Nudi Point natural skincare ships from a Takahue cowshed to around 50 stores across New Zealand

In a quiet patch of the Takahue Valley south of Kaitaia, a converted cowshed has become the production line for one of the Far North’s quieter business success stories. Nudi Point, founded by former banker and music teacher Blair Coates, has spent more than a decade turning out natural serums and balms in the back paddock of his family’s farm, and now supplies a network of around 50 stockists around the country.

Coates returned to his parents’ land more than ten years ago and drew on his earlier training as an aromatherapist to launch the brand in 2015. The name comes from a swimming hole behind the property, christened by his parents on a hot summer day in the early 1990s when they dropped their clothes for a swim.

“My number one criteria for the range was that it was 100 percent natural,” Coates told RNZ’s Country Life programme during a recent visit to the converted shed.

The shed itself sums up a lot about New Zealand small business. Where his family once milked cows, Coates and his husband Josh now mix and bottle essential oil based products in a sanitised lab, with his mother Jill helping in the office. The team is tiny, the property is rural, and the products move out by courier to retailers as far away as Wellington and the South Island.

The flagship product, the Facially Yours serum, won Best in Anti-Ageing at Verve Magazine’s Best in Beauty 2025 awards. According to the brand, it combines vitamin C, rosehip oil, argan oil, vitamin E and botanical extracts, and Coates says it has been the bestseller every year since launch.

“I think a lot of companies try to make multiple products and I wanted to be authentic and do it with integrity and put all the good things in one bottle,” Coates told the New Zealand Herald.

The story of Nudi Point reads like a familiar Northland arc, born of a teenager’s struggle with skin and a graduate’s choice to come home rather than chase city work. Coates has been open about the bullying and lost school days he went through as a teenager dealing with severe acne, and about how that pushed him into aromatherapy. The link between teenage misery and a small skincare brand on the family farm is direct, and personal.

The business is built on the idea that customers will pay a little more for products made by someone they can almost meet in person. Stockists are independent gift stores, day spas, pharmacies and lifestyle retailers, with online sales picking up the slack as bricks-and-mortar shops feel the pinch. Coates told RNZ that retail closures during the cost-of-living squeeze have pushed Nudi Point to lean harder on its own website. He has also spoken about hitting the road to meet potential new stockists and dropping promotional pamphlets along the way.

“We like to think that a little bit of Nudi Point magic goes in every little product,” Coates told RNZ.

For the Far North, Nudi Point sits inside a wider conversation about what rural New Zealand can look like when dairy prices wobble or when a family decides not to sell the back block. Takahue is a quiet inland valley, sheep and cattle country with a small school and one main road. A natural skincare brand competing nationally from a former cowshed is, on the face of it, an unlikely line of business, and that is part of why customers keep coming back.

Coates-Kitchen, as he is now formally known after marriage to husband Josh, has called 2025 the toughest year the company has had, with growth flat after a long run of consistent annual lifts. He credits the brand surviving in part to keeping the team small and the overheads close to zero, with no warehouse, no office in town, and family members covering most roles.

The brand has also leaned heavily on storytelling. Customers who buy a serum at a shop in Auckland or a pharmacy in the Bay of Plenty often end up reading about a converted cowshed and a swimming hole and a young man who came home. That narrative, more than any clever advertising, is what turns a bottle of serum into something a customer comes back for.

Whether Nudi Point grows from here or stays a deliberately small operation, it is a useful reminder that some of the country’s most New Zealand businesses are not on a high street but down a gravel road, on land a family has farmed for a generation, in a building that used to hold cows.

What do you think of small natural brands like Nudi Point, and have you bought a product made on a New Zealand family farm? Tell us in the comments below.