By Aaron Carpenter, Founder, ACV Consulting

Published: May 25th, 2026.

I just got back from New Zealand after working with Mons Royale on their U.S. growth strategy and speaking with emerging consumer brands navigating global brands' U.S. market entry through New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. The trip had two purposes: working directly with Mons Royale on their U.S. and global growth strategy, and presenting to a group of New Zealand consumer brands through New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), the government body that helps Kiwi companies scale internationally.

I had the honor of presenting to a room of twenty New Zealand business leaders, founders, and marketers looking out over the beautiful bay of Auckland from the top floor of the NZTE Headquarters.

I've worked with enough New Zealand brands at this point to have a real point of view. What I saw on this trip reinforced it. These brands are doing something that many larger, better-resourced companies have genuinely lost the ability to do, and it's worth talking about.

The Thing That Strikes You First

New Zealand is a country of five million people. The domestic market has a ceiling. The brands that want to grow past a certain point have no choice but to think globally. They have to do it without the safety net that most U.S. or European brands take for granted: a deep home market to fund the expansion, a large internal team to execute it, or a parent company to absorb the risk if it doesn't work.

What that forces is a rare kind of clarity and discipline. When your margin for error is small, you make better decisions. You don't spend on channels before you understand them. You don't enter markets before you've done the work. You protect the product and the story because you know that's what you're actually selling — not the marketing budget.

Hannah and Hamish Acland, the wife-husband founders, are a perfect example of this hands-on, do-it-yourself, get-it-done mentality. 

What NZTE Brands Understand About Global Brand US Market Entry

The brands in the room during my NZTE presentation were at different stages of growth, some just beginning to explore the U.S., others already operating here with varying degrees of traction. What the successful ones had in common wasn't budget or team size. It was a specific and defensible answer to the question: why does this brand belong in the U.S. market, and for whom?

The U.S. is not one consumer. It's a fragmented collection of markets, each with its own retail ecosystem, media landscape, and cultural reference points. The brands that arrive with a clear, narrow target, a specific kind of outdoor enthusiast, a specific retail channel, a specific coastal market to prove the concept before expanding, consistently outperform the ones that try to be everything to everyone from day one.

The conversation I kept having with brand after brand in New Zealand was the same: slow down on the spend and get the infrastructure right first. Your Meta and Google account structures were built for New Zealand audiences. Your product catalog copy doesn't speak to how U.S. consumers search. Your site experience isn't optimized for U.S. intent signals. Fix those things before you turn on paid growth, because every dollar you spend before that's in place is working at a fraction of its potential.

For brands preparing for international expansion, ACV’s fractional CMO services help align market positioning, infrastructure, and growth strategy before scaling spend.

Mons Royale: What Working With Them Looks Like Up Close

Mons Royale is the brand I was in New Zealand to work with directly, and spending time with the team there added a layer to my understanding of what makes them work.

On paper, the Mons story is compelling: husband-and-wife founders, B Corp-certified, built around merino wool and a genuine circular-economy vision, beloved in the outdoor community. What you get when you meet the team in person is that none of that is brand “positioning”; it's genuine and structural. The values show up in how the team makes decisions, how they talk about the product, and what they're willing to say no to in the service of protecting the long-term health of their brand.

From the first day I arrived in Wanaka to work with the founders and the Mons Royale team, I felt the authenticity. A dedicated group of people, working from the bottom of the globe, in a beautiful outdoor town, spreading the gospel of transitioning outdoor enthusiasts from petroleum-based gear to natural fabrics like Merino. They live the outdoor life every day; mountain biking, skiing, hiking, enjoying each other, and the spectacular natural setting that is their day-to-day.

The U.S. market opportunity for Mons is real and significant. So is the challenge. The outdoor performance category is crowded with well-resourced incumbents. The brands that break through don't do it by outspending. They do it by out-storying. Mons has the story. The work is building the infrastructure and the market access to export that narrative.

What Global Brand US Market Entry Actually Requires

The single clearest thing I took away from this trip is something I already believed but now feel more concretely: the brands most worth working with are the ones building something they actually believe in.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it's rare. Most brand conversations at scale are about metrics, market share, and competitive positioning. The Mons conversations, and a lot of the NZTE conversations, were about the product, the material, the community, and the long-term vision. The commercial ambition is real (these brands want to grow, and they need to grow), but the foundation is something more durable than a revenue target.

That's the kind of brand-building that holds up under pressure. And pressure is exactly what the U.S. market applies.

If you're a New Zealand brand thinking about expanding to the U.S., or a U.S. brand curious about what the Kiwi approach to growth looks like up close, please get in touch. I would genuinely enjoy the conversation.

Aaron Carpenter is the Founder of ACV Consulting, a fractional CMO firm that works with consumer and DTC brands. ACV has an active partnership with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. → acvconsulting.com