaging is doing exactly what we want it to do. It's popping on shelf and customers really can see what the different flavours are, rather than that sea of brown that we had previously.

[Text on screen: Win #2: Turbo charged our business plan]

Perry: The ANZ Business Boost has turbo charged up our overall business plans. So we would possibly be waiting another 18 months to 2 years before we got to the point where we are now.

And that has opened up other horizons such as exporting and new product ranges. This new packaging, which is fit for purpose both for the New Zealand market, domestic market and the international market absolutely means that we can escalate and drive forward our plans.

Erin: So I think the first bit of advice we would have is, have a really good business plan and proof test it.  Make sure that it's really solid and then make sure you're adaptable and flexible because things come across and you got to be able to change for the times and move in a different path, not the way that you thought it was going to go.

With the help of the ANZ Business Boost programme, we hope to be exporting much more of our product, maybe up to 50% over the next two to five years and bringing our beautiful sea salt to the world.

[Video: ANZ and Visa logos.]

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