( 00-01 )
The Challenge
Wellington Seamarket has been selling the city's best seafood for decades. The problem wasn't the fish. It was that almost nobody knew whose fish it was.
When we started, we hit the streets and surveyed a bunch of Wellingtonians. The results said it all. Most people knew the shops existed. They called it "that place on Cuba St." Nobody knew there were multiple stores. Nobody knew it was family owned.
That's existence awareness. It is not brand awareness.
The truth behind the counter was a much better story. Wellington Seamarket is a family business with Italian roots in Island Bay, run by the Basille family. The kind of place where you get treated like family and the fish only makes it to the case if it's good enough for nonna. None of that was showing up online.
The brief: take a brand people recognised but didn't really know, and turn it into one Wellington actually follows, trusts, and buys from.
( 00-02 )
The Strategy
We started with the brand itself. The old look reflected the sea. It said nothing about the family. So we rebuilt the identity around the heritage that makes Wellington Seamarket different. A hand-drawn sardine, a warmer palette of azure, sand and tomato, and a wordmark with a bit of old-school character. The kind of brand that feels like a family business, not a fish wholesaler.
Then we gave people a reason to follow.
We built everything around three content pillars: Family, Food, and Wellington. Family meant putting Dion, Tony, Salvi and Alfonso on camera and letting the real personalities run. The audience didn't fall for a logo. They fell for the team, the banter, and the occasional bit of chaos behind the counter. Food meant scroll-stopping seafood, the deep-fry experiments, first-timers trying kina and oysters. Wellington meant showing up as a local, in local feeds, for local people.
The execution mix:
Digitally native organic content, posted 3 to 4 times a week across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, with most of it video.
Employee-generated content built around the family, the part that made the brand feel human and kept people coming back.
Creator collabs with Wellington food and hospo creators who felt real, not polished.
Partnership collabs with local restaurants that Wellington Seamarket supplies with fresh fish, turning wholesale relationships into shared reach.
Local SEO, geotagging and Wellington-specific hashtags so the content landed in front of the people who could actually walk in the door.
Instagram became the engine for follower growth. Facebook went to work on engagement and the existing audience. TikTok was a blank page, so we started from scratch and built it up.
350%
increase in Facebook reach
1,167%
growth in Instagram following
( 00-03 )
The Results
We didn't just grow the numbers. We turned a recognised name into a brand Wellington shows up for, online and in person.
In ten months, Wellington Seamarket went from a shop people half-remembered to one of the city's most-followed seafood brands.
Following grew from 1,600 to 7,200, smashing the original 4,000 target.
536,000 lifetime reach, up 348%.
Total interactions up 367%, with comments up 592%.
Post reach of 912,846, up 1,167%.
Post engagement up 609%, comments on posts up 2,139%.
2,378 new followers, up 368%, off a channel that had barely moved in years.
TikTok
Built from zero to 229,000 video views, 8,500 likes and a following that keeps climbing.
And the numbers turned into something you could see. When the new Porirua store opened, the content did the heavy lifting. Hundreds of people turned up to celebrate opening day. That's the real measure of brand awareness. Not a reach figure on a dashboard, but a room full of people who decided to show up.
The work showed up at the till. Cuba St sales were up 25% in February and 20% in March, year on year. Lambton Quay was up 7% and 8% across the same two months. The clearest proof came at Christmas, when seafood preorders jumped more than 65% on the previous year, blowing past a target that was already a big step up. Online sales are climbing too. They've just moved to Shopify and are tracking well ahead of target.
It worked because we stopped making Wellington Seamarket look like a seafood supplier and started showing the family behind it. People don't follow a fishmonger. They follow the Basille's.
