First Dunedin, next step, the lucrative American market for a pair of entrepreneurial former Scarfies.

The Flatpack Co founders Angus Syme, 23, and Cam Leigh, 22, have just made a whirlwind trip around New Zealand’s campuses visiting first-year students.

That market – young people set to go flatting next year – is the company’s bread and butter. The Flatpack Co specialises in boxed mattresses and frames and a guarantee of delivery on the first day a student moves into their new flat.

And it has worked, with the pair selling and delivering some 3000 beds over the last couple of years. In February, Stuff reported that The Flatpack Co was set to turn over its first million dollars.

“We blew it out of the water ... we’ve had a fantastic year,” Syme said.

That success meant the pair are now looking to expand to the United States.

Syme said their business model was about getting in front of students the entire year, and getting them to pre-order their bed before they finished the year, “so they can go away for summer and not worry about it” – meaning that by the time other companies tried to target returning students, they were already committed to The FlatPack Co.

It was during their first year at the University of Otago that the pair came up with the idea to supply beds to fellow students, putting in $5000 a piece to buy 30 second-hand beds from graduating students and re-selling them to their mates.

“There is a culture, in Dunedin especially, to buy a bed from us.’’

Of the 4000-odd first-year students at Otago university, the company sold beds to 550 of them last year, and this year is on track to sell between 800 and 900 to them.

The success of their Dunedin-born idea is a key part of their American drive, as the New Zealand student city has been their strongest market.

To replicate that in the United States, the pair researched similar “college towns”, contacting students over social media about their universities – often three times the size of those in New Zealand.

Many of those were in the Midwestern US, with the pair also looking for college towns made up of mainly houses as opposed to apartment complexes with already furnished accommodation.

Syme and Leigh will visit mattress wholesalers in the US next month, later heading to some of those colleges to employ teams of students.

And if all goes well, the pair plan to return to the US in January “on a one-way ticket”.

“We are all guns blazing, ready to rip, s... and bust.”

The pair will start in Kansas, before concentrating on college towns in other states including Indiana, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Nebraska, Alabama and Arizona.

“The plan is we will be in 25 universities in five years,” Syme said. “The goal is to immerse ourselves in the college.”

Despite their aspirations for America, New Zealand remained an important market, they said, with the pair looking at employing a “hot-shot grad” to become the manager.

Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/