Why I’m farewelling my New Zealand life (again)

Monday, 2 February 2026

James Bush is a womenswear designer and teaches at Massey University. He is a regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: Guys, I’m out. Done. Gone burgers. I’m about to become another statistic. I’ve made the decision to leave New Zealand (at least for now).

I returned home at the very end of 2020, after seven years in Europe. In many ways I was a Covid refugee, returning home because the world had closed its borders and my visa had run out at the worst possible time.

After eight months under heavy lockdown in Geneva, Switzerland, arriving in Wellington was a shock.

The bustling cafés and restaurants were a stark contrast to the shuttered venues and socially distanced public spaces that had been my normal for most of the previous year. I’d spent that long, hot European summer isolating inside a fifth floor apartment, with the shutters drawn and windows closed against Geneva’s dense, alpine heat. At night we slept with bowls of water around the bed, by the morning it had all evaporated.

Upon my return I found New Zealand bustling and vibrant. It felt like the worst of the pandemic had somehow been avoided and there was a sense of optimism I vaguely remembered from the halcyon pre-pandemic days of 2019. I threw myself into creating a life here.

In 2021 I launched my business, J.Bush. I wanted to bring the skills and experience I’d had in Europe to a more relaxed, Kiwi environment and the New Zealand fashion industry welcomed me with open arms. Stalwarts like Viva, Fashion Quarterly and Ensemble all featured me and my work in their pages.

I discovered a brilliant community of like-minded creatives - the complete opposite of the dog-eat-dog world I’d previously been working in. I was also impressed by the New Zealand consumer’s commitment to supporting local design and manufacturing.

Around the same time I began teaching on the fashion course at Massey University - initially wherever they needed staff, but with time I found my way onto the final year honours paper, where I built a teaching practice based around physically researching and developing ideas. My concept was simple: if the final outcome is physical, writing an esoteric essay about it will only get you so far.

A couple of years later and I was introduced to Tracy Watkins, editor of The Post. I pitched her the idea of a column sitting somewhere at the intersection of design, social science and politics. She threw me a bone, and here we are now.

New Zealand has provided me with the most incredible opportunities. Where else, could I start and run a business, while developing teaching and writing careers on the side? It’s human scale, and while there will always be competition in any society, the competition here is nowhere near the level one finds in larger cities.

That said, there are a couple of major barriers facing New Zealand’s makers and entrepreneurs.

For one, our market size is an absolute killer. The whole country is the size of many single cities globally, so for specialised business like mine, it’s difficult for the local market to support the scale needed to be commercially viable. One has to pitch internationally from the beginning, but that’s easier said than done.

On top of this, capital and investment infrastructure are thin on the ground. There’s limited appetite for investment in creative or niche businesses, so the business culture tends towards conservative sectors – property, primary industries and tourism.

This breeds a somewhat conservative mindset that permeates the country more broadly. One need only look at the removal of art history from the school curriculum, or the severely reduced offerings of philosophy programmes at Massey and Victoria universities. The tertiary education system is increasingly shifting towards workforce training rather than intellectual development, but at what cost?

There are also more than a few talent and supply-chain issues. The specialised skills, suppliers and production infrastructure needed to grow my kind of business simply aren’t here at scale. It’s difficult not to end up cobbling things together from whatever materials are available, rather than creating considered work with a sophisticated relationship between material, structure and end consumer.

And finally, the cost structure is absolutely diabolical. We pay top dollar for everything, from shipping to services, yet sell in a market where the New Zealand peso doesn’t stretch very far at all.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, towards the end of 2025 I was beginning to feel stuck. So when an unsolicited, international job offer arrived in my inbox, I decided to take it. Not because I was desperate to leave, but because, after five years of building and learning, pushing and growing, I wasn’t really sure how much further I could take things here. The universe made the call for me.

I have no doubt that NZ will get through its current malaise, and with borders again tightening up across the world, it is likely that highly skilled Kiwis will be returning to our shores en masse in the not too distant future.

Who knows, I may even be one of them.

And to end shamelessly on the practical, J.Bush will be having a fire sale at 103 Victoria St, on February 13-14, with all remaining stock, fabric and trims priced to clear. So make hay while the sun shines.

An earlier version of this column included an incorrect address for the J.Bush fire sale.

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