An overseas experience in the UK is often a career-defining opportunity for young Kiwis to gain professional experience not available at home. But for New Zealand business women coming (or returning) to the UK later in their career, it is often the wide-ranging, high-level leadership experience which they have developed in New Zealand’s smaller markets that makes them the perfect fit for specialist roles abroad. Former Air New Zealand General Manager of Property and Infrastructure Rebecca MacDonald has experienced both types of ‘O.E.’. She returned in April this year, 14 years after her initial London stint, as the UK Director for Property Assets for the Marshall Group Property in Cambridge. 

Rosemary Coldstream’s flowering English garden is heavy with summer rain, so it feels strange to be sitting in it discussing heat-resistant and drought-tolerant garden design.  “Landscape gardening will change radically in the next 15-20 years, because of climate change”, she says. While her clients typically desire a traditional English mixed garden, with trees, shrubs, perennials and grass lawn, Rosemary is certain that the favoured pittosporum and hebes - and even birch and oak - in the UK will have to give way to a Mediterranean or South American plant palate. “With any garden, you've got to tailor it to the site,” she says.

Kim Palmer never actually set out to establish a global business. The inspiration for her award-winning health app, Clementine, grew out of her personal experience dealing with panic attacks during pregnancy and after childbirth. Her own mental health journey motivated her to develop the Clementine portfolio of hypnotherapy tools to help other women “in the trenches”. As interest exploded during the pandemic, this Kiwi FemTech innovator rapidly scaled her small UK business with impact investor funding, and is now taking the company she founded in 2017 into new international markets.