Auckland cookware company Ironclad takes off in Australia, rakes in $1.1m

Australians are flocking to a niche New Zealand kitchenware brand, so much so that the founders have made more than $1 million so far this year.

Married couple Kate and Levi Slavin and their friend Joe Carter decided to quit their full-time jobs in marketing to risk it all on designing and selling high-quality cast iron pans.

Their aptly-named company Ironclad sells pans with a ‘three generation guarantee’. Indeed, the founders claim it is the longest legally-binding product warranty on earth.

In 2019, they poured $1000 into Ironclad and also obtained a $10,000 overdraft facility. This has so far turned out to be the best investment they’ve made.

In 2022, they made $1.6 million in revenue, and so far this year they have raked in $1.1 million.

But only earlier this year did Mr Slavin quit his job, once he was finally convinced the business had enough legs to stay upright.

“It was the slowest start-up you could ever imagine,” Mr Slavin, 47, told news.com.au from Auckland.

So far, Ironclad has resisted “the temptation to staff up too quickly or get too big too quickly”, which could spell disaster for the budding brand.

The trio said they were inspired to make their own cookware brand after learning that the average teflon, non-stick cooking pan had an average lifespan of two years.

“We were using cast iron in our kitchen that had been handed down at home. I come from a design background, I also worked in hospitality, it made sense to us [to use cast iron],” Ms Slavin, 41, said.

Not wanting to expand too rapidly and ruin the brand, they eased into working on Ironclad.

“We’d seen brands fail,” Mr Slavin said. “We thought we’d build a really strong foundation to gradually move from full-time jobs to this. I was the last to join.”

He finally made the jump in January this year.

The third co-founder, Mr Carter, said that Covid-19 had been a blessing in disguise for the start-up.

“There was one night where we sold 68 of the pans overnight,” he recalled.

“It was devastating for a lot of businesses, but for us, people had a little bit more disposable income and were eating more at home with their family.”

Revenue jumped steadily every year and the website attracted buyers from 14 different countries, including Singapore and some “random islands” nowhere near New Zealand, like Hawaii and the Faroe Islands, part of the kingdom of Denmark.

“We realised quite a large percentage of our sales were coming from Australia. But we weren’t actively marketing in Australia,” Mr Carter said.

So they decided to make a concerted effort to break into the Australian market. Suffice to say, it was a hit.

They launched Ironclad in Australia in April last year and within four months they had landed a wholesale deal with a major kitchen retailer.

“About four months in, Kitchen Warehouse decided to stock us in about 20 of their stores,” Mr Carter explained.

“The Australian brand was outperforming New Zealand (within that period of time) even though we’d been building up the New Zealand presence for 3.5 years.”

They now have plans to open an office in Melbourne next year.

Although their business is based around the idea of only needing to buy their products once, they said 27 per cent of customers returned a second time to gift friends or family.

The cookware company has kicked off an equity crowd-funding round to raise $1.25 million to aid its Australian expansion.

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