Ten years building brands other people wanted to own.

I've spent ten years building brands. First in agencies: I started Kollab and scaled it as a social media agency, but I couldn't make it profitable. So we merged with Glass Elephant, where I was creative director across around 80 clients at any given time. Alongside that, from a rented desk in 2018, I started The Whitening Co. Today it's New Zealand's leading teeth whitening brand, in Life Pharmacy and Unichem nationwide.

It hasn't been glamorous. Oli and I remortgaged our house twice to buy out every other shareholder, about half a million dollars. And in February 2025, in one of our best months ever, we nearly ran out of cash.

People message me all the time, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, in person, wanting to pick my brain about starting a brand. I can never say no. I love it. But I can't do it one call at a time forever, so Socials to Storefront is all of it in one place, in the order it actually matters.

I wrote the whole journey down, photos and all, in my notebook. If you want to know who you'd be learning from, start there.

Groundwork is specifically for founders selling physical products. Not service businesses, not dropshippers without conviction, not people looking for a shortcut. For the people who are genuinely building something. This is the playbook I wish I'd had.