World changing Kiwi

Despite being born and raised in London Maia says she always had a strong affinity with Aotearoa. Her mother Esther Kerr Jessop (QSM) emigrated to London on the Rangitoto in 1958 and was one of the founding members of the Ngāti Rānana, the London Māori Club. Maia says despite being born 12,000 miles away she always felt strongly connected to Aotearoa. 

“We’ve always had this kind of bridge to New Zealand. I think I was, in a way, more exposed to Māori culture in London than I might have been if I lived in New Zealand. We were kind of straddling both worlds all the time. It was always fascinating to me that when I first came to New Zealand in 1977, I just felt like I’d come home.”

All her life Maia has loved museums and galleries but this wasn’t where her career started. 

“I think for me museums have always felt like a very natural place, a way to connect with things from home and I think that’s such an important part of what museums do around the world. They are a place, you know, for stewardship, kaitiakitanga of taonga. I really loved the environment of museums and galleries. I’ve always loved the architecture of those buildings, these are the places I gravitated towards when I went travelling, I could feel the energy of that space.”

“At university, I studied modern languages and found myself working in the city. I was working with art galleries and museums but as a broker for the Lloyd’s of London insurance market. Because of my love of art, I always knew the artists and people thought that was so sweet, that I knew about the art outside of the insurance side of things.”

At the end of the 1990’s she decided to make a bold career change and much to everyone’s surprise and her mother’s horror, she left her very secure job in the financial markets to start again. 

“I moved out to New Zealand and I stayed with my aunties and did a correspondence course in art history. Because having decided I wanted to work in museums and galleries I had no training in art history.”

For the next 14 years, Maia studied Pacific Art, Art History and Anthropology all over the world, soaking up all she could and it was during this time that she felt herself become whole in a way that had not been possible before. 

“While I was studying I felt like the different facets of my identity were polished off. Everything kind of began to make sense to me about who I was because I had this relationship with my pakeha side and being born and raised in London and then my Māori side and all these things were able to come together in this new path that I found myself on. So it was very rewarding and I kept going because I really enjoyed it.”

A lifetime of advocating for Māori and Pacific peoples has seen her significantly increase her understanding of Māori and Pacific art and build on the connections of working with leaders and iwi to ensure their art and culture are consistently represented in the right way and most recently she took up the role as the Oceania Curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming the first indigenous person from the Pacific to ever hold a curatorial position at the establishment. 

Anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond says Maia has brought the oceanic art world to life for Europe, for America and now for the world. “She has helped transform the way people see art, particularly Māori and Pacific art, giving it a new light to a new audience.” 

Maia says she sees her role as curator as having an important job to play in opening museums and galleries up to a new generation of people. 

“I think there’s a lot of momentum now in the way that museums and galleries are evolving, fundamentally they should be places where, you know, you bring people together to connect with taonga. So if we can see museums as places where we can confront our colonial past, the histories, the complicated stories, then there’s a chance for healing, there’s a chance for dialogue and moving forward.”

“I am the diaspora, that generation that was born and raised overseas and have this different kind of relationship with Aotearoa. I am very mindful of the fact that, for me, taonga in museums and the collections overseas were very important because they were like an anchor for me to understand and figure out who I was.”

Maia is also well known for the sense of community she has fostered in New York for Kiwi and visiting artists. She says the interactions with her Kiwi colleagues and friends really recharge her batteries and help her feel more connected to New Zealand. 

Association Professor of Art and Design at Auckland University of Technology, Albert Refiti says she is the perfect host, someone who welcomes visitors and whose work has huge global importance.

“It’s so important to have someone there who understands the art and the taonga, someone who is connected to it. And because she is right there with the artefacts, building and telling a new story about Pacific taonga she is also a fantastic host for our people to visit this space and make truly global connections.”

Maia is currently leading the renovation of the Oceania galleries at the Met Museum, which will open in 2025 creating a new purpose built space which allows art to be showcased to a wider audience of people, something she feels passionate about. 

“I am always trying to open up the space for others. I think there are so many incredible young Māori and Pacific artists who have so much to offer and being able to bring them into this space and show offshore audiences what is so special about Māori and Pacific art is really special. The global perception of Aotearoa and the Pacific is really heightened at the moment and it’s wonderful to be part of that.”

Maia is also involved in The Pacific Pipeline project through the Bishop Museum in Hawaii which aims to encourage a pipeline of young Pacific Islanders and Māori into museums, something she says resonates with her long term goals for the future. 

“I’m quite invested in people, in those who want to come and work in museums and work with the collections. I really advocate for that archive of indigenous knowledge that’s embedded in the collections and I am really invested in having people understand that we don’t know everything about our cultures.”

“I would ultimately like to see indigenous curators and conservators, Māori and Pacific Islanders looking after taonga from the region that they’re from. I think it’s really crucial that museums open up to allow for more people like me, who whakapapa to the collection, who have a genealogical relationship with the collection, to be the Kaitiakitanga or guardians of these collections and really look at the stewardship of these taonga in the long term.”

Eric and Emeline met in France, worked together in Spain, fell in love in Sweden, and got married in Austria. As self-confessed Lord of the Rings fans, the international couple first came to New Zealand on a holiday and immediately fell in love with the country and its people. Emeline says the idea of moving here was appealing but they couldn’t see how they could combine a move with their other true passion – the space sector.

Then in 2016, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship program offered the couple the opportunity to move here with the purpose of creating Spacebase. At this time Rocket Lab had yet to launch its first Electron rocket and the space industry in New Zealand was in its infancy. Eric says starting their work with Kiwi companies was a learning experience.

“To begin with we wanted to make a directory of all the space companies in New Zealand, we asked the Government how many there were and they said ‘Oh maybe three or four?” Through our work, we discovered around 240 different organisations, and companies around New Zealand who were involved in Space. The one thing that was a big surprise for us was that in the US, if you meet somebody, they hype themselves and they promote themselves instantly, but in New Zealand, you really needed to coax people out, to learn about all the amazing things they were doing, so in the early days we had to work hard to showcase all the work that was underway.”

Yoseph Ayele, Co-founder of the Edmund Hilary Fellowship says that what really stood out about Eric and Emeline, was their bold vision for New Zealand’s space industry and the way they went about implicating it. 

“They came here to democratise the space industry for global problems. They wanted to do it first in New Zealand and scale it around the world and what I admire most is that they really met the ecosystem where it’s at, and they embedded themselves in it. They started by going to regional New Zealand, parts of the country that not even tech companies, let alone space geeks, would go to. They did a lot of ground level education and community building, as well as  bridging the space industry with very important sectors for New Zealand, including agriculture and climate. Then they brought global know-how and expertise and networks to really level up the ecosystem.”

Eric and Emeline credit their work not to themselves but to all those Kiwi innovators who are involved in New Zealand’s aerospace industry. Eric says most Kiwi would be surprised to know how strong the country’s aerospace reputation is on the world stage. 

“People in the space industry are very aware of New Zealand, we are really moving fast in, in a lot of different areas. Space is instantly global, anything you launch is covering different countries and so the people producing spacecraft components here in New Zealand are immediately selling them to commercial entities around the world. I’m pretty impressed by the new innovations and solutions coming out of New Zealand which are being instantly adopted by customers around the world.”

There is no doubt that the work Eric and Emeline have done over the past 6-7 years has helped catalyse New Zealand’s Space industry – which is now a bigger export earner than the country’s wine industry. 

Peter Diamandis Founder and Executive Chairman XPRIZE Foundation, first met Eric and Emeline at the International Space University in 1987 when they were part of the founding class. 

“Eric and Emmeline had come as students in the earliest days, then they came back as members of our staff, then members of our faculty. What I admire about Eric and Emmeline is their focus and their passion and their ability to organise and inspire, I can’t say enough about their hard work and passion for the industry.”

That passion for the industry is what drives Eric and Emeline forward. Emeline, in particular, is very passionate about making sure that all countries have an equal opportunity to access space. 

“I think that if we really believe that space will influence the future of humanity we need to make sure that nobody gets left behind. So our main purpose is to make sure that the rest of the world actually gets involved in Space and our hope is to take the Spacebase concept we have developed in New Zealand and share it around the world with an aim to specifically develop the space industries in developing and emerging countries.”

This work is well underway and in 2018 with the help of Christchurch NZ, Spacebase launched its first national space competition which encouraged young people to develop space based solutions to problems we are facing on Earth. Since the early days the competition has grown and now includes schools, universities and start-ups across New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific Islands and this time for the first year, Emeline’s birthplace, the Philippines. 

Emeline says she loves educating young people about the many ways in which space could solve some of the problems we face on earth like climate change and extreme weather events. 

“From when I was very young I always wanted to go into space, but the reason for that was so that I could look at Earth. I am very passionate about what space can do for Earth. I think there is an opportunity for expanding out into the solar system and using some of  those resources to solve the problems we have and I think countries like New Zealand have an important part to play when it comes to this work.”

A large part of that work is the leading role New Zealand is currently taking in areas like sustainable space. Eric says that alongside the Kiwi number eight wire mentality, he also credits our success to ‘the power of small.’

“In New Zealand, government offices are small enough that you can actually get decisions made quickly, you would not believe the level of bureaucracy that we deal with in the US and at NASA

When it comes to issues like managing space debris, for example, there are international meetings with all these different proposals that are being made and a lot of countries are talking about what they’ll do in ten or fifteen years, and New Zealand will say we’re already doing that. So there’s a recognition that New Zealand is, is leading in a lot of these areas, and has the opportunity to quickly make decisions and, and lead on the policy side and really stand up as global leaders and that’s what makes it a really exciting place to be.”

As a child, Anu had a fascination with Africa. She devoured books from the New Plymouth library on the continent and its animals and watched African documentaries on television. She wanted to be a journalist, a wildlife biologist or a naturalist when she grew up, however, both her parents worked in medicine and convinced her that the best way to get to Africa was to be a doctor. 

“I studied medicine at Auckland University but I always had this vision of practising and improving medicine and healthcare in areas which were under-developed. That’s what I dreamed of and that’s what took me from New Plymouth into this global health trajectory.”

After studying in New Zealand she moved to New York to work at Mt Sinai Hospital, where she had the opportunity to be part of the team building a global health programme, after building that programme she went on to become the director, a dream job for the girl from Taranaki. 

“I was setting up health programs in East Africa and India and taking medical students and residents and public health doctors into the field to actively train them in the kind of specialised medicine and background knowledge that you need to be able to implement effective health care in settings that are under-resourced.”

After a change in leadership at Mt Sinai, Anu stepped back from Global Health to launch her own NGO Women Together Global, an organisation which focuses on connecting women across boundaries of geography and culture, helping them transfer knowledge and skills, and honouring women as educators, innovators and change-makers.

Then In 2019, she filed a federal case against Mt Sinai for sex, age and race discrimination and with seven co-plaintiffs she formed Equity Now, providing a platform for women to speak about discrimination and gender equity in healthcare.

During this time Anu was still working at the hospital as the Director of the Office of Wellbeing and Resilience and when the pandemic hit in 2020 she was drawn back into the day to day running of the hospital as shortages of PPE put staff and patients at risk. 

“During Covid, it was really in my face, how under-resourced our health care was for certain populations right here in New York City. I had been used to struggling with poor infrastructure and lack of resources in developing countries across the world, but it really struck home that we were facing those same shortages and deficits and barriers to healthcare here in New York City.”

“Mount Sinai has been my home. It’s where I worked from the moment that I came to New York, and I had been here for almost 20 years by the time COVID hit, I could see that my colleagues were going to go down, and I had this feeling of utter helplessness. So we just got scrappy, we looked at everything we had available to us, we used all our contacts domestic and international, to start mobilising communities to be able to produce, make, distribute, gather the PPE that we needed, and then get it out into those communities that need it at most, at first all hospitals were struggling but as time went on we see what we always see, those hospitals who serve under-privileged populations were once again left behind.”

Following the pandemic, Anu co-filed a new complaint against Mount Sinai in the New York State court. She draws on this legal case, alongside advocacy work, to demand institutional changes that will benefit all healthcare employees. To date, this work has seen changes at both the city and now state level. 

Anu hasn’t taken the easy route, standing up for issues she believes in. but says that she believes that if communities stand together, change will happen. 

“Being a Kiwi gives you a sense that we can do it. I think also growing up as a New Zealander, there’s a healthy scepticism and a healthy disregard for authority on a certain level and a willingness to say, ‘I have an idea’ and step forward even if it breaks the rules and even if it’s outside a structure or a system. For me, what gave me the ability to go forward and to try and make a change was really having my home as Aotearoa. As much as things were falling apart in New York City, I knew that I had a whole country, a home and a family behind me that I could rely on and it gave me this feeling of it’s gonna be alright.”

Dr Stella Safo who created Just Equity for Health, says she is proud to call Anu a friend. 

“She is the connective tissue for so many important movements, movements to inspire and build up other women, movements to address discrimination in medicine, movements to improve. She builds coalitions. She makes the world a better place.”

Anu also wants to give credit to her high school English teacher at New Plymouth Girls High, whose advice she says she still channels today. 

“She taught me one of the most transformative lessons of my life. I had handed in a writing assignment. I wrote what I thought would be expected of a teenage girl. I wrote about boys, about dating, and my teacher, Miss Hall, wrote a comment on my paper that has shaped a lot of what I’ve done since she wrote You are too intelligent to pretend that you are dizzily obsessed with boys. Try again. So with that one comment, Miss Hall at New Plymouth Girls High School changed my vision for myself. She cut through the conditioning that was beginning to be laid upon me as a teenage girl. She gave me permission to be different and now when I work with women and girls across the globe I think of her and I am determined that no woman should pretend to be, or should be made to be, smaller than she is.”

Lonjezo Chanza of Women Together Global says she admires Anu’s strength. 

“She puts everything in place, she works with women together, directing all the programs, listening to the women, listening to the people that she works with. I think she puts so much strength in it.” 

For Anu, being Kiwi means she has a sense of self reliance. 

“We are a little country at the bottom of the world. We rely on ourselves. If something’s going to be done, we will do it. I grew up with a sense that anything is possible if people come together”

As a child Joanne had no interest in becoming a teacher, in fact with two parents in the education sector she was determined not to go down that path. But then when she was 16 she went on an exchange to the US and all of that changed. 

“While I was on exchange I had to do a lot of speeches to different groups of people, including children. And I just loved it. I loved it when I was talking to the kids and I would ask them questions and just watching them get excited was incredible. I remember when I got back to New Zealand, Dad said to me ‘What are you going to do with your life Jojo?’ And I went, “I’m going to be a teacher” and he teased me and said, “Sorry, say that again?” It was just in my blood. I’ve tried to leave several times, but every time I end up coming back. I can’t help myself. I just love the work. 


Jo worked as a teacher for several years before becoming assistant principal and then principal and it was in this role that she became very interested in early work which was being done to create long term strategic plans for schools – something which was at the time very new. 

“To me strategic planning just made sense, I thought schools should have a bigger vision about what they were doing and understand that when you do something and you plan for it, what happens? I was interested in what was the next step. Why would we do something to make a difference here? The Ministry of Education sort of was watching what I was doing and they asked if I would help other schools and that was the start of my career with the Ministry. 

Jo’s work in this sector took her around the world and it was at a conference in the US where she met her husband Andrew. After relocating to Seattle, Andrew, a four time start up entrepreneur,  convinced her to start her own business based on the teachings of contributive learning and the idea that if you teach children who they are and where they belong you will have much better long term outcomes. And so The Learner First was born. 

“I was petrified quite frankly because having been a public servant all my life entrepreneurship was not in my way of thinking, so it was a real challenge for me. I thought I was pretty hopeless at it for a long time. I set up my company the New Zealand way in America, so I put people and planet first and then profits last, which at the time was a bt foreign so it took a long time but I built my company with a really good reputation. And that made a really big difference.”

The Learner First is built on four main principles which Jo says are all found fairly in the New Zealand School system but which are quite new to education systems overseas. 

“The Learner First helps teach kids who they are first, where they come from and where they belong? Then we focus on connection, how we connect to one another and to the planet. Thirdly we look at knowledge and what individual knowledge each child needs to succeed, and finally, we focus on competencies, which activates the learning.”

Jo says getting her company took a long time, and convincing people that these ‘radical’ ideas would make a difference was hard work. Two years after setting up her company she had a breakthrough. 

“This one Superintendent took a chance on me and we implemented the programme across two school districts he worked in, with stunning results. We had kids coming back to school, we had teachers coming back on Mondays and Fridays. We had 10,000 more school days paid for in one year because in that particular state, schools were funded based on the number of days kids attended. We saved the district $600,000 USD in one year for teacher turnover and kids’ results went up 20% in their standardised testing, which we didn’t even focus on, so it was really phenomenal. From there things just kept growing.”

Today The Learner First has offices in the US, Canada and Australia and Jo says she credits part of her success to her Kiwi upbringing. 

“I think as Kiwi we go out into the world just thinking we can do anything. That’s our belief in who we are. We’re strong people. We’re adventurers. We’re global people. We don’t sit still and wait for stuff to happen, we make it happen.”

Vishal Talreja of Dream a Dream in India says he firmly believes Jo is shaping the education of the future.

“Her ideas connect the purpose of education to the kind of societies we want to create. She connects the purpose of education to the idea of identity, to the idea of knowing where we come from.” 

Dr Karen Edge from UCL Centre for Educational Leadership agrees and sees Jo as courageous. 

“It’s very clear to see that she brings her humanity and the legacy of her family and her community with her in the journey for her work, she shares a little bit of New Zealand with all of us. The work that she has developed around contributive learning, around helping individuals in education understand who they are and where they fit in the world, is groundbreaking. Her ability to hold up and celebrate and shine a light on Maori communities, on communities in New Zealand, and to use that to shape her work is absolutely extraordinary.”

Alongside her work with The Learner First Jo has also published several books on teaching, learning, and system change. She has also worked to bring about purposeful opportunities for Māori including founding the Kia Kotahi Ako Charitable Trust, an indigenous knowledge transforming education and environmental solutions from Aotearoa. The charitable trust works to tackle both issues relating to the world’s climate crisis and an inequitable education system.

Jo says she wants all children to know that the Kiwi superpower is the belief that we can do anything and nothing is going to stand in our way. 

“I’m a little girl from Gore and I’m on the global stage. I just got back from a trip and I was the keynote at the American Principals Conference, Education Conference. Then I went and spent time speaking to all of the superintendents. I work on great big global boards. We’re not shy. We’re out there doing it. I’m proud to be a Kiwi. I never hold back, whenever I say I’m from Aotearoa New Zealand, I’m proud to say that. I want to say to every child you can.”

As a child, Mark Inglis wanted to be one of two things, either a professional motorbike rider or a mountaineer. He chose the latter and first started climbing at age 12. He went on to qualify as a search and rescue mountaineer, based at Aoraki Mt Cook, a role which he describes as a dream job. Mt Cook is also where he met and married his wife Anne who worked at one of the hotels. Life was going well until November of 1982 when an incident Mark refers to as his ‘hiccup’ occurred. 

“I definitely call it a hiccup, it’s another life away, really, but it’s still pretty clear. I had paired up with a new search and rescue teammate and we decided to do the east ridge of Aoraki, Mt Cook. The ice conditions were terrible and the climb took us a lot longer than normal, when we got to the middle peak we realised that the weather report that we’d had was like 12 hours out. It was blowing a gale. The wind in the New Zealand mountains will happily kill you, either with hypothermia or it just blows you straight off. The only place to get away from it that day was in a little crevasse, so we crawled into that thinking that we’d be there for a few hours or overnight at the most.”

The pair ended up in the ice cave for thirteen and a half days, or 324 hours, before rescuers could get to them. Both men suffered frostbite on their feet and ended up losing both their legs several inches below the knees. After several months in hospital, they were fitted with prosthetics which Mark admits were fairly basic back then. 

“Our first feet were still wooden wrapped in leather. It took years before we got plastic nylon feet and then it wasn’t until after the Paralympics in 2000 that I got my very first set of carbon fibre feet. The very first time I stepped on them and walked on them I thought, oh, imagine what I could have done if you’d, if you’d given me these 18 years ago.”

Despite his experience Mark went back to Mt Cook and worked as a duty ranger but got frustrated watching all his friends climb, he applied to be an ambulance officer but was turned down because of his legs and eventually decided to go back to University where he earned a first class honours degree in human biochemistry.

After graduating Mark got into winemaking, working for Montanna and also took up cycling, something which he could do with his legs and that put less pressure on his stumps than other activities. It was through cycling that Mark first represented New Zealand on the world stage – bringing home New Zealand’s first Paralympic cycling medal at the Sydney 2000 Games, an opportunity which opened more doors for him.

“Following the games I had an opportunity to go to Cambodia. And to work with the School of Prosthetics over there, it was really interesting, and it sowed the seeds for the whole concept of Limbs4All for my wife Anne and I.”

The Games also started Mark thinking that if he could compete on an Olympic level, then he should be able to climb again. Over the next few years, he trained hard first climbing Aoraki Mt Cook, then summiting Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world, and one of his personal favourite climbs, before tackling Everest in 2006.

“Everest isn’t the hardest climb you’re ever going to do, but it’s still Everest, for a mountaineer it’s like the World Cup. I had friends who all had total faith that I would do it. One of them, Russell always tried to keep a space on one of his expeditions to Everest for Inglis, because he knew I’d turn up. And when your friends have that faith in you you have to repay that by stepping up and so in 2006 that is what I did.”

Mark became the first double amputee to summit Everest and raised $70,000 USD at the same time which went to rebuild a limb centre in Cambodia. With the funds that were left over, Mark and Anne launched Limbs4All, a project which has taken up much of his focus over the last 10 years. 

“Limbs for All is about creating an inclusive opportunity for everyone. In a place like Cambodia or Nepal, people are truly disabled, because there’s no access to resources, your disability should never define your life but it does if you can’t get around it. We didn’t want to build infrastructure where we had to keep pumping funds into it so what we do is partner with chosen charities like Exceed in Cambodia and The Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Nepal.” 

“In Cambodia our biggest project is what we call Limbs for All Kids Exceed, we work with 115 disabled children in rural areas and we provide them everything that they need to get to school, from prosthetics and medical help right through to iPads for learning. In Nepal we discovered that prosthetics are quite well advanced, but they have a very high rate of spinal injuries per head of capita, and these people really struggle. So we work to provide rough terrain wheelchairs, for those who can’t get around and since we started we’ve helped provide around 250 of these.”

Carson Hart, Chief Executive of XSEED Worldwide, says Mark’s passion for helping those with a disability has helped thousands of people around the world. 

“Mark has contributed an awful lot to our organisation and to other organisations like us. His passion for people with disability, especially those with amputations is boundless, like everything Mark does, it’s boundless. Unlike most people, he really understands what it’s like to be without limbs and he really helps folks who are struggling at the beginning of their rehabilitation to see what’s possible.”

In 2003 Mark and Naked Rower, Rob Hamill took a roadshow through New Zealand, and in 17 weeks spoke to 135 schools and around 60, 000 kids. This was the start of Mark’s speaking career and these days he spends a lot of time in India working with corporate clients talking about how to tackle change and the role that a positive attitude plays in business culture.

Jason Fletcher is a long term friend of Marks who has worked with him on a number of projects to increase accessibility for those living with disabilities. He says what sets Mark apart is his drive and determination to really make a difference.

“If he can’t find, convince, or coerce someone into getting a task done, he’ll just simply do it himself. He has this uncanny ability to do almost anything and he never gives up.”

Mark says his days of climbing are over now, and while he admits that he would love to tackle Everest again, he knows he would be a bit too slow and there would probably be a divorce involved. However, he says he’s excited about what lies ahead.

“When people ask me what am I most proud of? It’s hands down my family, it’s Anne and my children, being able to raise them and see them succeed. Outside of that is it a career in science? Is it having one of my wines take out the sparkling wine of the world? Was it climbing Cho Oyo or Everest? Or a Silver medal at the Paralympics? All these things sort of merge into one, and become like a wave, you know that no matter how good something behind you is, there’s probably something better coming along. 

“In New Zealand, we are a real thought leader when it comes to attitudes to disabilities and the way we view inclusiveness, and I think we have a responsibility to continue to share that with the world. The next challenge is really the intellectual challenges of change. I think Covid really woke everyone up to how we approach change. I always say to people I’ll never be the equal of an able bodied mountaineer, but I can be equal or greater to any mountain. I implore people, when a mountain is put in front of them, choose to be greater than that mountain.”

For as long as Brianne West can remember she has always been passionate about the environment and animals. Her earliest memory involves ‘saving’ worms from puddles after it had rained.

“I have always thought that the world is this most amazing, awe inspiring place that we don’t respect or pay enough attention to. And if more people knew how amazing it was, then they’d look after it better.”

Her desire to create change never left her and was the driving force behind her starting her own solid beauty bar company out of her kitchen while she was still at Canterbury University studying biochemistry. 

“I had previously started a cosmetics company, just a regular one and it did ok, but after a year and a half of selling products I realised it wasn’t the money making side of things that was attractive to me, it was the creative side, and the running of a business. All my life I have believed that business is the way to change things, because business is the largest lever we have if we want to solve some of the social and environmental problems we are facing and we haven’t yet engaged that lever in the way we could have.”

Brianne’s company Sorbet, (later renamed Ethique) wanted to rid the world of a million plastic bottles. One of her early investors and mentors Brian Person first met Brianne on an entrepreneurship program for students and remembers right from the start she was convincing.

“She was telling us all about the business she had started in her home kitchen, but what really got our attention was she, she sort of sat back at one point and said, I really want to tell you about my vision. And Breanne told us that her vision was to rid the world of plastic bottles. And we were completely blown away. We couldn’t quite believe what we were hearing. But it wasn’t so much that she had this real purpose to her business intentions, and it wasn’t so much the scale and the aspiration of the vision. It was that she had the courage to say it. She actually said out loud, “I want to rid the world of plastic bottles.”

Along with her plan to rid the world of plastic bottles, Brianne says she also wanted her company to do good in other ways, essentially operating as what is now known as B-corp. 

“I believe that business should be run ethically, but it was tricky because back then there really wasn’t a baseline. I was very idealistic and I was surrounded by people who told me it couldn’t be done, a lot of people would say ‘oh, you can’t do that because it doesn’t work financially and business is first and foremost is about profit, which is a notion I reject. So I was sort of working it out as I went along.” 

In the decade since Ethique launched Brianne has travelled the globe (after overcoming a fear of flying) speaking to businesses to promote the use of more ethical products. Ethique COO Tristan Roberts says Brianne’s honesty and direct nature are something that’s lacking in business and a trait which has allowed her to get global companies to sit up and listen. 

“She’s travelled the world talking to different people, talking to businesses, trying to convince them to change and the reasons why, and she’s been able to do that. She’s been at the forefront of change for some big companies in the UK and the US. She’s led their sustainability mission, the reason they have big sustainability walls of product now is because of her, because of Ethique.”

Brian says Brianne’s conviction that business is an important part of change is what makes her such a successful mentor. He says she doesn’t just list her values on a website, she lives them every day. 

“Not only is she creating an ethical mission driven businesses and brands herself. But then she’s supporting other people to do the same thing. And this is having a significant impact on the country, on the world, and on promoting New Zealand on the global stage.”

Now Brianne says she’s getting ready to take on the soft drinks industry with her new start up ‘Incrediballs.’

“I want Incrediballs to disrupt the drinks industry in the same way Ethique disrupted the beauty industry. So instead of buying a bottle of flavoured water you just take your regular water and drop an Incrediball in and you’ve got a fizzy cola flavoured drink that’s exactly the same. We will have different flavours and functions and I can see real applications for it on places like Air New Zealand, no need to carry plastic bottles of drinks, I am also working on a very exciting charitable arm for the company, which will have the potential to solve nutritional issues and provide clean, safe water in places where that’s not a reality, which I’m very excited about. 

She’s also launched an online platform ‘Business but Better’ which aims to help the next generation of purpose led entrepreneurs both in New Zealand and around the world. 

“Business but Better allows me to share what I have learnt with a wider group of people, I can’t start every purpose led business but I can help those who want to start their own. I have done a lot of mentoring in the past and I find that often at the really early stage people have an idea, but they’re sort of scared to take the next step, and I think a lot of that fear comes from not knowing what to do next or how to do it. I didn’t know, I had no idea really how to start a business but I didn’t care, people would say ‘oh no you can’t do that, and I would reply well that’s how I am doing it.’ I don’t think I have that inbuilt fear of failure that many people have, I don’t like failure, I am very competitive but I just don’t let that fear of failure stop me. I have failed more times than I’ve ever succeeded. If what I have learnt can help someone else then that can only be a good thing.”

“I think New Zealander entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned in a couple of different many of our competitor countries, and people always expect Kiwi to be kind and nice, which is lovely when you travel. But the other aspect is that I think we are determined to prove ourselves because we are a smaller country which is relatively isolated. We seem to do a lot of big things here because people seem driven to do big things. There’s this massive entrepreneurial ecosystem, we are quite a forward thinking, innovative place.”