From the Editor

By Matt Cooney, June 8, 2006 @ 3:26 pm

Misery is an odd name to call a fashion range, or a line of toys, or, say, yourself. But it’s intriguing, evocative and neatly captures Tanya ‘Misery’ Thompson’s art, which manages to be both cute and just a bit creepy at the same time.

Still, who’d want to be so closely identified with their product—to be, in effect, Brand X? Thompson wears the Misery label easily because her brand is so true to herself. It’s not affected or egotistical. Most of all, it’s not empty: Misery’s products are imaginative and unique, as her recent starring appearance at the Taipei Toy Fair illustrates. (See our cover story on page 50 to learn how Thompson is on her way to building a global Misery brand.)

We like to think of this straightforward, take-me-as-I-am approach as an essentially Kiwi trait. The New Zealanders featured inside these pages share an appreciation of a great idea and a willingness to work like hell to see it through. It turns out those characteristics—“creativity, flexibility and ability to solve problems and get things done”, in the words of former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley—are exactly the qualities that are most admired in China. If you thought that China was too big, too daunting, too dangerous, it might be time to think again. New Zealand and China are complementary economies and the Chinese like what they hear of Enzed. Check out our feature on page 60 and visit our website for more stories of Kiwis doing smart business in China.

There’s some nervousness about manufacturing in China. It’s misplaced. New Zealand’s future relies on ideas: design, marketing, innovation—which is why the Buy Kiwi-Made campaign, which received $11.5 million in the May budget, misses the point. It doesn’t matter if your next toaster is made in China so long as we can print the labels that matter: imagined, invented, recorded, written, researched, marketed and designed, with pride, in New Zealand.