"Absolutely. There's no other word for it," the quintessential outdoors man - hunter, adventurer, businessman and now author - with his trademark long tresses, said during a visit to Oamaru on Friday.
A trapper by trade, he and his wife started the company in 1994 after a crash in the skin market.
In those early years, they attended a trade show in Melbourne, where their competitors had booths that cost thousands. They had a trestle table and took a sheet from their hotel bed to cover it. For the first three or four days, they were sniggered at but, on the last day of the show, it was open to the public and people "got us", he said.
The couple started the Swazi business in Levin and keeping manufacturing in New Zealand was hugely challenging.
Many other manufacturers had "disappeared".
But it was not all about the "bottom line". It was about people and staying true to his principles, he said.
Times were tough but he believed there would be a lift in the economy and when it did come, it would be a huge lift.
While it was sometimes tempting to move manufacturing off-shore, he likened it to a mountain.
"It's tough to climb a mountain, really, really challenging. When you get to the top of the mountain, ... the view's good," he said.
Driven by a desire to change the world and with a love, rather than a passion, for New Zealand, Mr Hughes has just released a book Untamed: The Extraordinary Adventures of the Swazi Man.
Writing a book, he thought, was going to be easy - taking a couple of weekends and possibly a Wednesday night. He found it to be an exhausting exercise, saying that now he did not even want to sign a cheque.
He outlined several of his adventures at a business breakfast in Oamaru, where he was introduced as a man who was, for anyone who worked in Customs, "the bane of their lives".
He spoke of hunting on foot for Cape buffalo in Africa, with local porters carrying the camp - everything from chilly bins and drums to kerosene and the toilet - on their heads.
He hunted during the day and slept under mosquito nets at night with kerosene lanterns at each end of the tent that were supposed to stop lions and elephants from walking through the camp, but did not.
Following the buffalo was an "incredibly intense" hunt in long grass and, after following a herd of 200 for five hours in temperatures of about 55degC, he was lucky enough to shoot a big bull buffalo.
Saying that hunters were conservationists, he and his wife have set up the Siberian Tiger Trust in a bid to help save the endangered Siberian (or Amur) tigers in Russia, sending vehicles and satellite phones.
Next month, he heads back to Alaska, for his 15th visit, to film an episode of a television series he has been working on.
It will involve a 12-day hunt on horseback and, while he was not a great horseman, he was really looking forward to it.
The 12 episodes were not all just hunting, but included some adventure and exploration.
Mr Hughes said his favourite adventure was going to a dogsled school in northern Norway. Mushing a set of dogs was like flying and the "most awesome" experience.
The best place in the world was home "first and foremost" and his favourite hunting spot was stalking tahr in the Southern Alps.
