Mat Mowbray
Co-Founder, Zuru
Mat Mowbray is a New Zealand entrepreneur and engineer, and one of the richest people in New Zealand. With his brother Nick and sister Anna he co-founded Zuru, the toy and consumer-goods maker that grew from a farm shed in the Waikato into a global manufacturing empire.
From a Waikato farm to Guangzhou
Raised on a dairy farm near Cambridge in the Waikato, Mat and his younger brother Nick left New Zealand as teenagers in the early 2000s and set up in Guangzhou, China, learning the toy trade from the factory floor up. Mat had walked away from an engineering degree to chase the venture, and it was his mechanical bent that shaped what Zuru became.
Anna joined soon after to run operations, and the three siblings built the business together, with Nick selling, Anna managing and Mat engineering.
The engineer behind the product
Mat is the research and development mind of the family. He designed Zuru's early injection-moulding tooling himself and has spent most of two decades running product design and manufacturing automation. The approach paid off spectacularly with Bunch O Balloons, the self-sealing water-balloon kit that became one of the best-selling toys in the world and turned Zuru into a household name.
Beyond toys
Zuru has since expanded far past toys into consumer goods, with brands like Rascal + Friends nappies, Monday Haircare and Dose and Co, and into robotics through Zuru Tech, which is developing automated systems for building houses. Mat now leads much of that technology and robotics work. Together the venture has made the Mowbrays one of New Zealand's wealthiest families, a fortune Forbes has tracked into the billions, with Mat and his brother Nick sharing the top of the national rich list.
About this profile
This profile was researched and written by Noteworthy using publicly available sources. If something here is out of date or incorrect, let us know and we’ll review it.
