Part 2: How to Fund Your NZ Product Brand - Without VC

Venture capital rarely backs consumer brands—so how do you fund inventory, launch costs, and growth? This part explains NZ-specific funding options founders actually use.

The Working Capital Challenge

• One of key challenge for consumer products is the cash tied up for a number of months in advance of being paid as you need to procure key ingredients, packaging and pay for manufacture, warehousing and shipping costs all in advance of getting paid
• Think about creative ways you can scale to manage the capital requirements eg small batch production, pilot stores, start with a mix of DTC and retail

Debt vs Equity — Which to Use and When

• Use Debt when you have reliable cashflow and you want to maintain full ownership
• Debt watch outs: personal guarantees can be required, regular payments can be challenging in early stages, limited availability pre-revenue/early-stage
• Use Equity when you’re pre-revenue or scaling fast, can’t support loan repayments yet, want strategic value beyond money, willing to share ownership/control
• Equity watch outs: potential loss of control, value/goal misalignment, setting value too high or low