High Court hears Zuru’s global nappy business has nearly $1b annual sales

Wednesday, 6 August 2025

“Probably.” Zuru’s Nick Mowbray was a bit vague in his answer to whether he and his brother Mat, the founders of the Zuru consumer goods business, were worth $20 billion.

It was his second attempt to answer the question during a hearing at the High Court in Auckland on Tuesday. The first time he was asked by barrister Sam Lowry, Mowbray had answered: “Potentially.”

But he was clearer about how big Zuru’s global nappy business, launched in 2017, had become.

“We’ve built our business now, I think, to almost a billion dollars in sales this year,” he said.

And it wasn’t just sales. The business was really profitable, Mowbray, New Zealand’s richest man, said.

Lowry is representing Auckland-based JJK, which Zuru and Zuru-owned nappy company Rascals International is suing at the High Court in Auckland for millions of dollars in damages in a case that began on Monday.

Zuru and Rascals claim JJK conspired with a Rascals’ director, and used confidential information from Rascals supplied by that director, to buy and develop the struggling Treasures nappy brand, which Rascals had been trying to buy, setting back Rascals’ expansion into Woolworths’ supermarkets.

After missing out on Treasures, it wasn’t until February 2025 that Zuru had launched its new Millie Moon nappy range into Woolworths supermarkets.

JJK does not deny it was working with Rascals’ director Grant Taylor, but maintains it has done nothing wrong, and is counter-suing Zuru and Rascals. Taylor was also being sued by Rascals and Zuru, but settled that claim for an undisclosed sum before the trial began on Monday.

In his examination of Mowbray on Tuesday, Lowry sought to present the civil suit as a battle of the Goliath Zuru against the David JJK, which he said had had to borrow to fund its defence.

He sought to extract estimates of the Mowbrays’ wealth, from the billionaire, and asked him whether he agreed he was “relentless” in business.

Mowbray agreed he was relentless, and that he didn’t like losing.

Earlier at the Tuesday hearing Lowry had characterised the Zuru suit as “revenge litigation”.

Mowbray had earlier told the court he believed Zuru’s case against JJK was a “slamdunk”.

Mowbray agreed with Lowry’s assertion that he had felt betrayed when he had learned Taylor had tried to buy the Treasures brand in 2020, and then had been in contact with JJK leading up to its purchase of Treasures later in the same year.

During that period, Taylor had been either a director of Rascals, or covered by a non-compete contract after being ejected from Rascals, but he did not reveal his dealings to Mowbray or Rascals.

Mowbray said Taylor had been a long-standing friend. The pair went to high school together at St Peter’s College in Cambridge, and went into business together after a holiday they took together in Bali in 2016 during which Taylor asked for help in developing the Rascals nappy company, which Taylor’s family owned.

Mowbray agreed to help, and in 2017, Zuru invested in Rascals through a specially established company Rascal and Friends NZ. By 2019, it was doing $10 million a year in nappy sales. And in 2020, Zuru bought complete ownership from Taylor and his family, for $30m.

Rascals’ nappies, including under the Millie Moon brand, are now sold in multiple countries including the Australia, the UK, US, China and Canada.

Mowbray told the court he and Taylor had resolved to stay friends after Taylor left his job at Rascals following Mowbray losing confidence in his abilities. But that friendship did not survive Taylor secretly trying to buy the Treasures brand, and then working with JJK.

JJK maintains Taylor worked with it only in a high-level “mentoring” capacity.

On Tuesday, Lowry attempted to demonstrate to the court that individual elements of the information JJK received were not confidential, and had previously been provided to third parties like retailers.

Mowbray resisted that assertion.

He said information provided to retailers was considered to have been shared in confidence. And, he said, Zuru and Rascals had developed a business model that was effective at disrupting big consumer goods brands quickly and profitably in a way that no other Western company had managed.

While some of the elements of the business model were publicly known at a high level, Mowbray said, it was the detail and totality of the elements that constituted the business model. It was those details, and that totality that constituted confidential knowledge.

Taylor had been privy to that information, and took some of it to JJK, which made use of it, Zuru and Rascals maintain.

“We built a model that one Treasures wasn’t doing, and couldn’t work out how to do,” he said.

Mowbray told the court that in the global nappy business, many attempts had been made by companies to break the stranglehold of big brand nappy companies.

They had failed, but already Zuru’s nappy business had reached annual revenue of more than $1b, and it had done it profitably.

Nobody had been able to do anything like that before, Mowbray said.

The hearing on Tuesday also revealed just how tough it had been for many well-known New Zealand nappy brands in the 2017 to 2021 period.

Not only was Treasures in trouble, and Rascals in desperate need of turning profitable, but several other nappy brands were being shopped around to potential buyers.

Mowbray said two nappy brands were offered to Zuru, but it decided against buying either, instead opting to create the Millie Moon brand.

The brands offered to Zuru were Tooshies and Noopii.

The trial continues and is set down to take four weeks.