Qoin - be part of where the world is going

News Ticker

“Can my business benefit from networking and word of mouth?”
December issue NZ Manufacturer – The Year in Review
A Step Forward in Safety – The New Rules for Smoke Alarms 
The Interview – Jill Cooper
Lifting performance by eliminating data silos
NZ-EU trade agreement is great news for sustainability
The Industry 4.0 Transformation – An update from the innovation frontline
The Interview: Heidi Hannonen, Vice President, Markets, Kemppi Oy

Profiles

Women Founders Marian Johnson

Women founders lay down challenge for New Zealand to do business better 

2023 women founder conference, Electrify Aotearoa: Auckland, saw the best and brightest women in business lay down the challenge for New Zealand to do better. The best and brightest women in Aotearoa business want improvements to the business sector and they’re not going to wait around for someone to fix things.. Organised and presented by Ministry of Awesome and hosted at the SkyCity Theatre, Electrify Aotearoa saw keynotes from a broad selection of Aotearoa’s most electric founders, including Janine Grainger of Easy Crypto , Maru Nihoniho, of Metia Interactive, and Frances Shoemack of Abel along with 20 other inspirational speakers and startup experts conducting masterclasses and panel discussions. A key challenge for New Zealand business laid down by Electrify Aotearoa was to support and invest capital in as many women-led start-ups as men. Other panels at the event included, Barriers to investment led by Theresa Gattung, Founder mindset led by Suse Reynolds of Angel Association NZ with Supie’s Sarah Balle and Jessica Manins, Co-Founder at Beyond, as well as masterclasses in brand and go-to-market, suitable for entrepreneurs at all stages of their growth trajectory.   Sold out for its second consecutive year, Electrify Aotearoa again underlined the inportance  of building deeper connections among entrepreneurial wahine, to lift each other up and open doors for one another. Ministry of Awesome CEO, Marian Johnson said the event was a “thunderclap” moment for women in business in Aotearoa to demand and lead the change the country needs. “To every woman in this room, this is your call to action to believe, to activate, to connect with each other and power up. Every one of our speakers is a trailblazer and an innovator so tell their stories, tell your own, and share that inspiration around,” Johnson said. “For NZ to be a world leading innovation economy, […]

keren-cook-300x200

Q&A: Keren Cook, NatureBee CEO and Global Consumer Advocate

Q: How are you finding current business conditions? A: Continued talk of a recession and the rising cost of living is reducing consumers’ discretionary spending, which naturally makes sales growth tougher. For us, this means working harder to position our product in a crowded marketplace where price is king for many. Q: Where do you see future growth opportunities for your company? A: We see some positive future growth opportunities offshore presently, specifically with a focus on the United States and United Kingdom markets. Q: Business success – what’s it all about? A: For us, business success is about customer-centric thinking and actions; having products that people both need and want. The key is to continually adapt and find ways in which to communicate the key benefits of our products and the drivers that really cut through a noisy marketplace. Q: How do you measure success – money or satisfaction for the task at hand? A: At NatureBee success is about having happy customers, which leads to business growth and customer retention! As such, success is measured by the lifetime value of our customers. We currently have over 29,000 loyal, returning customers and over 55,000 customers who we communicate with regularly, and we are always growing. Q: How are you finding staff retention in the current environment? Is it hard to keep them? A: Because of the way we’re set up as a business, the staff retention issues others are facing aren’t an issue for us at NatureBee. We tend to work alongside our long-term partners in a contract capacity and are fortunate that this creates consistency as well as flexibility. Q: What one thing would make business easier for you?  A: Great question. I think finding the magic button for Amazon would be it for me! We have been […]

poslovni portet Marina

Women in Business: Marina Rajic, CEO BioViros

Tell readers what it is that you do? At BioViros, we make special tools called viral vectors to help fight cancer. Imagine these as tiny delivery vans. We take a harmless virus, remove its contents, and put in a special package instead. This package has instructions that can teach our own immune system to recognise and fight cancer. We produce these viral vectors in large quantities so they can be used in cancer treatments. It’s a bit like running a factory that makes special delivery vans, but these vans are 0.000000001 meters in size, and their cargo is to equip our white blood cells. So far, we have established a laboratory for production in Lower Hutt, and hired key people to do run the process in NZ. As we expand in 2023, we are prioritising communication with our investors, understanding that their partnership is crucial for the team growth and production scale up to enable production of viral vectors for clinical trials in NZ and beyond. Where are the opportunities in Bio Tech? In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a growth of FDA approved drugs for cell and gene therapy. We have decided to dive deeper into this and place our bets on viral vector manufacturing. I hope to see New Zealand attracting a lot of talent in the field of cell therapy in the very near future. Globally we will also probably see a shift towards personalised medicine, driven by genomics and bioinformatics where precise algorithms can tailor the treatments for individual patients. Does BioViros have overseas markets? A large portion of BioViros market will be overseas. We’ve talked to people from Australia, US and will look into Asia as well. Customers are mainly interested in sourcing a high-quality product without the fear of delays, because that […]