Jessie Wong

And it had always been my goal to grow over there.

And, you know, I think every time you kind of clock something, it's like, what's the next challenge?

And so I think I just, you know, once I'd had a little bit of time in market, realised that we were going to need more capital to actually make a go of it and grow over there in a sustainable way.

The thing that actually took the most amount of time in that process was deciding what type of capital and who we wanted to bring on.

And it had to be investors who had a very long-term vision for what the brand could be and were willing to back it the distance.

I don't have any co-founders.

But I don't necessarily like just, you know, I like having sounding boards and I like figuring things out with other people.

So it's fun.

And we've got, you know, great shareholders.

They're very supportive.

And it's been a really excellent experience.

But I think also spending that time on the alignment of what we both wanted is probably the valuable part in that.

You know, I grew up here.

I care a lot about Wellington.

I love New Zealand.

I love the city.

We are not too big, not too small.

We're sort of perfectly right sized to be the creative capital of Aotearoa.

I think that I have, you know, over the last 10 years and especially building You May, observed so much incredible talent being born of Wellington, you know.

Wellingtonians have gone on to do incredible things on the world stage and we don't necessarily celebrate it enough because we're a very modest breed here.