The true story behind New Zealand’s emporium empire (2024)

Before $2 shops and Temu, there were Arthur’s, Geoff’s and Pete’s Emporiums – and that was only the beginning. As these local institutions mark their biggest day of the year, Gabi Lardies delves into their shared history.

There are buttons in tubes arranged by colour and to be sold one-by-one for 20 cents or so; millions of plastic soft toy and googly eyes; rolls and rolls of fabric – bright red vinyl, pink fur, sage linen, island-style patterned cotton, peach-coloured micro-mesh; jumbled cards of elaborate trims; ribbons; webbing; lace and bias tape; tubes of paint; stacks of canvases; teddy bear talcum powder; hard plastic miniature toys; a box of sewing patterns that look decidedly out of the 1980s; butterfly hair clips and stickers; fridge magnets; toilet plungers; chain by the metre; dress-ups; and any number of other craft or household items you didn’t know you wanted. This is Geoff’s Emporium, my local since before I was born, and it’s perfect for Halloween but also perfect for every other day of the year. But why is it called an emporium? And who is Geoff? While we’re at it, who are Ike, Arthur, David, Pete, AJ and Tom, and why do they also have emporiums?

Our nation’s emporia (or emporiums – either plural form is accepted by all the major dictionaries), scattered throughout the country, are local institutions, and have been for decades. This is the story of how a handful of mates, brothers and sons, many from Cambridge, left their day jobs to sell us almost anything, at really good prices.

The beginning

“Ah, well you’ve called the original,” says Toby Brasting, son of Arthur of Arthur’s Emporium. He’s at Arthur’s in Whangārei, the single-storey red building surrounded by murals on Clyde Street. The shop’s tagline, under the chunky font of its name and above the front doors, is “We’re little, we’re local, we care!” This week and last, the entrance has been guarded by six-foot-tall “robotic things” who say “spooky things” to customers as they walk in. These animatronic ghouls are part of the emporium’s Halloween range, which makes the two weeks leading up to today the shop’s busiest weeks of the year. But the range of creepy costumes and cursed house decor aren’t the reason that Arthur’s Emporium is beloved. That would be Arthur’s personality, which is said to be perfectly reflected in the eclectic collection of stock: craft supplies, fabric, fishing gear, American hardware. Just about the only thing you won’t find in Arthur’s emporium is an electronic till. Barcodes are no use here.

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When Arthur’s Emporium opened in Whangārei in 1978, it set off a ripple effect. Two years later Geoff’s Emporium opened in Auckland, and David’s Emporium followed swiftly in Hamilton. More emporiums followed. Ike’s in Brown’s Bay on Auckland’s North Shore in 1983, AJ’s in Rotorua in 1998, Pete’s in Porirua in 2008, and Tom’s in Christchurch in 2017. There have even been second emporiums for some – Arthur had another in Manukau for a while, Ike had a second in Devonport, AJ had another in Tauranga, and today there are still two Geoff’s and two David’s emporia.

Almost 50 years ago Arthur “hummed and haa-ed” about the name of his shop, says Toby. He almost called it The House of Flaws until his wife, Jen, thought of an emporium. “The word in the dictionary sums it up perfectly,” says Toby: a large shop that sells many different types of goods. It’s lucky that he settled on a name so versatile because within a year of opening, “Dad was getting so much stuff, he talked his mate in Auckland and another one in Hamilton into opening up [shops] so that they could handle all the stock they were getting.” These mates were Geoff Lamb and David Lloyd, of Geoff’s Emporium and David’s Emporium. Arthur and Geoff have died, but David is still around, a busy retiree.

In the early 1970s, David, then a primary teacher at Cambridge East School, remembers the father of two of his students “boldly announcing” that his family would be in charge of the hot dog stand at the school gala, but they needed three-phase power in the library, which a friend on the power board would hook up for them. That friend was Arthur, and he and David became friends. “I admired Arthur very much for being able to cut through red tape,” says David. Arthur was “a bloody huge character in this world”, he adds, and David has always been a bit of a rule-breaker. “I have been seen as eccentric by some people,” he admits. After 16 years of teaching, when he was ready to do something else, David called Arthur, and bought a butchery in Hamilton on his advice. Up in Whangārei, Arthur was fishing commercially, and being a bit of an entrepreneur on the side, he was buying jewellery from Geoff Lamb for his daughter to sell at the local market. Arthur had a stall there himself, with rope and fishing supplies. “He may have even swapped a bit of stock with Geoff,” says David.

After about three years of David running the butchery, “rumour had it that Arthur had a shop called Arthur’s Emporium”. David was curious. He went up to visit for a week-long holiday, and spent it all “having fun in the emporium”. When he returned to Hamilton, “I couldn’t find anything else that I would have preferred to do. And so I decided I would start an emporium.” David thinks he opened “maybe a month before Geoff” in 1980.

In the early days, David and Arthur would both go to Auckland on Mondays and stay the night with Geoff and the family. The three would swap stock and stories. One of their early purchases was 13 large truckloads of plastics, homeware like cups, butter dishes and plates, from a manufacturer that was closing down. They stored it in Auckland and divided it up each week. “You will see them in retro sales these days,” says David, and I think I have. They’re white, with thick bands of red and black around the edges.

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David found he had to upsize his shop in a couple of years: people “were hungry for the prices that we had”, he says. Those prices were so low that he was accused of having stolen the goods on more than one occasion. He remembers when he first opened a policeman visited and left “with his eyes sticking out”. An hour or two later two police inspectors came looking for stolen goods, “but none were”. He says that in Auckland, Geoff faced some pushback from other retailers for being too cheap.

At one point, David bought hundreds of bottomless buckets – a manufacturing mistake that would have gone to the dump if not to his shop. “My friends and family were on the ground rolling around with laughter. They realised I was completely mad, not just half mad, as they suspected.” David sold them for 50 cents each, which “made good profit” and they were a success. People bought them to put around plants or around pet’s heads if they’d had an operation, among “myriads of ideas”. David never tried to explain the purpose of items for sale. “I’d leave it up to people’s imagination,” he says.

For David, having the emporium was “huge fun. It really, really was – with the customers’ reactions to things, chin wagging, yep, the whole thing.” He remembers having lunch (which in those days included a cigarette) behind the counter with his staff. “They were so good to me, and I was one of them.” These days, David is sometimes introduced as “David from David’s Emporium” which is met with audible gasps and sometimes a cheer. People under 44 are “absolutely staggered” he says, because the emporium has been there their whole lives and “they expected the old codger to be well dead and gone by now”.

Geoff’s and the second generation

On paper, Geoff’s son Derrol has run the original Geoff’s Emporium on Dominion Road since “about 95 or 93, somewhere around then”, but Derrol was never able to get Geoff to stop working. In an oral history recorded for the Auckland City Library in 2013, Derrol said that at first, he suggested that Geoff take a day off each week, maybe a Wednesday, to work on his garden or other such things. Seemingly offended, Geoff asked if Derrol thought he wasn’t up for it any more. Derrol “never, ever mentioned it again”. Geoff kept coming into the shop “every hour it was open” until the day before he died, “which I think would have made him happy. And he isn’t the retiring type,” said Derrol.

Derrol’s account of Geoff’s Emporium does not begin with Arthur. First it’s his dad, a “character” and “natural-born trader” who loved fossicking for bargains and buying and selling. Then it’s the Cook Street Market,the East End-style markets that opened in downtown Auckland in 1970. Located in a large former parking building where the Aotea Centre stands today, they became an incense-shrouded hub of alternative culture and reached the height of popularity in the early 80s. Stalls spilled out into the surrounding carpark, and stallholders were like family to each other. There, the Lambs started out selling jewellery they made out of horseshoe nails, which was trendy at the time. Then they moved into toys and jewellery boxes that Geoff bought broken from wholesalers and fixed before selling.

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As a teenager, Derrol was there at the market helping, but in about 1973, he went off to do a “real job”, working for a decade for a chemical company. Geoff opened a small store in Takapuna, where he got more and more into picking up seconds, ends of lines and the like from manufacturers, wholesalers and importers, stocking “lots of different bits and pieces” including Temuka Pottery. The shop soon became too small, so Geoff leased the old Bell Radio & Television Corporation factory on Dominion Road, which soon became Geoff’s Emporium, probably due to his friend Arthur’s influence.

One day in 1983 Derrol popped into his dad’s emporium to say hi, and Geoff asked, “Why don’t you open a shop?” Ten years must have seemed long enough to have a “real job”. Derrol’s name was decided to be too much of a mouthful, so his childhood pet name, Ike, was used instead. Ike’s Emporium opened in 1983 in his neighbourhood, Browns Bay on the North Shore. Back then, Browns Bay was considered a holiday destination, so unlike many places in Auckland, trading on Saturday was allowed. “I sort of feel the 1980s weren’t that long ago,” says Derrol, “but they probably were, when you think about things like that.” Later, Geoff’s brother Jerry and his wife Corey (behind many of the men’s names are in fact wives and partners who are owners and managers of the emporia too) opened a second Geoff’s Emporium in Henderson.

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While Geoff was roping his family in, emporium fever was stirring back in Cambridge. Friends who Arthur’s son Toby had made in primary and high school were seeing the appeal of bargain hunting and being your own boss. First Andrea and John moved to Rotorua to open AJ’s Emporium in 1998. Then Pete, John’s brother, opened his in Porirua in 2008. Finally, their friend Wayne moved to Christchurch to open Tom’s Emporium in 2017, named after his grandfather.

Sourcing stock and ‘a different world’

The huge change over the decades has been where the stock comes from. “We used to buy a lot from local manufacturers, but they gradually disappeared over the years,” says Derrol. He remembers scouring local manufacturers with his dad; buckles from shoe factories, handles from bag manufacturers, big sheets of rubber from jandal factories, and even leftover handles from a coffin manufacturer. “That sort of thing was bread and butter and a real point of difference from most other stores. People could get things that were quite useful.”

“It was a different world” when Geoff, Arthur and David were rummaging through unwanted things and starting out, says Derrol. Namely, there was import licensing that heavily restricted what could be brought into the country. It was designed to protect the local economy and employment, and local manufacturing proliferated. “There certainly wasn’t the mass of imported stuff that there is now,” says Derrol. Then in 1983 the Closer Economic Relations (CER) agreement meant that Australian goods were exempt from the import licensing regime. Then, the fourth Labour government won the 1984 election and rapidly deregulated. Import licensing was all but eliminated. “Things changed pretty dramatically,” says Derrol.

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They would go to auctions down at the wharf. It was the early days of containerisation and there were all sorts of interesting goods turning up that might be unclaimed, lost or mislabelled. The auctions were regular, and Geoff had a ring of mates, or cronies, including Arthur and David, who wouldn’t bid against each other, but instead buy together. “Auctioneers hated it,” says Derrol, but would turn a blind eye since they were regulars, and did buy a lot. There were also liquidation auctions when businesses had gone bust – Geoff would always turn to the page in the newspaper where they were advertised first.

These days, most of the stock is sourced from overseas. “The internet’s changed that for the better,” says Derrol. “In the old days we were sending faxes and even writing letters to suppliers, so lead times were horrendous.”

Though all the emporia are owned and run independently, most source collectively. They have an informal buyers group, and an agent in China, who visits manufacturers and wholesalers on their behalf to buy things.

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Before Covid-19, they would go to China three or four times a year, but now it’s usually two, one for the Halloween season, and another for Christmas, says Neil Roach, David’s son-in-law who now owns and runs both David’s Emporiums. He says the emporium owners aren’t exactly like other people who do business there. They have more time, and even when they’re banded together, they’re a tiny fish in the buying world. He remembers being in a shop that had 300 different scissors on display. They were ordering “one or two boxes of this, one box of that”, when another buyer came in and interrupted. He ordered a whole 40-foot shipping container of one type of scissors – about 240,000 of them. “You just got to realise where you sit in the grand scheme of things,” says Neil.

The trips are fun. There’s always “a beer or two” and once there was $600 worth of fireworks set off in the town square of a small village (with permission form the local policeman). There are also yearly trips to Las Vegas, where most of the surplus and end-of-line-type stock comes from, including the house paint and hardware.

It’s a lot of shipping, which can be costly, but the emporiums have found ways around that cost. New Zealand exports a lot of meat, in refrigerated containers which need to come back. Emporium stock hitches a discounted rate in them, like relocating a hire car. “They do you a special deal to get it back so they can fill it up with meat and export it again,” says Toby from Arthur’s. “They don’t quite hold as much, but they still hold plenty.”

Competition arrives

“There’s a lot of bastardised ones around now,” says Toby, and some are “trying to trade on our name”. He won’t name names, but 280 metres from Arthur’s is a shop simply called The Emporium. There’s bigger competition too – in 1982 the very first Warehouse opened on the North Shore, in 1996 the first Spotlight in New Zealand appeared in Wairau Park, Bunnings expanded into New Zealand in 2001, and in 2008 Look Sharp was born. They’re not comparable of course, lacking the ramshackle nature of the emporiums, the surprises, the bargains, and the things found in old cardboard boxes that are unwittingly vintage.

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When I ask Neil from David’s what sets them apart from other shops, he goes straight to buttons. “We keep them in these little plastic tubes. And if you want six buttons, we just count out six buttons and charge you the price. We don’t pretty package them into eight or four or anything like that, and make you pay for more than you want.” He says some buttons are just 10 cents, and selling them individually “makes no sense” from a purely business perspective. He doesn’t like the idea of forcing people to buy, and spend, more than they want or need. “That leaves a bad taste in your mouth. So I would rather we just keep doing what we do, keep the customers happy, and not have anyone think we’re ripping them off.”

After the buttons he begins to talk about trims that can be bought by the centimetre, then the surplus house paint he imports from the States that costs about half as much as the paint at Bunnings, and then the staff. Some staff members have worked at David’s for over 20 years, and some leave only to retire. “They’re happy,” says Neil.

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The succession plan

In November 2007, Geoff died at age 79. He was buried on the peaceful green slopes of the North Shore Memorial Park. In the pocket of his suit, his family popped a set of keys. The keys open the doors at 274 Dominion Road, where he opened Geoff’s Emporium in 1980 and where it still stands today. Geoff’s was one of the first shops to stock lots of Halloween decor and costumes, because they noticed people coming in to buy fabric for capes and other dress-ups. But now, “we’re not the only people in town”, says Derrol. “I was just at Woolworths, and they’ve got a range of Halloween masks and bits and pieces there.” Basically “it’s everywhere”, so while the market has grown, “I don’t think our market share is growing.”

After running the emporia for about 30 years, Derrol feels he’s “starting to get a bit old for it”. Though Toby is handing over Arthur’s to a third generation, Derrol’s children have their own plans. “It’s just one of those things,” he says. If they’re not passed down, his connections to suppliers are irreplaceable. “Inevitably, you know, there’s got to be a conclusion some time.”

The true story behind New Zealand’s emporium empire (2024)
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