If sheep are our national joke then young entrepreneur Jeremy Moon is having the last laugh.
Moon is behind Icebreaker - the Queenstown clothing brand that's made wool cool, again.
Icebreaker is sold in more than 1,000 stores in 17 countries and Moon has been invited to speak next month at the prestigious Harvard Business School.
Entrepreneurial management students will analyse Icebreaker's business model - the first time a New Zealand company has been used by the school as a case study.
America's top outdoor retailers recently travelled to Queenstown to visit the Icebreaker "factory" - the ruggedly beautiful high country where merino sheep thrive. And retailers like Jay Michael Brown from Colorado want a bigger slice of the action.
"We get calls from Hollywood now because we have one of the best selections of Icebreaker in the US," says Brown.
The Icebreaker recipe for success combines kiwi innovation and stylish modern design mixed with marketing genius.
Moon says most wool is ideal for carpets but not against the skin. But he says the the mighty merino's super-fine fibre is perfect.
Icebreaker took the wool and spun, knitted and weaved it into one of NZ's great business success stories of the past decade. The company has just had its10th birthday, employs people all over the world and is a far cry from the one-man business Jeremy Moon started in 1995.
"This year we will have more than half a million customers globally," Moon told Sunday.
The story of Icebreaker really began when Moon was 24-years-old. Fresh out of university and armed with a marketing degree, merino farmer Brian Brackenridge showed him his underpants (long johns).
"I didn't quite know what to expect. But when you touch them, they're wool but they feel so beautifully soft, like silk, and you can throw them in the washing machine. Suddenly here was a new idea. Everything in the outdoor market was made of plastic. So I thought if we could crack this, we're onto something big," says Moon.
Moon mortgaged his house, bought half of Brackenridge's company and set off with a battered old suitcase to peddle his wares.
New Zealand adventurer the late Sir Peter Blake took a pair of Icebreaker underpants on the ultimate road test - the sea - wearing the same pair of long johns for 43 days and 43 nights in the Jules Verne Challenge.
"It was incredibly generous of him because here I was someone with no credibility in the outdoors business...a product that was untested, and here Peter came out and said he didn't take it off for 43 days and it was the best thing he's ever worn, so without that critical ingredient it would have been almost impossible."
Moon soon learned that pure NZ merino wasn't enough and he needed quality control. So he took another punt and signed farmers to contracts to grow merino fibre just for Icebreaker. They would be paid an agreed price for an agreed quality.
"It's a bit like wine, but because it's from Bordeaux it doesn't mean it's great. You can have Chateaux Petrus at $1500 a bottle and also you can have chateau rot-gut and get change from $3.50."
The first contract for just 700 kilograms was for four bales of wool delivered on the back of a ute in 1997. Icebreaker now controls more than a quarter of NZ's fine merino clip.
"We've just signed contracts for 2006-2008...about two and a half thousand tonnes roughly of pure merino, so that is quite a big chunk of the clip, worth about $30 million.
It's the largest merino contract in the world and for many it has economically rescued the high country. Nokomai Station has more merino than any other station in New Zealand. Covering about 38,000 hectares - an area twice the size of Auckland city - it produces about 20 tonnes of pure merino fibre every year.
Rob and Linda Butson, the owners of Mount Nicholas Station on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, were among the first suppliers of merino fibre to Icebreaker.
"He [Moon] looked a bit dreamy with his battered old suitcase, had a bit of a talk to him and he was pretty hooked on this merino fibre, and when we got home from the conference I said forget about him, he's not much use to us - looks like a dreamer to me," says Rob.
But Rob now says Moon has been their saviour.
"If you took contracts out of the system, it's probably as bad as it's ever been. I think in real terms, merino wool is as low as it's ever been," says Rob.
Icebreaker has a huge focus on marketing and had the brand before the product. When Moon heard about Shrek - the daggy old merino wandering about in the bush who became world famous - he seized on the opportunity.
After footage of the recently shorn Shrek wearing an Icebreaker jumper went global the website went ballistic and icebreaker.com got a million hits the next day.
"We started getting emails from front pages in Switzerland and the US and all through Europe," says Moon.
He says they have turned down some pretty big chains in the US "not because we don't want to do business with them, but because we want to do it when the time is right and when the strategy has been built."
He believes it is a mistake to try to scale a brand too quickly and either not be ready for it and disappoint people, or burn the people who are the core partners.
Icebreaker doesn't want to be a fashion flash-in-the-pan, it is a company with a 100 year vision which should far outlive the natural life of its youthful founder.
