Just three years after starting their business in Dunedin, two former Scarfies are eyeing up a $1 million turnover and have ambitious plans to expand.

Enter Angus Syme and Cam Leigh, both 22.

In their first year at the University of Otago, the pair came up with a business idea to supply beds to fellow students – buying 30 secondhand beds from graduating students and reselling them to ‘’all of our mates arriving here on Castle St the following year’’, Syme, a finance graduate, said.

For $200 those students about to go flatting for the first time would have a secondhand queen-sized bed delivered to their flat on the day they arrived in Dunedin.

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‘’We thought we were the kings of Castle,’’ Leigh, an accounting graduate, said.

The pair would test the beds and clean them up, but quickly realised that original business idea was not scalable.

They were approached by more students while doing their deliveries, and began to look at the feasibility of supplying new beds using their $5000 from the secondhand bed enterprise to launch The FlatPack Company.

That led them offshore to China and Malaysia, where they sourced pocket-spring mattresses which were compressed, vacuum-sealed and put in a box. The box element was important as they could put 500 boxes in a single shipping container, as well as being easy to deliver to flats.

With a basic mattress and frame costing $699, the company was on its way.

‘’It is the whole direct-to-consumer model, we barely have any overheads,’’ Syme said.

It also proved popular, with the pair selling 1200 products in the first year alone, followed by 1600 the second year, and a further 2000 over the last year.

Those first three years focused largely on selling student beds to the student markets in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland.

But now they wanted to change that up, Leigh said.

Over the past six months the men, who graduated from Otago in 2021 and moved to Tauranga, had researched other age demographics, after experiencing a surge of interest in the 20 to 30-year-old bracket.

That was partially driven by former students, who had used the company while studying, and also driven by their social media campaigns.

‘’Now we are trying to build and move Flat Pack as a brand to this YoPro (young professional) space, and really target this bedroom furniture space,’’ Leigh said.

‘’We want to be the bedroom furniture company for 20 to 30-year-olds,’’ Syme said.

It is a far cry from when the pair spitballed the idea for the company while at Otago's Cumberland College, a hall of residence,

‘’We’ve gone quickly from $5000 in the bank account to ... more than that.’’

Leigh said their annual revenue was likely to hit the $1m mark this year.