As joint Managing Director and the person responsible for much of the financial and administration side of the Seabreeze business, Vicki gets to see first-hand the trusted relationships that have been built up over the years with both employees and customers.
Wed March 16th 2022
Everyone at Seabreeze likes the busy nature of our work environment and Vicki is no exception. She and husband Malcolm run the business together and are proud to have such a close-knit, dedicated team. “We’re able to take a real interest in our staff, because we’re quite small”, she says. “We move around, we’re hands on ourselves. We get to chat to them about family life and what they are up to.”
She appreciates all the different perspectives that come from having a team with a wide range of life experiences. It all contributes to a team that works hard and trusts each other. “We’re a really diverse bunch, we’ve all got different personality types and cultures and it's all quite interesting. We’re all hard workers but I think we enjoy it as well.”
As business owners, Vicki and Malcolm appreciate that they’ve been trusted with relationships that were already existing before they bought Seabreeze. “It's a well known business in the Silverdale - Orewa area,” says Vicki, “and there’s trust there with people who have used Seabreeze before, and come back year after year.”
There’s also a lot of trust with Seabreeze’s network of ‘beach store’ clients, scattered around the coastal parts of New Zealand. Seabreeze keeps them stocked up with things like souvenir printed t-shirts. Vicki knows it's the personal touch that keeps them loyal. “Malcolm does the big trips up north and down on the East Cape to do the beach stores. They just trust us to come around year after year. I’ve certainly had people say, ‘Oh, we've tried somewhere else and we prefer to come back to you guys again’.”
What really holds these relationships together is the knowledge that, in the rare instance that something's not right, Seabreeze will own it and remedy it straight away. It’s the kind of reassurance you can’t always rely on when you’re manufacturing offshore — and that local touch is a huge part of what makes Seabreeze different.
