New Billionaire Family: Zuru

Three Kiwi siblings got rich off cheap toys. Plus: The Top-Earning Athletes

Nick Mowbray is working from home, a 12-bedroom mansion in Coatesville, New Zealand. It’s the former abode of cyber-renegade Kim Dotcom, and it’s here that Dotcom was arrested by heavily armed police in 2012. Life is quieter for Mowbray,

34, and the spring sun is shining brilliantly on his 2,000-bottle-a-year vineyard as he explains what affords him this lifestyle: a rapidly growing toy company called Zuru that he runs with his siblings Mat, 38, and Anna, 36.

“My philosophy is always work with scale,” he says, strolling the library of the 48,000-square-foot estate, which boasts a hedge maze and an indoor lap pool.

Zuru, which the Mowbrays founded in 2003, specializes in making cheap toys, like Bunch O Balloons, a gadget that lets users fill 100 water balloons in 60 seconds. The company is based in Hong Kong, where Mat and Anna live—and which provides Zuru access to low tax rates. They have invested heavily in automation to further save on costs.

Today Zuru sells its playthings in 120 countries and generates more than $300 million in annual sales. The company has no debt, and it has never taken outside funding, save for an initial $20,000 loan from the siblings’ parents, an engineer and a teacher. The trio owns the entire business, and it’s worth more than $1 billion. “Being Kiwis, we’re quite humble. But it’s definitely been an amazing journey,” says Anna, who serves as chief operating officer. (Nick and Mat are co-CEOs.)

Zuru began as a pet project. When he was 12, Mat designed a model hot-air balloon kit. He and Nick peddled the kits door-to-door, and in 2003, when Nick was 18, they moved to China to turn the

hobby into a real business.

“The first night, we slept in the bushes outside Hong Kong airport,” Nick recalls. From there the brothers rented an eighth-story walkup in the city of Shantou for $20 a month. Anna joined them roughly a year later.

The Mowbrays started out distributing existing products, like a helicopter-shaped boomerang. They eventually made their own toys, such as Bunch O Balloons, and knocked off established brands like Nerf’s dart blasters.

Over time, the Mowbrays pushed their way into every major U.S. retailer, including Walmart, Target and CVS. “We basically bootstrapped all the way up,” Nick says. “It’s kind of unheard of.”