We often get asked what prompted us to start making and selling Okarito Sandfly Repellent? The answer is, basically a whole series of accidents.

In 1999 we bought the business Okarito Nature Tours (now Okarito Kayaks), a kayaking ecotourism business on Okarito Lagoon, South Westland. We purchased this business from it’s founders, Ian & Debbie James. Ian & Debbie used to provide for their kayakers a repellent consisting of citronella mixed with moisturising body oil.

Citronella has long been used as an insect repellent. It is extracted from citronella grass by steam distillation. The citronella oil we use comes from Sri Lanka. Most commercial repellents contain DEET (diethyltoluamide) which was developed by the United States military to protect their soldiers from malaria in South East Asian wars. DEET is known to dissolve many plastics and synthetic fabrics . This would be very damaging to our kayak equipment so we tried to discourage its use by providing a free alternative.

We continued to provide this repellent free to our kayak customers. Many kayakers would return from their trips and  tell us how well our repellent had worked, often saying it had worked better than their store-bought repellent, and demanding that we sold them some. To this we would reply that we didn’t have any for sale, we only provided it for free.

After a year or so of people requesting to buy our repellent, we decided we needed to do something about it. We bought 50 plastic bottles and printed out labels from our computer. We thought these might last a year or so, but they sold out in a month. So I bought 100 bottles and they rapidly sold out. Then 500….clearly the universe was trying to tell us something.

So we look into it further – we decided to use 100% natural oils – no chemicals, alcohol, ethanol or any other additives that are found in most repellents. We switched to sweet almond oil as a carrier for the citronella oil. Sweet almond oil is an excellent skin moisturiser. We had labels printed by a printer, and started wholesaling our repellent to some other retailers.

Our repellent was a great sideline to the kayak business. On wet weather days we would sit around drinking coffee and bottling repellent. However as our busy kayaking season coincided with the sandfly-ridden summer months we were never really able to get on the road and market it at the times when we really needed to.

In 2014 we leased out (and eventually sold) our kayak business and moved temporarily to Central Otago to get our son closer to a high school. This move gave us more time to market our repellent, develop our branding and systems, and start an online shop. We moved back to Okarito in 2019 and our repellent is all made and distributed from there. We now supply our repellent to more than 100 retailers nationwide plus online sales.