Amanda Gaskin
Seachange
From working in London studios before the internet was a thing to burnout to growing a studio with her husband Tim. We chat about trust, respect and alignment with the clients being the key do doing great work
Amanda Gaskin is the co-founder and Creative Director of Seachange. Seachange has picked up major recognition here and overseas, including D&AD Pencils, New York Type Directors Club awards, AGDA wins and honours at the Best Design Awards.
Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s I watched a lot of terrible TV ads. But every so often there’d be one that really stood out, something that made me realise someone had actually thought deeply about it. Ads like the Ansett NZ ‘Fluffy’ commercial or the old Instant Kiwi campaigns. They were clever, funny and unmistakably Kiwi. It was probably the first time I realised New Zealanders have this uniquely dry, subtle sense of humour, which I loved. Throughout high school I wanted to go into advertising because of work like that.
Both of my parents worked in sales, and when my mum realised I could draw she was so impressed. She doesn’t have a creative bone in her body, sorry Mum. They were always really supportive of my creativity, even though they didn’t totally understand where it came from.
:quality(82)/media/Oikos.jpg)
:quality(82)/media/loot.jpg)
Not at all. I showed my mum some of my work recently and she said, “Oh, it’s nice, but it doesn’t have much graphic design in it, does it?” I’m still not entirely sure what she thinks graphic design is. More stuff, maybe.
My dad calls us “Advertising hot shots”, which is not only cringe but couldn’t be further from what we do. We don’t even work in advertising, haha.
Honestly, no idea. I don’t think I properly understood what design was until I got my first job.
Definitely not top of the class through high school. I have ADHD, although I only found that out a few years ago. I really struggled with subjects like maths and science because they just didn’t spark any joy for me. ADHD brains need dopamine to engage, so I naturally gravitated towards the art department and took as many creative subjects as I could.
Then at AUT the classes were pretty big, which made it hard to connect with lecturers and tutors. I think I needed a smaller environment where I would’ve felt more supported. Also, at 18 you’re still figuring out who you are and probably have no clue what you actually want to do with your life.
I’ll definitely encourage my kids to take a gap year, travel, and maybe work a few less-than-ideal jobs before studying, just so they can appreciate their career choice once they find it.
Seachange’s co-founder and my partner, Tim Donaldson, went to Ilam in Christchurch, and I’ve always been jealous of his university experience. His class only had seven people, and they were taught by the same tutor for all four years. Luckily for him, that tutor was Hamish Meikle, who ran this brilliant studio called Circle at the time. He was teaching while actively running a practice, so students were learning from someone with real-world experience.
To this day Hamish is one of the smartest people we’ve ever met. Circle did incredible work for the music and fashion industries, although sadly most of it existed before the internet so there’s barely any record of it.
I was lucky enough to work with Hamish after university, and he’s the person who really made me fall in love with design, not any of my tutors. He introduced me to the idea of clear, simple thinking and how to communicate so much with so little. He was very much a Smile in The Mind designer, and I still think that book is essential reading for design students.
:quality(82)/media/woolpot.png)
:quality(82)/media/wecompost.jpg)
:quality(82)/media/smileinthemind.webp)
It was definitely more female-heavy. But interestingly, I’m not sure how many of those women actually ended up working in design. A lot of the women I studied with moved into adjacent creative roles like account management or studio management, hardly any actually became designers.
At Seachange, the applicant pool is often heavily male-dominated, which I find interesting but not entirely surprising. Design is a very competitive industry, and I do wonder whether the realities of family life, childcare and household responsibilities make it harder for women to stay in it long term. Society definitely places more on our plates.
At one point I put out a “Females, please apply” call on Instagram because I was frustrated by the imbalance. At the time our applications were probably 85% male. The response was amazing and we ended up getting flooded with female applicants.
Not at all. I wanted to travel. My two best friends and I had saved through our final year, so as soon as we graduated we packed our bags and travelled around Southeast Asia for six months.
When I came back I ended up working at a restaurant. I was probably still recalibrating after such a big trip, and all the opiates, haha, so design wasn’t really on my mind.
Then one day my mum found a job ad for a junior designer role at a studio in Parnell. The salary was $35,000, which felt like a fortune at the time. I applied, and it turned out Tim, my now partner, and Hamish Meikle were the ones interviewing me.
I vividly remember showing them my final uni project, which I’d made entirely by hand, cutting and pasting weird collages together. Meanwhile everyone else was getting excited about computers and digital design. It was 2004 and I was still physically sticking things together. I’ve always had a slightly rebellious streak like that. If everyone’s doing the same thing, I instinctively want to do the opposite.
Luckily Hamish and Tim liked my strange project and gave me a shot. Honestly, everything I know and love about design comes back to those two.
Ha, not for me. But we got along really well and I found Tim incredibly inspiring. I definitely had a talent crush on him.
After about two years of working together I decided to move to London, and Tim followed me. Although he tells everyone I followed him.
The internet was only just starting to become a thing, and not many studios had websites back then. From New Zealand it was actually pretty hard to research agencies or understand where we wanted to work.
When we got to London we bought a bunch of design books and started making lists of studios we liked. We were pretty naïve. A lot of agencies never replied to us, and competition was intense because the pool of designers in London was huge.
Eventually we both went through recruitment agencies and landed jobs. I ended up at a studio I really loved, while Tim got a job at one he liked but didn’t love, so he kept applying elsewhere. Within about six months he landed what was arguably the best agency job in London at the time.
The studio I worked at had both a print team and a digital team, which completely blew my mind. Up until then I’d only really known print design, so being somewhere that did both felt incredibly futuristic.
Nope. We weren’t looking back at all. Honestly, I don’t think we would’ve moved home if we hadn’t had our first child in London. The lifestyle suited us perfectly and there were so many opportunities there. We absolutely loved it.
But once we had our daughter, doing everything without family support became much harder, and coming home felt like the right decision.
Not straight away. Tim was freelancing at Inhouse with Arch MacDonnell, and I was at home with our daughter slowly building up our own clients.
We’d work together in the evenings after she went to bed and on weekends. We worked constantly, but it felt exciting because we were building something together.
Eventually we reached a point where we had enough clients, enough relationships, and enough financial stability to take the leap. Tim left Inhouse and Seachange officially started in April 2017, 3 months before our second child was born, looking back I’m not sure what we were thinking.
:quality(82)/media/silo.jpg)
:quality(82)/media/bugg2.jpg)
Absolutely. Work ethic is a huge part of it. Neither of us came from wealthy families, we didn’t go to private schools full of connections, and we both had to pay our own way through university and leave with massive loans.
We’ve never had any handouts, so we’ve always had to make things happen ourselves. That probably drives us. No one’s coming to save the day.
Both Tim and I were also raised by single mums, and we watched them juggle multiple jobs to support their families. They were incredibly strong role models.
But we also work hard because we genuinely care about the work. We want to create things we’re proud of. When I present work to a client, I need to fully believe in it. I need to be able to look them in the eye and stand behind what we’ve made.
Honestly, every male creative I’ve worked with has been incredibly supportive and encouraging.
I’ve never had a female creative director, although I would’ve loved that.
The male creative directors I worked with were always inclusive and valued my opinion. Maybe I just got lucky, because I’ve definitely heard some horror stories over the years, but my own experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
I do have quite a strong personality though, and I think some men are slightly intimidated by me. I don’t mince my words, and maybe that’s part of why I’ve never really felt pushed around.
For the first two years it was just Tim and me, and honestly that worked really well.
Around year three we hired our first designer, and it was a disaster. Not because of the person, but because Tim and I had absolutely no management skills. We had no idea how to properly manage people or get the best out of them.
In a small studio you need people who can wear multiple hats, and not every designer is suited to that. Someone can be brilliant at one thing but not necessarily rounded enough for a smaller team.
We learned a lot through those mistakes, and I think we’re much better managers now.
That said, when you’re a small business owner, all the stress and risk ultimately falls on you. You can have an amazing team, but at the end of the day you’re the one lying awake worrying about how to pay everyone, keep clients happy and still create work you’re proud of. Trying to be creative all day while managing staff, writing proposals at night, dealing with finances and constantly handling clients eventually became overwhelming. By the end of 2023 I was completely burnt out. I remember saying to Tim, “I don’t think I want to do this anymore. I think I’m done.”
He knew I wouldn’t say something like that lightly, so he definitely freaked out a bit. We’ve always said we wouldn’t continue the business without each other because the way we work together is pretty unique. We trust each other’s opinions more than anyone else’s.
About a year ago we hired a general manager because we realised we needed some distance from the day-to-day running of the business. That decision has been pivotal.
For the previous few years I barely designed at all, and I think I was deeply frustrated by that. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day to design, direct, manage a team and run a business simultaneously.
Now I’m back designing and directing again, and everything feels far more balanced.
Supertrash was a pretty pivotal job for us. We still get new business enquiries because of it, and it’s eight years old now. We’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way too, far too many to mention, but I don’t really dwell on them. When you’re just two creatives doing everything, from scoping and billing to strategy and making the work, the lines blur pretty quickly.
I can’t speak for Tim, but most of my mistakes have probably been around managing people. No one really prepares you for how hard it is to manage other adults, especially when you’re also trying to be creative and run a business at the same time.
We’ve taken on tiny projects with almost no budget and turned them into award-winning work, which we’re really proud of. Then we’ve had projects with much bigger budgets where we weren’t particularly happy with the outcome. The lesson is always the same though: if there’s trust, respect and alignment with the client, regardless of budget, the work usually ends up great. If you’re not fully aligned, eventually something breaks, usually the work, the relationship, or both. But that’s just part of the process, and every project teaches you something new.
:quality(82)/media/supertrash.jpg)
Australia feels really exciting for us at the moment because our client base there is steadily growing. We recently had a very talented designer rejoin the team after spending two years trying out other studios, and he’s now based in Sydney. So this year we’re planning to get over there as much as possible to work closely with him, but also to properly hustle for work, which is something very foreign to Tim and me.
In the short term though, we also need to build a bigger team in Auckland. We love hiring juniors because they bring energy and a completely different perspective, but they can also be incredibly time-intensive. If they don’t get up to speed quickly, you may as well be paying a senior designer, so it can become a bit of a false economy. That said, Tim and I genuinely love mentoring young creatives. They just have to be smart, hardworking and able to keep up.
We’re also really interested in building a less traditional agency model. This year we’ve spent a lot of time meeting and interviewing all sorts of creatives who we’d love to pull in on different projects, rather than being weighed down by permanent salaries, the same ways of thinking, and the overheads that come with a large full-time team.
Yes, it’s a very conscious decision. Awards take a huge amount of time, resources and energy to pull together. In the first five years of Seachange they were our main new business tool and they were incredible for that. But as our profile has grown more organically, we don’t need to rely on them as much anymore.
The thing is, I know we can win awards. We’ve won over 100 in less than nine years, so there’s not a lot left to prove. But I do have a funny relationship with them. They’re not facts, they’re not scientific, and they don’t always reflect the best work.
Every year there are pieces of work that I think are exceptional that don’t get recognised, and then sometimes weaker work gets rewarded because there are so many variables, especially in New Zealand. The calibre of judges, personal bias, sponsor influence, and sometimes just the reality of time pressure when assessing work.
Awards are lovely. But they’re not the be all and end all.
:quality(82)/media/twyg.jpg)
:quality(82)/media/think.jpg)