As a company, we’re on a mission to raise the next generation of mountain bikers.

And although we’re based in beautiful New Zealand, and love it – most of the mountain bike families we want to help are off-shore. In fact, only 5% of our customers are down under, which means that achieving our mission means getting serious about the bigger markets.

Like the US of A.

And recently, we’ve taken another step towards growing our USA customer base, thanks to New Zealand Trade & Enterprise.

If you’ve never heard of New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE), they’re the New Zealand government's international business development agency, and they focus on helping kiwi export businesses grow bigger, better and faster. 

Anyway, we’ve been working with NZTE for a while now, and they’ve helped us with many of the challenges we face as a fast growing export business. Things like strategy, counterfeits, logistics, recruitment, planning. The works. They have been epic!

And now, we’re pleased to announce their co-investment into our US market growth, thanks to their Investment Growth Fund (IGF) programme. 

The IGF with NZTE (enough acronyms yet?) provides us with up to $600k of co-investment over the next 3 years, all targeted at growing our business in North America. 

Receiving the IGF is a big milestone for us, but it hasn’t been without hard work. It’s been a 6 month process led by our co-founder Tom and our financial controller Celia, who have worked to prove the direct economic impact on New Zealand as a result of growing our business off-shore.

But now, with the IGF under our belt, we can put our foot firmly down on our USA growth plans.

We’ve already hired Lauren DiMartino, our US market lead. And she’s already busy doing things that we simply couldn’t do from New Zealand right now, like attending bike specific trade-shows like CABDA Chicago, or building deeper relationships with our distributor and network of retailers, including the likes of REI Co-Op. 

A massive thanks to Celia from our team, and Dave Cotter from NZTE who has supported us through the process of successfully completing our IGF submission. And a special thanks to our distributors, retailers, customers and team for their support to date.

https://kidsrideshotgun.co.nz/