A trail-blazing attitude first attracted Steve Williamson to changes being made in the merino industry.
His arrival at The New Zealand Merino Company (NZM) coincided with its early work to move away from a long-held commodity model for selling wool.
New ways were being found to connect fine wool farmers with buyers and tell merino’s story to markets around the world.
For him, this inventive hotbed was a home away from home.
NZM’s creative general manager makes a good guide when he takes visitors through its forward-gazing headquarters in Christchurch.
That’s because he designed the layout — two winged lanes converging into a dramatic lobby with walls draped in shag pile carpet or a living wall.
Proof of the company’s innovative mantra are a couple of surfboards where wool is used as a fibreglass replacement next to a mock retail outlet.
This meeting point leads into an amphitheatre and then a dark room with a wide screen to relay merino messages. Next door is a display area illustrating the fibre’s many end uses.
An iPad first aimed at a QR code draws up hologram-type images when pointed to a circular seat. On another wall is an eclectic collection of small items documenting its past and future.
The NZM office is an extension of the creative force that was allowed to express itself inside and outside its walls.
Mr Williamson said the design was a window into the company’s culture.
His job was to reach into the future and bring a small slice back to today, he said.
This was always calibrated to see if it was being driven to the end user — anyone buying merino outdoorwear, a legacy garment or even a sock, shoe, woollen kayak or surfboard.
Mr Williamson leaves next week to carry out much the same role for his next employer at Leaft Foods, a plant protein start-up aiming to reduce the environmental impact of food production.
He was sad to be moving on, saying it had been a privilege to be a piece of the "giant NZM puzzle".
"When I get kind of emotional about it I think of the growers and how amazing they’ve been in my years here.
"It wasn’t an easy decision because there’s a community that’s embraced what we’ve been trying to do.
"At the other end of the equation there’s been these incredible brands and their customers and being involved right through that value chain."
Nor has it been all plain sailing.
"I owe a lot of beers around the community as we had to convince a lot of growers to do things which at the time were really uncomfortable for them. But I think if there was one big takeaway it’s that growers are very sophisticated nowadays and understand it’s all about the end user in an offshore market, and really understanding their needs and reverse engineering that back to what they are growing and making sure they can solve real-world problems."
"The gold standard now is ZQRX which has the regenerative component in it and that’s what people come looking for.
"In the early days you had to hunt pretty hard and you spend a lot of time around the world pitching. It’s different now. They come to you and want this story and everything connected with it."
Brand partners trusted the performance and quality of merino being provided which was backed up by "world-leading" environmental and ethical credentials, he said.
The ZQ Regenerative Index was launched in 2021 as the world’s first regenerative wool platform along with merino wool apparel and footwear brands Allbirds, Icebreaker and Smartwool.
Tackling woollen products’ emissions and lower their environmental impact was the aim.
ZQRX evolved from the ZQ ethical wool programme and included its animal welfare and social responsibility criteria.
This route of innovation and challenging the status quo can be traced to 1996 when merino farmers took their future into their own hands by establishing markets for their fibre.
Initially there were just a handful of brands. Today, there are more than 100.
Mr Williamson was working with a Christchurch creative agency when he bumped into NZM co-founder John Brakenridge, who only left this year after 27 years as chief executive.
He found they spoke the same language.
They were on a similar wavelength when it came to embracing creativity, taking change head-on and being unafraid of pioneering new directions away from treating merino as a commodity product.
"We just synced. I liked the way he was trying to change the primary sector and it needed to change."
When another agency called The Plant was formed by a group that included him, NZM crossed over to continue working with it.
During this nine-year relationship, NZM was shaking things up by creating a market-first approach and introducing supply contracts to old and new brands.
Innovative end products were found by brand partners for fine wool and story-telling was woven into them to grow demand for the fibre.
They included the likes of Icebreaker, the merino wool outdoor clothing success story founded by New Zealander Jeremy Moon and sold to United States retailer VF Corporation in 2017.
Similar to NZM, Icebreaker championed the values of sustainability, natural fibres, environmental and social ethics and animal welfare.
Mr Williamson said the Icebreaker brand was all about the performance of merino wool.
"You climb Mt Everest, you wear Icebreaker. At the other end if you are at the Cannes Film Festival you should be wearing Loro Piana [fine suits]. They are the extremes and are complementary. Our growers understand that and know there are certain things they have to do in their behaviours, in the hand-selection nature of their wool and that’s reflected in the final product."
Contracts created a connection from merino being grown on a station to a garment being sold across a retail counter. Farmers got a guaranteed price and buyers a guaranteed supply of quality wool with the attributes they needed for their products.
"Textiles wool makes up 1% of the market and keep on adding zero, zero, zero something and that’s fine wool’s share.
"We’re not building the Nissan Leaf of wool or even a Tesla wool — we built the Range Rover of wool. It’s a comfortable, sophisticated and luxury environment and it’s off-road and can perform and deliver the goods.
"For Kiwis it can be sometimes uncomfortable targeting this elite, but with such a small amount it’s all we can do and that’s where we got to."
When The Plant agency rolled into a technology company called RedSeed, Mr Brakenridge approached him in 2010 to join NZM’s inner fold.
A handshake later and he was part of the team.
This was a period of more change. The merino company went out on a limb to support the end of mulesing, a procedure where flaps of skin are cut from the breech of sheep to prevent flystrike.
Early conversations were held about bringing sustainability into the wool-to-market cycle and passing on market insights to farmers.
Mr Williamson said his role was to tease out the "magic" and emotional experience and put into words or pictures the way people felt.
"I would like to say it was really easy, but there were some very, very difficult years.
"We were trying to innovate inside an industry that has been that way for 100 years, maybe 150 years.
"There’s a wonderful cigarette card I found with wool bales being taken off by a traction engine to the market and the grower being told he didn’t need to worry about it any more because these brokers were going to take care of it. If you looked at the industry the only thing that had changed was the type of transport — they were going off by truck."
Initially, NZM struggled with the balance between IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient) in brand development.
IQ was marketing, while brand and experience went into EQ.
Most decisions were emotional, especially when it came to shopping.
ZQ was the result. To launch this a summit was held in Palo Alto, California, next to the Stanford University campus. Palo Alto is a centre of innovation and innovators. and was home to Apple founder, the late Steve Jobs.
The concept was to bring together leaders of key brands, hire a room and bring in university professors to challenge the thinking of the value chain.
On the edge of the campus they noticed a lot of empty retail space in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.
That spawned the idea of renting premises.
On the first day of the summit, brand partners were invited into the interior which had been dressed up as a mini-lecture theatre for the professorial lectures.
The second day after visiting innovation firm Ideo, they returned to see it had been transformed into a ZQ pop-up store.
Mr Williamson said this creative concept of a retail store of the future captured people’s hearts and minds and locked them into ZQ.
"I think I’m most proud of taking ZQ and ZQRX, and we know it’s a mouthful, and building a story around this. ZQ was the IQ/EQ piece and RX was shorthand for the Regenerative Index and it’s stuck.
"What’s exciting now is seeing how brands communicate that to their brand users."
To simply create a code of compliance for merino wool was unsustainable and it needed storytelling and relating the magic and emotional experience to make it work.
Mr Williamson was raised in Naseby and Dunedin and said he gained a healthy respect for the work farmers put in after digging out thistles on his uncle Bill McKerrow’s farm at Waianakarua, in Otago.
On merino farmers’ environmental performance, he sometimes thinks they do not get a fair shake.
"Recently, I feel like farming is lumped in with mining and it feels extractive and yet they grow incredible food, fibre, grow the communities and the economy — they’re growers.
"They do more than I will ever do and they’re an agronomist, geologist, an engineer, sometimes a mentor, medic, best mate, school teacher.
"They’re everyday heroes never acknowledged."
Mr Williamson said he was looking forward to his new role as there was potential to find a new income stream for merino growers who had been supportive of his move to Leaft.
Co-founded by John Penno and Maury Leyland Penno, the idea for leaf protein came at a hackathon. Funds have been from heavy-hitters and a team has been built up to produce edible protein with a light touch on the environment.
This is based around rubisco — the protein in green leaves responsible for photosynthesis — with technology developed to extract it for human consumption.
The next step is to fast-track product prototypes into the market.
Mr Williamson said this space appealed to him as he always liked to prototype fast and move quickly to gain insights into a prototype’s potential.
For him, the pinnacle at NZM was when it won the supreme award at the New Zealand International Business Awards in 2019.
Now it was time to find a new mountain and relearn and recharge.
"It’s a great problem that I believe they’ve solved. That problem is we need to reduce meat-based products because of the environmental credentials against them. The challenge is a lot of the plant-based products don’t really deliver the protein and what you’re looking for.
"Leaft has cracked that with its Leaft-based protein that’s the complete nutrition with an amino acid profile similar to beef. It’s great for farmers because they can potentially de-stock and maybe get an even better return in the long term by taking it from lucerne. It’s not something that’s foreign to them, so it’s really complementary."
As Leaft’s new creative lead, he hopes to replicate some of the lessons he has learned at NZM.
He wants to bring to the start-up NZM’s same fearless approach towards failure. That was under the same rule-book that it must increase the sales margin, trust and reputation for farmers, partners and end brands.
Perhaps 70% of what NZM does brings in money and then there was the evolutionary and revolutionary work.
An example was Allbirds’ revolutionary merino shoes. They went from slow starters to leading the ethical shoe market and that flowed into becoming a core part of NZM business.
"We often have about 10 chips on the table. Seven don’t go well, but we learn a lot from them and it flows back. Two or three do really well. On paper they seemed like crazy ideas, but they pay off."
