Skies still glowing

Dil Belworthy found his passion. Eventually. Scot MacKay reports.

As he potters around the crayfish boat setting up for the next voyage, the sound of rushing feet on wood grows louder behind him. Lifting his head he sees the excited face of his out-of-breath friend, Brett, who grabs him and orders him to his car.

"Get in!" Dil does as he's told. The rusted white Lada with a missing windscreen revs and takes off with a spray of gravel, racing across Halfmoon Bay.

Stewart Island had at least 70 single men in the early 1990s, so when a single female set foot on land, it was all about getting there first.

The handbrake comes on and the car rocks to a halt beside a bewildered 23-year-old English woman on an evening stroll.

His life turned on that moment. With one look at the slim, black-haired Catherine Worsley, and after holding 30 different jobs in his 32 years, Gil Belworthy determined his life finally had purpose. He would marry this woman and support a family.

For the 15 years leading up to that meeting, his life had been more about being careful what not to do.

Back when he was 17, his dad came home one day, crying. He had been forced to lay off dozens of workers at Auckland's Champion Flower Mill. Never, he told his son, stick with a job you don't passionately enjoy. Not even for five minutes.

These words stayed with him.

And look at him now. At 47, he has his wife, his family, and is now the owner of Glowing Sky Clothing Limited, a four-store chain that has grown from a cramped, small cottage perched atop a hill on Stewart Island, to what will soon be 10 stores nationwide.

He's a hard man to pick – a fast-talker, but laid back with it. A self-proclaimed "smartass".

I meet up with Dil Belworthy at his Spey St store in Invercargill, on a day of torrential rain. Belworthy is wearing shorts and sandals.

"Beautiful day, isn't it," he remarks.

Officially, and to his mum, he will always be Phillip Belworthy, but to everyone else he's Dil – "a name I got because I was always fooling around and getting in the sh** as a boy".

"It's slang for a cowpat, too," he adds with a grin.

At 17, sporting long hippie hair and acting the part of the classic 1970s rebel, Belworthy was expelled from New Plymouth Boys' High School.

"It was when they used to have the cane and you would get caned for having your socks down. I was the guy who just had to go to school with my socks down, I just had to. I think I even set the school record for being caned the most times," he says.

After school, the first of those many jobs was as a dairy factory worker and, because his parents had taken off to Malaysia, they decided to buy him a caravan at Fitzroy Beach in New Plymouth so he could keep his job.

For the next three years Belworthy did nothing but surf and work odd jobs when he needed money for food.

"I yelled in a punk band for a couple of years and then my lack of singing talent forced me out of that," he says with a laugh.

After leaving the dairy factory, necessity and that ardent search for a passion led Belworthy to job after job. Some favourites were a book salesman, orchard manager, and a blood gatherer in a Dunedin freezing works, "which I particularly liked".

Belworthy's life revolved around learning new things within new jobs, so there was always an interest for a little while, "even if it was learning to cut cabbages".

After several years, his parents had decided they would buy their drifting son a fruit shop in Otara, Auckland, in the hope it would straighten him out.

His mother Joan says she and his dad just wanted him to do something with his life.

"He was so smart, he could have done anything but he liked to wander. It's all thanks to his wife that he has come so far though," she says.

Belworthy: "The flaw in the (Otara) plan of course is that it is a place that is full of many gorgeous young Polynesian ladies and very few single Palagis (white people). All the Polynesian ladies wanted to marry Palagis because they had this preconception that they were filthy rich."

Belworthy married a beautiful young Samoan woman. "I thought here is a combination where I will get to go live in a beautiful tropical island in Samoa and at the same time by applying my Western farming skills I might be of some benefit to their family. It was a terribly naive idea as it turns out."

After a divorce, the 30-year-old was back in Auckland, rudderless until family friend Brett Hamilton called him to Stewart Island to work on his fishing boat.

The memory of a rusted Lada comes to mind again as Belworthy floats back to his meeting with Catherine. He knew almost immediately there was something between them.

"You guys are obviously fishermen," said Catherine. "Not that we are trying to feed you any bait," Belworthy replied, brightly.

Feel free to disagree, but she quite liked that line.

Three years later the pair were married.

Not long after, sitting in a pub and surrounded by boaties still draped in leggings, the smell of fish lingered as Belworthy drank with his mates and wondered how he could make a lot of money, fast.

The idea for a clothing line was born.

Catherine: "At first he just wanted to print and sell them locally but then he said he was giving up fishing and going to make a fulltime job of it. I thought it was crazy."

Only the sense of his sheer motivation kept her up for it. "Dil can do whatever he sets his mind to – I just had to have faith in him."

As a printing room, the couple used their kitchen; a room so small that it wasn't an option to make a cup of tea while they worked.

They then upgraded to a house on a cliff above Halfmoon Bay. Surrounded by bush and with the view of the sea crashing into the harbour before them, it was the ideal location to live.

The upgrade also meant they could use the basement as both a printing station and store, but complaints from tourists about the "life-threatening" hike to their house – they were worried they would pass away while climbing our driveway, it was so steep" he recalls – the next move was to a store in town.

After three years in business and with two children aged one and two, a baggy-eyed Belworthy decided it was time to go nationwide.

"I was thinking about it in the back of my mind and then I read in the Sunday Star Times one day that Auckland Airport was the best place in the world to sell anything, so I had this idea that I would make a range of T-shirts and sell them there."

Soon after, a determined Belworthy stepped off the plane in Auckland wearing a Swanndri and boots – the only style of clothing he owned – and still smelling of fish he made his way to a menswear store. He bought a pair of shoes and a shirt, then went into the nicest shop he could see: Art Port.

"Hey, I'm a fisherman from Stewart Island and I make T-shirts. Would you like to take a look?" Straight away came the stock standard no. But then the woman decided, if only because his introductory line had struck her as funny, and her being formerly from Winton, that she should at least take a look.

She liked the clothing and from there Belworthy's sales grew.

In 2005, Catherine and Belworthy decided to move the family to Invercargill to open another store. Two years later business was going so well they decided to stop providing other stores with their T-shirts and instead opened a further two stores of their own on Waiheke Island and in Wanaka.

Today, the Belworthys live in an upmarket, sandy brick house in Invercargill, with 5ha of farmland, own a silver V8 five series BMW and can afford to give their children everything they need to achieve in life – exactly how Belworthy planned it.

Belworthy: "At one stage I had this famous Auckland designer who said to start a company in New Zealand and survive is hard anywhere, but to start a clothing company on Stewart Island is impossible. But here I am ..." When it began the pair identified the need for a new and fresh scene in the souvenir market, opting to print simple, yet purely New Zealand, designs instead of outrageous and overly busy T-shirts.

The first line of clothing was the hand-printed T-shirts. "We looked at a point of difference and to be honest when I looked around it struck me that all the souvenir shirts around were completely crass and tacky.

"At that stage everything was big and bright, and there were dolphins breaking away in every direction with huge New Zealands across it and cartoon Kiwis playing rugby, that kind of crap."

So they decided to use a simple small fishhook as the first design with "Hand-printed, Aotearoa" in small print on the back.

Then it was the Glowing Sky Merino brand – core clothing styles made from super-fine Merino fabric in their own manufacturing company in Temuka.

"These are opposed to seasonal products which you wear for a year and throw out.

"They are clothing that you can wear year after year."

Last year, Glowing Sky sold more than 25,000 garments and in the next five years Belworthy and Catherine are planning to open another 10 stores nationwide.

Described as "anally retentive" by his staff, Belworthy is a perfectionist. Anything that comes to an employee's mind, such as customers they have to contact or orders they have to fill, must be written down instantly. The rule applies to him as well.

This avoids errors. He was well pleased, months later, to learn that Ferrari had been using the same system. "It was a proud moment knowing I'm thinking like the best," he chuckles.

As for the financial side of the business, Belworthy and his two-finger typing would never have survived without Catherine's capacity for dealing with the financial nitty-gritty. She hasn't just been counting beans though – she is also one of the main designers, using her outsider tourist background to design garments that she sees as typically New Zealand.

Working from home to be closer to the children, both Catherine and Belworthy are pleased with what they have achieved.

From the outset they wanted to provide their kids with a good, stable lifestyle, and although Belworthy says up until two years ago he felt he didn't have enough time with his children, he doesn't regret a thing.

"It's all life experience."

- © Fairfax NZ News