Special feature | ITM 25th anniversary DAVID TAKES ON GOLIATH Like all good Kiwi success stories, the tale of how ITM became one of the leading building supplies merchants in the country has humble beginnings. In the late 1980s, ITM founder Kevin Marevich headed a small family owned building supplies and timber supplies yard north of Kaitaia called The Factory Building Shop. “I had been selling timber from a local sawmill,” he explains. “I had come from the building merchant side and had a background working in sawmills etc. but I was struggling to get distributorships, which was a real problem for merchants in those days.” Major suppliers wouldn’t sell to smaller independent operators individually and they were often having to purchase products such as plasterboard, insulation and plywood from their competitors, which meant they could only add a tiny margin.
ITM Board in 1993: Nobel Bardell, Len Haydock, Lindsay Gray, Kevin Marevich and Tony Oetegen
“As soon as we established that buying power, the business developed quickly into an opportunity to do so much more because I was able to gather more sizeable businesses which, even though they were well established, were still having trouble getting distributorships because of a real ‘old boy’s’ network with major manufacturers and suppliers at the time.
Kevin approached some like-minded locals and, in 1991, a group of six New Zealanders with wide experience in the building supplies industry, formed the board of the ITM Cooperative Society in the belief that independently “It became a very strong movement with a lot of owned businesses could not only survive, but support by the sheer volume of people that came thrive when they combined their efforts. on board. We had all been experiencing barriers to businesses; barriers which we couldn’t By banding together, the smaller operators overcome on our own, but as a group we could.” realised they could actually outsmart their competitors and access products such as The co-operative deliberately kept a low profile. plasterboard, insulation and plywood at “By the time a number of our competitors wholesale rates. realised what was happening we had a sizeable “It was the right thing at the right time and the volume and by the time they tried to close the right mix of personalities that came together to door on us, the horse had bolted and we didn’t make it work,” Kevin explains. look back.” > ITM Members and support office staff at Conference in 1993
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