A University of Canterbury student has turned the familiar problem of unwanted household clutter into a national founder story, after winning the Momentum Student Entrepreneur Award at the 2026 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards.

Civil engineering student Zac Hemmings received the award for Cluttr, a start-up designed to make selling unwanted household items easier for people who do not have the time or patience to photograph, list, negotiate and complete second-hand sales themselves.

The model is deliberately practical. Customers photograph items they want to sell, Cluttr estimates value, matches them with a student reseller and manages the sale process from collection through to completion.

Hemmings did not begin with a large team or outside funding. UC says he spent seven months acting as Cluttr's first reseller, collecting items, photographing them, negotiating sales and building software with volunteer developers while testing the idea with real customers.

That early operator role matters because it kept the start-up close to the messy details of the market it wants to serve. Household resale sounds simple until someone has to value a couch, arrange pickup, answer questions, handle no-shows and decide what is worth listing at all.

Cluttr was developed through UC's Centre for Entrepreneurship Summer Startup and Incubator programmes, and the venture has since completed paid pilot collections, won Red Bull Basement New Zealand and represented the country at the Red Bull Basement World Final in San Francisco.

For Christchurch, the story is a reminder that founder momentum does not always start in a lab or boardroom. Sometimes it starts with a student doing the awkward manual work long enough to prove there is a business hiding inside an everyday frustration.