Originally a trapper, Mr Davis moved into manufacturing possum fur products after years of hard work catching the furry imports in the wild.
"That's why I like to pay my hunters well, because I know how hard they work," he said. Although this has been a quiet year so far, Mr Davis said he was unconcerned, because between 40% to 60% of his business was now offshore, via the Internet.
While customers to his Glenorchy-based retail outlet bought off the shelf, Internet customers were more likely to order the company's custom-made articles, such as the luxurious possum fur bedspreads, he said.
When he first started making the bedspreads as an experiment a few years ago, Mr Davis said he thought he would do well if he could sell two or three a year.
"Now we sell two or three a week," he said.
Carefully colour-matched furs of the best pelts fetch up to $3375 for a double size.
But the money does not always come easily.
Mr Davis has seen the industry go through tough times, including the collapse in the 1980s with first the animal rights campaigners, and then the sharemarket crash.
Returns to hunters also dropped to just $4 "when you needed $6 to recover costs and at least $12 to make any money", he said.
Instead of simply catching and on-selling the pelts, Mr Davis decided to lease the shop premises and start manufacturing.
"We started at home with making teddy bears and boot-liners, and just went from there," he said. The ideas for possum fur items came from trial and error.
"I'm lucky I've got clever people working for me who come up with clever ideas. They start with an idea and work on it to see if we can sell it," Mr Davis said.
It was good, old-fashioned Kiwi ingenuity that worked: "That's what used to happen before you used to have all these flash designers."
Skin prices had rocketed up to as much as $25 or $35 each ex-tannery, depending on what had been done to the skin and its condition, with most averaging about $16.
"I pay a premium. I've been a hunter myself and they deserve every cent they get.
It's nice surroundings, but you are doing it in tough conditions."
Most hunters used cyanide, and retrieved after two nights, he said.
A typical line would be 8km long with bait every 20m or 30m, realising up to 100 possums in a catch.
But catching the possum was only the start.
They then had to be skinned and these carried out.
A load of 100 skins could weigh 70kg in the pack.
The possums were skinned on the spot and the carcasses left to rot, but were safe because the cyanide was a "single stage" poison which killed only the animal that ingested it, Mr Davis said.
"There's no carry-over in the food chain, so it's a good poison, but it's a deadly substance."
It also leaves the fur in good condition, made even better when the possums have been feeding in beech forest.
Different fur colours and condition were found in different geographic areas, he said, and if the furs were not good enough, they were bleached or dyed; but only if the fur itself was worth the extra.
A poor fur would still be poor even when dyed, which would add to the cost, so the fur itself had to be good quality.
Whatever the cost, the biggest numbers of buyers were those in North America, where an indigenous fur trade remained part of their heritage, despite it mostly being farmed product now, he said.
"North Americans like to show off their bedrooms . . . [in the same way] we like to show off our living rooms," Mr Davis said.
