A small family firm in Riverton, on the Southland coast, has quietly built one of the most unusual export businesses in New Zealand, turning roughly a million pāua shells a year into the raw material for luxury jewellery, designer furniture and the inlaid panels that decorate palaces and hotels across the Middle East. Yet the people who run it say the strange truth of the trade is that they could sell far more shell than the country will currently let them gather.
Ocean Shell Ltd has been grading, drying and polishing shells at its Riverton warehouse for decades. Founder Bruce Shields started the company knowing almost nothing about the product, and built it on a simple reputation. “When I started, I knew nothing about pāua shell. I just saw it as a business opportunity and we became known as reliable, honest and trustworthy,” he told RNZ.
Today his daughter Nina Shields runs the operation, which handles around 250 tonnes of shell a year. Alongside the local pāua it imports trochus shell from Papua New Guinea, mother of pearl from Australia and abalone from several other countries, before shipping much of it to factories in South-East Asia where it is sliced into the thin veneer sheets prized by designers. The wholesale arm, Luméa, sells to customers around the world, while a retail division, Ocean Shell Studios, supplies the craft and souvenir trade at home.
What strikes Nina Shields most is how differently New Zealanders and overseas buyers see the same blue-green shell. “Around here you just see it lying around. People think it’s abundant, whereas outside of New Zealand, people really value it. They think it’s magical,” she said. That perception gap has become a commercial one. The polished shell ends up in high-end fashion accessories, furniture inlay, fine jewellery and even cosmetics and medical products, and demand from luxury markets keeps climbing.
The price of pāua shell is now around three times what it was a decade ago, and Ocean Shell says it cannot keep up. “We are struggling really from a supply perspective with the shell. We could sell way more,” Nina Shields said. “We’re getting inquiries weekly from new customers or new people that would like to buy large quantities of shell that we simply can’t supply because we’ve already sold what we have.”
Part of the squeeze comes from changes in the wider pāua industry. New Zealand’s commercial pāua exports have roughly halved, falling from about 200 tonnes a year to closer to 100 tonnes, and around 40 percent of the catch is now shipped live to Asia rather than processed at home, which means fewer shells flow back to firms like Ocean Shell.
The bigger frustration is the shell that washes up on beaches and is never used at all. Under New Zealand rules it is illegal to sell seafood taken recreationally, and that ban extends to the empty shells that recreational divers and beachcombers collect. Ocean Shell cannot legally buy them, even though they would otherwise be thrown back or simply left to break down on the sand. “To me it seems crazy that there’s literally money lying on the ground and we just can’t access it but the law is the law,” Nina Shields said.
She is careful not to argue against the rule itself. “That’s in place for good reason, not wanting to incentivise overfishing but maybe one day in the future we can figure that out,” she said.
There is already a model that appears to work. On the Chatham Islands, a special exemption lets locals gather naturally beached pāua shell and sell it, with the proceeds going into community infrastructure and youth programmes. Ocean Shell would like to see that approach tested more widely. By its estimate, allowing the sale of around 300,000 beached shells a year could be worth roughly $500,000, money that might flow to community projects rather than being left on the tideline. A scheme like that would also give regulators something they currently lack. “We’d be collecting data that’s helpful for making sure the industry is sustainable, as well as supporting community,” Nina Shields said.
For now the company keeps doing what it has always done, sending Southland shell to designers, jewellers and furniture makers who treat it as a precious material rather than beach clutter. It is a reminder that some of New Zealand’s most valuable exports are not the obvious ones, and that a shell most New Zealanders step over on a weekend walk can end up as a feature wall in a palace or a clasp on a designer handbag.
Whether the rules ever change, the lesson from Riverton is that value often sits in plain sight, waiting for someone to look at it the way the rest of the world already does. You can read the original report on RNZ.
What do you think, should New Zealand make it easier to collect and sell beached pāua shell, or is the current ban worth keeping? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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