FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

We Are New Zealand

Running This NZ Tech Start-Up Takes Self-Belief and Mum’s Indian Cooking

Angad Nayyar moved to Auckland as a seven-year-old, and immediately the city’s diversity meant he felt at home.

This series is presented by the Electoral Commission New Zealand. Click here to enrol to vote.

"Every good start-up has a garage," says Angad Nayyar, and his, run by a team of three from Manukau, is no different. Strutagio, which combines the word "strut" with the Italian word for ease, hopes to eliminate one of the pitfalls of buying shoes online—getting them out of the box to find they don't actually fit. By using smartphone camera technology, Ang and his team aim to solve a problem that is worth about $500 million every year in the US alone.

He hopes that one day the company will thrive, and give back to Auckland—the city his family moved to from India when he was just seven, and a place he feels has given him a lot of opportunities. His ambitions, once the company starts to grow, go beyond just footwear, and the core technology, he notes—"taking photos and making cool stuff happen with it"—has plenty of further applications. Voting is another way, Angad says, to give back—or, at least, give input. "There's a lot of different communities I care about and naturally I want to make sure that they have the brightest future possible, and one way to do that is to make sure that I vote and have my point of view, and what I hope their future will be like, represented as well."