Ellie Shedden is a true international citizen.

Born a Kiwi, she lived a chunk of her childhood in Australia, returned to New Zealand and boomeranged back to Oz.
But Melbourne was a mere bounce for a degree and to start work in the construction sector. By age 26 Ellie, a now well-travelled business woman, was promoted to the Czech Republic as a senior corporate services manager with a portfolio of projects – budget US$40 million.

Then love entered the picture – of her Venezuelan partner Sarkis Agobian and the Czech Republic.
“Who wouldn’t love being in the centre of Europe with the ease of travel and such culture,” she laughs. “Sarkis and I love it there.”

But there was only one way to meet the visa rules around staying – quit her job and start her own company. OOP Clicks was born (the name comes from Ellie and references “ Alley Oop”, an old song  and French circus acrobatic move).

Ellie built a substantial digital affiliate marketing business, think retail, tourism, banks, airlines… by reaching out to her network and aligning with one of the world’s biggest affiliate networks.

Next came COVID. The pair needed somewhere safe and Ellie, a Kiwi by birth, soon found Sarkis could get a partner visa as a permanent resident to join her in Auckland. She sold the business and secured the Australasian market for the affiliate network.

Elle brought OOP Marketing into the B:HIVE in February this year and quickly found out that New Zealand marketers don’t really understanding the value of affiliate marketing.

That’s something she is helping change – with agility that would be the envy of any circus acrobat.

Cryptocurrency and the world of decentralised finance (DeFi) is probably still a mystery to most of us.

But the B:HIVE is the home of one the world’s leading disruptors when it comes to unlocking the value of digital assets. Unvest is a cross-chain DeFi protocol for trading unvested tokens and it has attracted investors and traders from throughout the world.

It’s the brainchild of Kiran Matthews. You may have seen him, often sporting a wide brim hat and a growing amount of ink, hanging out at Friday drinks before lockdown.

It all started when the majority of his early investment in a crypto project was locked for a two-year period. When those tokens increased significantly in value, Kiran was a tad annoyed he couldn’t cash out some of his gain.

So back in April this year he invented a platform to change that. Unvest’s first product is “Liquid Vesting Tokens” or LVTs, that means projects who distribute using Unvest’s protocol can offer their early investors the option to realise gains early by selling the LVT within the vesting period. The LVTs can then be redeemed 1:1 at the end of the vesting period, or be traded an unlimited number of times securely on-chain.

As we have all seen, crypto like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin have huge surges and crashes – Doge did on the back of a flippant remark by Elon Musk.

So how does Unvest make any money? Unvest’s protocol takes a 2.5% fee every time an LVT is transferred between wallets. In the future these rewards will also be made available to the Unvest community who will be able to stake their UNV holdings to receive a share of the fees accumulated by the various projects using Unvest’s services. 

Unvest raised funds from international investors including GD10 Ventures and x21 Digital, so COO James Rohloff says it can quietly grow its product offering over the next few years without having to be too concerned by the high volatility of the crypto industry. 

Suffice it to say Unvest intends to be a one stop powerhouse to assist the launch of new crypto products. And from a platform that kicked off at the beginning of September it has shown plenty of muscle. According to CoinMarketCap.com, the price of Unvest (UNV) coin is sitting at around US$0.09, up over 300% from its listing price.  UNV coins can be bought and sold on exchanges such as Uniswap and Pancakeswap.

To learn more click here.

Paul O’Donohue and his SalesStar team are having to sit on their hands before they find out if they have won in the New Zealand International Business Awards.

Supposed to have been announced at a big black-tie event in October, COVID and its interminable lockdown/levels has seen the results pushed out until February 2022.

SalesStar is a finalist in two categories – Excellence in Digital Transformation and Australia-New Zealand business leader Kat Davey is a nominee in the Inspiring Women Leaders Award.

Paul says he and the team are proud, as these are the first awards SalesStar has entered:

“What is it they say about the painter’s house, or the mechanic’s car? As someone reminded us recently: ‘You’re a fantastic transformational sales company, but what are you doing about selling yourself?’.

“A good look in the mirror and we decided it’s time the world heard more about SalesStar and our determination to go global.”

SalesStar already has established practices in Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States and now in Mexico.

And in a perfect case study for how the B:HIVE encourages collaboration, Simon Anderson (Level One) has just partnered in and set up SalesStar Digital with the global team. Just as SalesStar has taken itself global by digitalising its sales training, that has now been extended to lead generation for SalesStar and its clients.

The B:HIVE’s indie ad agency Yarn created headlines around the world recently when it stung Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in her home town!

Yarn creative directors Rich Robson and Matt Sellars saw Thunberg hit out at New Zealand for not doing anything to tackle the climate crisis and the team thought “hell” our pizza client might have something to say about that.

Yarn founder Heath Davy says billboards that suggested Thunberg could go to Hell Pizza for 100% carbon neutral deliveries in New Zealand, first went up around the country. The campaign immediately attracted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. That got squashed.

Next, the team targeted Stockholm, placing one billboard 300 metres from Thunberg’s home. But that was not before one that country’s largest agencies was served with a legal threat to stop the billboards being erected.

Davy says a multi-national agency stepped up to the plate to help and the rest is history. Photos of the billboard went around the world.

Hell CEO Ben Cumming says: “The campaign hits all the right notes for us – engaging, polarising opinions and generating discussion on an important matter.”

If you have ever had a cheeky wee red at the B:HIVE Friday drinks (don’t we all miss it!), chances are it may have been from one of our fellow B:HIVEr’s Toi Toi Wines.

You might be interested to know that Toi Toi’s Pinot Noir Clutha 2020 has won a gold medal in the recent New World Wine Awards. That means it scored 95 points and is one of the top 50 wines across all varietals.

Kevin Joyce, the principal of Toi Toi who you will (usually) find with his team on Level Two, is delighted as it’s the first time the pinot noir has been entered in the awards for wines under $25. But winemaker and viticulturalist Tim Adams is even more chuffed after having to deal with challenging grape growing conditions, coupled with COVID-19 restrictions.

“I kind of let the wine make itself,” he says. “It’s wild fermented and we did gentle plunging, treating the fruit with gentle hands. We wanted to enhance the fruit, not over extract the tannins.”

Congratulations to the Toi Toi team. We can’t wait to taste it… if there’s any left after shoppers get the score. It is on special at New World stores this month at $21.99 or at Blackmarket.

Our B:HIVE kiwi conservators have been a tad busy over lockdown.

First there’s the name change – from Kiwis for kiwi to “Save the Kiwi”. And a little bird tells me that The Hatchery, a branding agency at the B:HIVE, helped with the rebrand.

Next came scoring New Zealand’s GOAT in a boat – Lisa Carrington. For those of you who are not sure what that means , it’s the title “Greatest of All Time – in a boat” that the NZ Herald gave Carrington after she won three gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics.

Carrington has become the latest Save the Kiwi ambassador, joining Sir John Key and Helen Clark among others. Part of Carrington’s involvement with Save the Kiwi will include an education campaign about dogs and kiwi over the summer holidays, featuring her own canine Colin.

Carrington said serving as an ambassador was one way she can give back to New Zealand after receiving so much support during her Olympic campaign this year.

“The kiwi is so important to our identity as New Zealanders; not only are we known as ‘Kiwis’ around the world, Aotearoa has such unique wildlife,” she said. “I want to be a part of it surviving for the future generations.” Carrington was named an ambassador during Save the Kiwi Week late October.

The team gave us a couple of facts to think about: An average of 27 kiwi are killed by predators every week. That’s a population decline of around 1,400 kiwi every year, or two per cent. At this rate, kiwi may disappear from the mainland in our lifetime. Just one hundred years ago, kiwi numbered in the millions. A single roaming dog can wipe out an entire kiwi population in a matter of days.

For more information, and to check out Save the Kiwi’s new re-brand click here.