Sean and Anna Easton are as happy as pigs in the proverbial — literally.
The couple upped sticks after a decade in Melbourne and moved back to Mrs Easton’s hometown of Oamaru with their now 6-year-old daughter Frankie.
As they reflected on their year in business owning Awamoa Portable Loos and Effluent Services, Mr Easton said such an enterprise was "never the plan".
"This is not what we thought we’d ever be doing. It’s amazing how far you branch away from your idealism, from what you think makes you happy," he said.
They reckoned Oamaru was the best place to be living in the world at the moment.
They likened it to living in a trendy Melbourne suburb while also enjoying the satisfaction of running their own business.
That choice of business might lend itself to plenty of toilet humour, which they enjoyed — "we struggle to be serious" — but they had absolutely no regrets about their foray into the waste industry.
Mrs Easton left home when she was 18, leaving Oamaru initially for Detroit and then travelling all over the world.
She met her future husband in London where they literally bunked up together.
From South Africa, Mr Easton had lived in Ireland and Scotland before moving to London and into a share room in a share house. He occupied the bottom bunk and Mrs Easton moved in and took the top bunk.
Out of the blue, after they had known each other a few months, she asked him, "in true Anna style", if he wanted to go with her to Jamaica.
"I was like, ‘that sounds rad’," he said.
The spontaneity was tempered by reality when they could not travel there because of visa issues, so they looked at where else they could go. A travel agent suggested Rio de Janeiro and the couple backpacked together through South America for four months.
After later living in Wellington and Auckland, the couple, who have been together 16 years, spent a decade in Melbourne. Mr Easton wanted to study and he also "just wanted a city to call home".
He graduated with a degree in sustainability and environmental management and then worked for a social enterprise as sustainability manager. His focus there was primarily on waste management.
"I always said to myself I wanted to own my own waste management business. I didn’t mean literally, but you have to be careful what you wish for," he said.
Mrs Easton started her own photography business "from scratch", spending the decade working full-time and photographing everything from newborns to weddings, commercial gigs and families.
"I loved it and worked really hard from the ground up and was really successful," she said.
The addition of Frankie to their family was a turning point to making a decision about their future. Even before Covid-19, they had been toying with the idea of moving back to New Zealand.
In January last year, having spent about a month on the West Coast "hiding in a hut" and having a magical time, the family was on their way to Christchurch Airport to fly back to Melbourne.
The smoke from Australian bushfires was making its way over to New Zealand and friends told them to stop and buy masks before they left as there was a mask shortage in Melbourne. Saying goodbye to Mrs Easton’s parents did not make sense, Mr Easton recalled, and they knew then they needed to make plans to come back.
Her parents were successful in business and they kept in touch, discussing opportunities in North Otago. While some did not suit, when they came across Awamoa Portable Loos and Effluent Services, it ticked their boxes.
The couple ran the business for the first few weeks from a caravan in the Waitaki Valley with no running water, electricity, Wi-fi or phone reception.
"It was a nightmare, it was insane. We just felt like renegades," Mrs Easton recalled.
"We felt like we were put on a reality TV show ... try running your business from here ... it just felt like we were tied to a wild bull," her husband added.
The couple had to work together and it was fortunate they had such a solid relationship — "pun intended" — Mrs Easton said.
That working together had continued for the pair.
They employed two staff, but were very hands-on in the business, and Mrs Easton said she genuinely enjoyed cleaning toilets.
In a quirk quite possibly fortuitous for a purveyor of toilets, Mr Easton remarkably had no sense of smell, having run into a metal pillar when he was 7. That resulted in an obliterated nose which had been reconstructed multiple times.
As well as supplying portaloos and cleaning out septic tanks, the business did other waste-related work, including for some of the town’s big businesses, dealing with the likes of grease traps and dairy sumps.
The company had 115 portaloos, and while Covid-19 had meant the cancellation of many events where portaloos were required, there were a lot of long-term hires.
Mrs Easton was upbeat about the future, saying events were "heaps of fun" and it would be exciting when they returned.
The couple had previously looked at how Covid would affect their business so they could go into the pandemic with their eyes open.
Asked what their future plans for the operation were, Mr Easton said it was hard to say long-term. At the moment, they were quite process-driven. There were lots of things they wanted to achieve in the business which were not necessarily growth-oriented.
Mr Easton had "cool sustainability things" that he was keen to do; there were all sorts of different toilet technologies, from generating biogas to incinerator toilets.
North Otago was also the perfect place to indulge in Mrs Easton’s well-known passion for op-shopping. Mrs Easton, an op-shop queen, has developed a following of thousands for her social media presence as She Hunts Op Shops. Op-shopping in North Otago and beyond was "primo", she said.
Op-shopping might be "very on point" at the moment but delving around for treasures was something she had been doing since she was six.
Her social media presence started accidentally, when she started documenting various shops online in Melbourne so she would remember them.
Within several weeks, she had 2000 followers.
Mr Easton, a self-described "music nut", had his own collecting fetish — for him, it was all about speakers.
Their friends back in Melbourne might have initially been shocked with the type of business they bought, but Mr and Mrs Easton messaged them regularly with photographs of their adventures in New Zealand and they were "in awe".
"They are really happy for us and stoked that we’ve made it work. We’ve achieved so much, I can’t believe what we’ve done this year. It’s insane," she said.
