Style: August 05, 2022

Style | Feature 23
“The love, skill and care being poured into our garments is phenomenal,
and for us, it’s important to know that the people making
our clothes are well looked after.”
You grew up on a South Island farm, when/where did your
interest in fashion/clothing come from?
I grew up on a sheep farm at the base of the Southern Alps,
up the Rakaia Gorge.
I was always interested in wool, I learnt to spin and knit
– pretty badly – from an early age.
All our sweaters were beautiful homespun wool garments
my mother made. I made all my own clothes from about 12
years old and started my first business at that age making and
dressing soft toy animal families!
You’ve been in the garment industry since 1981, tell us
about those beginnings…
I had a very exciting and fulfilling career in echocardiography
when it was brand new in the world, but had to leave it
behind to have my two children. There was no such thing as
part-time or maternity leave in those days.
I was fairly busy with two little people in my life, but there
was a growing question in my head – what will I do with the
fragments of available time that were opening up? I couldn’t
go back to echocardiography. What else could I do?
I reflected back to the days growing up on our farm, we
had a big kitchen with a coal range in it. It was always warm
in there, so we all used to linger around the kitchen table
after meals, along with any farm workers and visitors we
had. Something that came up in conversation often was the
concern that the New Zealand economy at the time was
reliant on exporting primary products with no added value.
Raw wool was sent overseas in bales, whole meat carcasses
shipped offshore – there was no marketing innovation or
development, as both of those categories were dealt with
through single desk commodity marketing.
Around the age of six, at that same kitchen table, I learnt
about the power of a country’s brand. My mother was
emptying our three-times-weekly mail bag, when a little box
covered in brown paper tumbled out. Inside was a pair of
shiny red shoes she’d bought for me to wear to a wedding.
My mother took one shoe out, turned it over and there were
three words stamped in the leather sole.
“Made in England,” she said, “that means they’ll be good
quality”. For some reason that concept of a ‘country’s brand’
stuck with me.
I decided I would do something about the lack of value add
in our economy. I would make some cute natural wool items
for infants, wrap our New Zealand brand values of ‘clean,
green environment’ and ‘warm friendly people’ around them,
and offer them to people in overseas markets who dreamt of
living in pristine, laid-back New Zealand.
I asked a neighbour to teach me how to knit properly
so I could write knitting patterns, and started with just 10
outworkers. That quickly grew to 500 in just four years. In
the first six months, I moved from infant and toddler styles
into childrenswear, then onto adult handknits and finally adult
domestic machine knits. Selling garments only for infants and
toddlers wasn’t going to meet the yarn spinner’s minimum
run, so we had to go bigger right from the get-go.
Four years in, we moved to computerised knitting – not
something I had planned or particularly wanted to do – but I
couldn’t scale fast enough and consistently get the premium
quality we required using outworkers.
Within eight years, I was travelling and exporting to Europe,
Canada, USA, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia. Our season
here was very short, so this was a way I could keep our team
in work through the offseason.
How did Untouched World come about?
With all the travel I was doing, visiting most markets
once a year, it became obvious to me the planet was
in trouble. I could see more evidence of environmental
degradation from visit to visit. The various newspapers
I picked up on my travels only ever talked about GDP
and business revenue. There was absolutely no
conversation or thought at the time given to what was
happening to the environment.
I, on the other hand, fretted about it. Here I was, one
lone observer from the other side of the world, in a small
company and a woman to boot – what could I possibly do?
That’s when the idea was born for Untouched World to
be a sustainable lifestyle brand. Until then it was a certified
organic undyed knitwear story under our then parent
brand, Snowy Peak Ltd.
I wanted to model running a sustainable business and
producing sustainable products, and engage people and
leaders with more power than me to help along the way.
I would challenge the status quo, get people thinking and
asking questions, and most importantly, get people to start
taking positive action. This was back before social media
existed, so there was no influencer market to work with.