I've been op shopping for more than 40 years. Long before secondhand was fashionable, before sustainability became a marketing word and definitely before anyone called it the circular economy, secondhand was simply part of life.
I grew up with op shops and secondhand. From the age of nine I was brought up by a solo mum, and even before that we were a low income family. My mum worked as a checkout supervisor at 3 Guys, if you're old enough to remember that supermarket 😂, and my dad was a builder who had businesses that succeeded and businesses that didn't. We didn't have a lot of money, so buying secondhand wasn't some conscious environmental decision. It was just what you did.
But somewhere along the way, secondhand became something I genuinely loved.
👢 Secondhand, Docs and finding my own style
By my early teens, secondhand had already become more than something we bought because money was tight. I was starting to work out my own style, and apparently 13 year old me had fairly definite ideas about what that looked like. 😂
My mum and I used to go into town on a Friday night just so I could look around this store I loved. I got my first pair of secondhand Dr. Martens when I was about 13, and Army and Leather in Onehunga was another favourite haunt. There was also the old army satchel that I decorated with a Union Jack and a huge anarchy symbol. Very subtle. 😂
I loved finding things that were different. Things with a bit of character, things that weren't sitting on every other rack and things that let me look like me rather than whatever somebody had decided everyone was supposed to be wearing that year.
🧵 Then I got a job on K'Road
At 16, my first job was as a shop assistant in the haberdashery department at Rendell's on K'Road. I looked after all the stockings, pantyhose and all those little bits and pieces that came with a proper department store haberdashery section.
K'Road in those days was a bloody brilliant place for a curious 16 year old with a lunch break. 😂 I'd spend mine walking up and down Karangahape Road, disappearing down the alleys and little lanes and discovering all the retro stores, secondhand shops and boutiques tucked away in places you would never have found unless you went looking.
Central Auckland became a pretty big part of my life after that. I worked in Auckland City through much of my late teens, and for a while I lived about 20 metres off Queen Street while studying Travel and Tourism. I came back to living and working around central Auckland again in my late 20s and early 30s, so those streets, shops, arcades and little tucked away places ended up being part of several different chapters of my life.
Later I moved into corporate jobs, earned decent money and could afford the flash stuff, but I still found myself in secondhand boutiques looking for clothes for work. By then it had absolutely nothing to do with what I could or couldn't afford. I just loved finding things that were different.
Retail has been part of my working life for around 30 years, including charity and secondhand retail. I've managed shops, worked with stock, customers, volunteers and all the day to day realities that come with retail. I know how much work goes into getting one donated or secondhand item from a bag or box onto a rack, shelf or website, and I know how quickly that work multiplies when almost every item is unique.
That experience would eventually become incredibly important, although at the time I certainly wasn't thinking, “One day I'm going to build a technology platform for this industry.”
🌪️ Sometimes the next thing starts when everything else falls apart
The years before OpShop.Kiwi weren't exactly a neat little founder journey. There was the end of a relationship, a Protection Order, ongoing harassment, losing my job, being locked out of my home, being unwell and eventually waiting for major surgery. There were periods where it felt like several parts of my life had decided to fall over at the same time.
By October 2025 I wasn't working, I was dealing with my health that at times kept me indoors, and I was bored out of my bloody mind.
So I started looking at something I understood: Secondhand.
I knew how these shops worked. I knew the amount of stock that came through them. I knew how much incredible stuff never reached customers outside the immediate area, and I knew that putting unique secondhand items online could be painfully time consuming.
I started looking at the ecommerce options available to a small secondhand business and had one of those moments where you look at the costs, the subscriptions, the work involved and think, “You have got to be kidding me, how much?!”
Then came the next thought. Okay, so how could you?
💡 The idea that wouldn't leave me alone
The original idea was fairly simple. What if New Zealand had an online marketplace specifically for op shops and genuine secondhand businesses? Somewhere that understood that these businesses don't necessarily have 500 identical products sitting in a warehouse. They might have one Crown Lynn vase, one vintage jacket, one unusual piece of furniture or one pair of boots, and once it is sold, it is gone.
I started pulling the idea apart, looking at how it could work and finding all the reasons it probably couldn't.
And there were plenty of people willing to help with that part. 😂
My mother told me I was crazy and that it wouldn't work. She still tells me I am so much like my father, and that hasn't always been meant kindly. My dad had ideas, took risks, had businesses that worked and others that failed. There had been enough comments over the years about being a nothing, a nobody, or ending up just like him that some of it inevitably sat there in the back of my head.
There was also the voice left behind from a former partner and years of being told what I couldn't do.
For a while I listened to all of it.
Then, while I was picking the idea to bits, I decided something.
If I was going to do this, I was going to do it differently.
🙋♀️ So I asked for help
This is probably one of the most important parts of the OpShop.Kiwi story.
I stopped thinking I had to know everything.
I started asking for advice. I looked for mentors. I found people who understood business, startups, technology and commercialisation, and I started putting the idea in front of people who were prepared to question it.
That wasn't always comfortable. Some ideas survived. Others absolutely did not. 😂
But every time somebody challenged an assumption, asked an awkward question or made me explain why something needed to exist, the idea became clearer.
I started learning something I probably should have learned years earlier. Asking for help doesn't make the idea less mine. Having people around me who know things I don't know doesn't make me less capable. It gives me a better chance of building the thing properly.
🚀 Then it became real
What started as something to occupy my brain began turning into an actual business.
On 23 February 2026, OpShop.Kiwi Limited was incorporated.
That was a pretty significant moment. The idea that had started while I was sitting at home bored, unwell and wondering what the hell I was going to do next suddenly had a company name attached to it.
But even then, the idea didn't stop changing.
🗺️ It was never going to be just another marketplace
The more I worked on OpShop.Kiwi, the more obvious it became that simply creating another website where people could list products wasn't enough.
If shoppers don't know a store exists, how are they supposed to support it? That question helped lead to The Guide, a way to discover genuine secondhand businesses around New Zealand.
If a store has hundreds or thousands of unique items and every one needs to be photographed, identified, described and listed, how do you make that easier? That problem led to Revelist and the idea of using technology to dramatically reduce the work involved in getting secondhand stock online.
If something sells across the counter, the online stock needs to know about it. If it sells online, the store needs to know about it. That led into the POS side of the system.
Then there is advertising, store discovery, events, customer tools and the other pieces that have gradually joined together.
Somewhere along the way, OpShop.Kiwi stopped being a marketplace and started becoming an ecosystem built specifically around secondhand.
💚 Commercial doesn't have to mean without purpose
I want OpShop.Kiwi to be commercially successful. I don't apologise for that.
A business needs to make money if it is going to survive, employ people, keep developing technology, support its customers and grow beyond one person sitting behind a computer doing far too many things at once. 😂
But I also don't believe commercial success and purpose have to sit on opposite sides of the table. The dream is much bigger than simply operating a successful marketplace.
I would love to see OpShop.Kiwi eventually able to help smaller and rural secondhand stores access technology and opportunities they might otherwise struggle to afford. I want to build international connections so extraordinary secondhand items sitting in small New Zealand stores can find buyers well beyond their own towns and eventually beyond New Zealand.
And then there is the problem that sits at the end of reuse.
♻️ What happens when something really can't be reused?
Secondhand extends the life of things, but eventually some things genuinely reach the end.
Textiles are one of the areas I would love OpShop.Kiwi to be able to tackle in the future. What if unusable fabric could become composite building board, soundproofing, insulation or something else useful instead of becoming waste?
That's not something I can magically launch next month. It will take research, partnerships, money and probably a whole new collection of people telling me I'm crazy. 😂
But that's part of the point.
Commercial success gives OpShop.Kiwi the means. Purpose determines what I eventually want to do with it.
🚐 And then there is the Roadshow
One of the parts I'm most excited about is getting away from the computer and actually getting out around New Zealand.
The OpShop.Kiwi Roadshow is about visiting stores, meeting the people behind them, listening to what they need, helping businesses get onto the platform and discovering the places and treasures that make secondhand shopping so much fun in the first place.
It also brings me back to where this whole story started.
Actually going op shopping.
✍️ Which brings me to this blog
I realised that if I'm going to be travelling around New Zealand visiting op shops, vintage stores, antique shops, markets and all the weird and wonderful places in between, I'm probably going to have a few stories to tell. So this is also the beginning of something a little more personal.
OpShop.Kiwi Blog.
I'll still write about OpShop.Kiwi, what I'm building and what is happening behind the scenes, but I also want somewhere to write about the shops I visit, the people I meet, the things I find and probably the occasional completely unnecessary treasure that somehow ends up coming home with me.
Because underneath all the technology, business plans, meetings, mentoring, development work and spreadsheets, I'm still the person who will spot an op shop sign while driving through a town and immediately wonder whether I have time to turn around. 😂
🌱 I'm still building it
OpShop.Kiwi isn't the finished story. Not even close.
There are still things that don't work the way I want them to. There are ideas that will change, things I'll get wrong and probably a few more occasions where I'll wonder why on earth I thought building all of this was a sensible idea.
But there is also something pretty bloody satisfying about looking at an idea you were told wouldn't work and realising that it exists.
I'm not interested in pretending I built it entirely by myself either. I asked for help, and I intend to keep asking for it. Mentors, advisers, businesses, customers and the people who challenge what I'm doing are all helping shape what OpShop.Kiwi becomes.
I don't know exactly how big this will eventually become, but I know why I started, and I know who I'm building it for. After more than 40 years of rummaging through racks, shelves, boxes and occasionally things I probably shouldn't have touched without gloves, I think secondhand still has plenty of surprises left in it. 😂💚
I hope you'll join me on this journey and maybe, one day, our paths will cross and you can tell me about your own love of searching for that hidden gem.
AJ ❤️
