A wild childhood spent close to the edges of the world

Before Charlotte ever set foot in New Zealand, she had already lived a life that most people only read about. Her early years were spent on Pitcairn Island, one of the most remote inhabited places on earth, and aboard a sailboat moored near Tahiti. She was very young for all of it, but the imprint those years left is visible in almost everything she does today.

She spent those early years exploring rockpools, swimming in warm harbour water, learning the ocean from the inside out. She danced on the boat deck and sang along to Janis Joplin. She was, by her own account, a little wild island girl: happiest outdoors, endlessly curious, touching and tasting and noticing everything. Her mother remembers how captivated young Charlotte was by the textures she found in nature: moss on rocks, lichen on bark, the give of a fern frond under small fingers. She would stop and run her hands over everything. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense.

The family moved to New Zealand in 1999 and settled in Gisborne on the East Coast, where Charlotte grew up. It is a place that has never fully let her go, even as life has since taken her to Auckland and her imagination to far further corners of the world.

Gymnastics, precision, and learning what it means to pay attention

In Gisborne, Charlotte found gymnastics, and gymnastics found something in her. She was good at it in the way that takes real work and real attention: training seriously, competing regularly, winning. The sport demanded a very particular kind of focus, the ability to notice the smallest misalignment in a movement, to feel the precise difference between almost right and exactly right, and to care enough about the gap to keep closing it. That focus became second nature, then first nature.

A back injury ended her competitive career at fifteen. It was a significant loss at an age when identity and ambition are tightly wound together. But the discipline gymnastics had built in her did not leave with the sport. It transferred quietly and permanently into everything that followed. The attention to detail that defines NZ Charly, the refusal to accept almost right when exactly right is achievable, is that same instinct, expressed differently.

The lifestyle block, and coming back to the land

About twelve years ago, Charlotte's mother bought a lifestyle block outside Gisborne. Building and growing it became something the two of them did together, working alongside each other in the quiet way that physical shared work allows. Charlotte describes it as one of the most nourishing and healing experiences of her life: a way of bonding and mending that went beyond words, rooted in the soil and the seasons and the simple satisfaction of watching something grow.

Being back on the land reconnected her to something she had loved as a child and had not quite known she had been missing. Hiking back into the bush. Getting into the hills. Seeking out places that required effort to reach and rewarded it generously with silence and perspective. Her mother used to joke that the small girl who had been obsessed with forest textures had simply grown up and found a way to keep touching things for a living.

It is not an inaccurate summary. The obsession with texture that began on Pitcairn Island and deepened in the New Zealand bush transferred, with remarkable directness, into a career built around the feel of rare fibres between her hands.

Fashion, an industry, and a quiet dissatisfaction

Charlotte studied fashion and spent years working across the New Zealand industry: fitting hospital staff of every shape and size for uniforms, styling for brands, moving through the different corners of a small and varied sector. She was good at the work. She was also increasingly aware of something that nagged at her, quietly at first and then with more insistence.

Everything came from somewhere else. The supply chains were long, opaque, and distant. The real costs of what she was working with, the freight emissions, the labour conditions, the slow disappearance of local craftsmanship and the people who carried it, were invisible in the price tags and largely unexamined in the conversations around her. She had always believed that a bargain someone else is paying for is not actually a bargain. Working in the industry made it increasingly difficult to look away from who was paying.

The friend who changed everything

During the COVID lockdowns, a very good friend sat Charlotte down and told her plainly that she was done listening to ideas that were never going to happen. She did not want to hear about it anymore unless something was actually going to be done about it.

Charlotte ordered yarn. She made test pieces. She set up a stall at a craft market in Gisborne. She sold seven jumpers in a single day and knew, with the kind of clarity that does not require analysis, that she was onto something. NZ Charly began in earnest from that point.

She has since moved to Auckland to be closer to manufacturing, which reduces unnecessary freight and keeps the brand's footprint as compact as possible. The roots, though, are still in Gisborne: in the land, the block, the bush tracks, and the rhythms of a place that shaped her in ways she is still discovering.

How Charlotte actually spends her time

Charlotte is a person of deliberate habits. Over the past few years she has been building what she calls a habit stack: adding one new healthy practice per month, slowly, until her mornings look the way she wants her whole life to feel. Right now her days begin with green tea, twenty minutes of yoga, a Pilates session, twenty minutes of language learning, breakfast, and coffee, before the working day begins. None of it arrived at once. It was assembled one month at a time until it became ordinary rather than aspirational. The goal is to make her dream day her actual day, bit by bit, until the gap between the two quietly disappears.

Outside of work she moves constantly, and in varied ways. Salsa and bachata dancing are a regular part of her week, something she values as a way of returning fully to her body and reconnecting with her feminine side after days spent largely in her head. She hikes with seriousness: her favourite track near Auckland is the Omanawanui Track in the Waitakere Ranges, which she has run the full length of as a day out to clear her mind and return to herself. For anything bigger, she heads to the mountains. Anywhere quiet, remote and where the noise and pressures of a city drops away.

She does pottery, which she is drawn to for reasons that have little to do with the finished object. Pottery teaches patience in a way that is difficult to fake. It teaches non-attachment. It shows you, repeatedly and without sentiment, that sometimes things simply do not work out, and that the practice is worth pursuing regardless. She finds that genuinely useful.

She reads purposefully. She is currently working through The Longevity Paradox, which examines the food habits and lifestyle practices that support long-term health and can, the author argues, reverse the course of ageing and disease from the inside out. It fits the way she approaches most things: curious, willing to go deeper, and genuinely invested in doing something well rather than simply doing it.

What she cooks

Charlotte cooks with the same simplicity she brings to most things. Her most-returned-to dish is a salad that requires almost no effort and tastes as though it required quite a lot: baby spinach, ripe tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, walnuts, good olive oil, and a splash of balsamic. When she wants something more grounding, it is sausages from the butcher, mashed potato, and fresh vegetables. Good ingredients. Nothing overcomplicated. Treated with respect.

Where she goes, and where she is heading

Charlotte is working her way through the seven wonders of the world, not as a checklist to be ticked but as a framework for deeper, slower travel. Each wonder comes with what she calls a side quest attached: something less obvious, more personal, and usually involving a longer detour than strictly necessary.

The journey she thinks about most often is the old Silk Road. The ancient trade route connecting China to the Mediterranean, passing through Central Asia, Persia, and the Caucasus, has fascinated her for years. What moved along it was not just silk and spices but ideas, craft, religion, language, and technique: the full texture of human exchange across thousands of kilometres and hundreds of years. Textiles were among the most prized commodities the route carried. It is the kind of detail Charlotte notices, and does not forget.

The thread that runs through everything

NZ Charly is not a faceless brand. It is one person's considered response to an industry she worked in, found wanting, and decided to do differently. Charlotte packs every order herself. She sources every fibre. She makes every decision about what gets made, how it gets made, and whether it is good enough to carry her name.

The curiosity that sent a small child running her hands over moss in a forest on a remote island. The discipline that gymnastics built and a back injury could not take away. The patience that pottery keeps teaching her. The values that grew from years in an industry that obscured its own costs. The belief that the land matters, that the things we own should last, and that how something is made is inseparable from what it is. All of it is in the knitwear. You cannot really separate the two.

If you ever want to talk fibres, share a hiking recommendation, or simply say hello, she genuinely means it when she says the door is open.