MONIQUE FORD/The Post
Ben Kepes says he has had a peripatetic career.
Taking on the supermarket duopoly will require a new player with a lot of financial backing, the former chair of failed online grocery retailer Supie says.
Supie went into liquidation last month owing more than $2.1 million to creditors.
While an anonymous donor paid wages owed to many former Supie employees, 89 of the 122 staff were still owed $120,797 in outstanding wages and holiday pay. Employees did not receive redundancy pay.
Former board chair Ben Kepes said he had become involved with Supie because its founder, Sarah Balle, was “exceptional”.
“She is incredibly hard-working, dedicated and committed, all those things,” he said.
“In all this stuff post Supie’s demise, there has been a lot of criticism. Mistakes do happen all the time and I’m not saying nothing happened that was wrong but she did an incredible job.
“Where she got to was phenomenal given the situation, the duopoly and how much money we raised. Being involved in that was awesome. I feel incredibly privileged that she asked me to invest, join the board and asked me to chair.”
Kepes said the outcome was tragic.
“It has been really upsetting, the commentary from armchair critics.”
The experience had proved to him that anyone trying to compete with the supermarkets by raising small amounts of money and through incremental organic growth would struggle.
But a business such as The Warehouse, or a big private equity firm or international player with $100 million to spend would be in a different position, he said.
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The online grocer’s 120 employees were told it went into voluntary administration this morning.
“They absolutely can get to scale but it’s not going to come from a start-up.”
New Zealanders might need to do their bit to encourage competition too, he said.
“I’m not blaming for a moment consumers for Supie’s demise – the interesting thing is that if people want competition, people need to support competitors. We’re keen in New Zealand to comment that there isn’t enough competition or stuff doesn’t happen but at the same time we don’t vote with our wallets and that’s on us. We’re used to going to the supermarket. If it’s a bit harder to support a competitor online, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to actually put ourselves out.”
Kepes is a professional director who sits on a number of other boards including Kordia, UniMed, Pegasus Health and Corde.
He founded Cactus Outdoor about 30 years ago and is also known for his technology commentary and consulting work.
Kepes said the environment for start-up businesses had changed a lot over the time he had been in business.
“It’s hilarious when I go and talk to young people, entrepreneurs… there’s this thing about startups and funding and pitching and hustle.
“We were just some random guys who didn’t really want real jobs and liked hanging out in the outdoors and wanted to make gear we and our mates would be into.
“There’s been this change, and the cult of entrepreneurship – it’s kind of bizarre because it’s now no longer about doing something you’re passionate about, it’s about engineering a business… it’s all very transactional, super-fast. Build something, sell it three years later for lots of money, rinse and repeat. I’m not against that but it doesn’t feel particularly satisfying or legacy-building.”
Cactus is the “last man stranding” when it comes to manufacturing of its type in New Zealand, he says, and a conversation is needed about what support could be given to the sector.
Cactus makes uniforms for the army and police.
Kepes said, on a purely cost basis, it might make more sense to do this overseas. “If you look at the social, environmental impacts, the carbon story, the much more holistic picture, keeping people gainfully employed, it’s more complex than that.”
He said it was easy for people to blame “the man or woman” for organisations like Shein or Temu dominating the landscape and pushing smaller players out, but it was up to people to make a change.
“You can blame corporations, the government or whoever but they are all an aggregate or an abstraction for us a society. We need to take a long, hard look at the decisions we make as individual consumers because they inform the decisions that your leaders make.”
SUPPLIED
Cactus Outdoor is the ‘last man standing’ for apparel in this country.
Legacy is a focus for Kepes. His two sons now work in the Cactus business.
“I’m incredibly proud that my boys are passionate about this thing.”
Like him, his sons have followed a career of doing rather than studying, which Kepes thinks will become more and more the norm over time.
“This idea of going to university to do accounting such that you can work for 30 years and become partner is not going to be the case. Partly because AI is going to decimate that industry but the progression and long-term employment in one vocation isn’t going to exist. I would never be so arrogant to think there’s any takeaways anyone can take from my journey but if there’s anything it’s just try stuff.
“My sons are 21 and 23 and haven’t studied – they grew up with me talking every day about business but they are significantly better businessmen than I ever was at a much younger age, just from doing stuff. They both had little businesses at school and other businesses on the side. The reason they have such hustle is that they’ve just hustled, they didn’t go to uni to learn a theory about how to do business, they just do business.”
He says he tries to focus on how he might leave things in a better place, when he is in his other roles, too.
A lot of the same problems pop up across the organisations he’s involved in – whether that is finding staff in recent years or the looming prospect of AI.
In ten years’ time, he says, we may not recognise the world. “So many roles will be completely decimated – professional services, engineering, law, accounting, some levels of journalism. A lot of people talk about AI and say that if everything is going to change, there’ll be no need for people any more.
“But I still believe in heart and even if we can simulate every possible human sense there’s still something about being human…Humans will go on, as humans do. The human condition. But what humans do day to day will change.”
For now, Kepes says, one of the biggest challenges is the economic environment. Cactus has opened a new shop in Auckland and Queenstown but the economic climate is “dire”. “Things are super tough. We’re a business with no debt and we’re completely self-funded which means you don’t get big growth you would otherwise but we’re quite stable and secure. We are doing okay but what I hear from around the industry is that things are really, really grim.”
He said it was likely to get worse. “We haven’t seen the start of it yet. There are still significant numbers of people on fixed mortgages going to come off. There is going to be some carnage out there.”
