It's that age-old story.
When brand strategist Bron Williams first left Dunedin, she never thought she would ever move back to the city. Back in the early 2000s, it was a very different place to what it is now, she recalled.
Fast forward to about five years ago and travel, careers and motherhood had been thrown into the mix in the intervening years.
She and her husband had busy careers and were living in his hometown of Auckland when they realised it was not a very liveable city.
Nor was it giving their young daughter the kind of childhood they wanted for her; one that was safe and had freedom and more connection to nature.
They were tired of the commute, spending several hours a day in traffic. Even clients who might be based a five-minute drive down the road were preferring to meet virtually in the post-Covid-19 world.
But where would they go? The couple started looking at possible places they could live and ‘‘did the math’’ on each locality. It was when they looked at Dunedin that they realised they could have a great life in the South: everything was very close — Ms Williams was an advocate for the 15-minute city — and there was the extra bonus of their daughter’s grandparents living there.
As a teenager, she had spent a few years living in Dunedin where she attended Logan Park High School and then art school before moving to Wellington. The family had since spent time with her parents and enjoyed holidays in Central Otago, the space and freedom a stark contrast to suburban life in
Auckland.
Three years ago, they moved to Dunedin and discovered how much a lack of commute impacted their quality of life. Their home was a three-minute drive from Ms Williams’ workplace in Moray Pl.
She has established an arm of the strategy-led branding and design studio of which she is a director. Previously known as Bron Williams Studio, it was recently renamed Essential Viewing and it drew clients from all over the world.
While her head might be in China working for an ice cream brand, or in the United States working on a global technology brand, she could then step outside the studio for coffee, or a chat with neighbouring tenants in what was a very close-knit and welcoming community.
Ms Williams never actually finished her art school studies, dropping out shortly before graduation.
‘‘You don’t know what you’re doing as a young person and you look back on your path and it makes so much sense,’’ she said.
In her case, that was working in fashion and then brands which was all about creativity, drama, impact, trends and making people ‘‘feel something’’. She started her career as a fashion journalist and later moved into advertising in large agencies, initially leading fashion accounts.
Then she became captivated by the design and branding worlds, and got work as a copy-writer, cutting her teeth on large-scale rebrands. What she did not realise when she started learning strategy was she had already been doing brand strategy in her fashion career.
She had been consulting ad hoc for brands without realising that was what it was. With her own interest in fashion and creative writing, she developed her own version of strategy — in a world where it could be ‘‘typically dry and quite functional’’ — and that led her to initially contract to other agencies. Then clients asked her to run the design stage as well. Often clients became more like partners and close, trusted relationships would follow, she said.
Essential Viewing was a studio which happened very organically. It had a core of three — Ms Williams, who is strategy and voice director, creative director Alice Murray and group account director Jo Hanson.
Ms Murray spent seven years as an associate partner at Pentagram London, the largest independent design agency in the world where the rebrand of Rolls-Royce was among her portfolio, while Ms Hanson had previously led Westpac’s Australasia rebrand.
The wider team ranged from five to 17 depending on how many projects were on the go, how complex they were and what stage of the process they were at. They were now working with grocery, sports, technology, wellness and gaming.
Ms Williams felt both honoured and flattered that global brands of scale wanted to talk to them. That was ‘‘super humbling’’. The team were also passionate about working not just with large organisations, but small ones that were doing very meaningful things.
Culture was something that was critical to her, the intimacy of the team and relationships with clients were very close. As the team grew, it was about keeping and fostering that culture. Creativity was a very vulnerable process and those involved needed to feel emotionally safe to let their best ideas come forward.
Live-feed video ran during the day meaning the rest of the team and Ms Williams could catch up any time they liked. It was also about replicating the standard office banter, when they were sitting across a desk from each other, and it seemed to work well. Ms Williams regularly flew to Auckland to see the team and that gave her a big city ‘‘fix’’ but it was always a relief to get back home.
Dunedin was an ‘‘awesome little city’’ and the novelty of living here had not worn off. Her husband equally loved the pace of Dunedin and their daughter, now 7, was thriving at school.
Resilience, in terms of this generation, was a huge concern for Ms Williams and finding public schools in the city that supported resilience and creating well-rounded humans, with such a high level of care, had been a surprising and quite moving experience, she said.
