Tim Gonzalez, Commercial Manager for SnapCore,
lives with his partner Ari in Inner Glyn, Nelson.
I was working for another technology company, based out of Dunedin, where both me and my wife are from. One of the managers had moved on from his role up here quite suddenly, and I ended up being asked to fill in and basically cover his responsibilities. One day they turned around and asked would I consider moving up to Nelson?
We had no friends or family up here. I'd never even been to Nelson before working here - we had quite a short turnaround to make the decision and we just thought, why not try something new? We'd always been down south, always lived down in Dunedin.
I think the first day we came up here together, it was a Saturday, and it was just the most beautiful day you could probably imagine, we were pretty blown away by the scenery. Which is a pretty typical Nelson day, to be honest.
As cliche as it sounds, one of the best things we enjoyed - especially coming from down south - is the weather.
I don't know whether Nelson still holds the record for New Zealand's most sunshine hours, but it really changes the way that you live and do life. We find that we do more stuff outdoors. We really enjoy being so close to some of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand. We're 45 minutes from Abel Tasman, 40 minutes from Kaiteri Beach - we've got a beautiful bay five minutes from where we live.
In the summertime, I spend a lot of time behind a boat wakeboarding. We do that out in the bay or out by Rabbit Island or down at the Nelson Lakes, which is only another 50 minutes away.
I love getting out on the golf course. We've got half a dozen golf courses within 30 minutes.
And I think for its size, Nelson has just heaps of good options for cafes and bars and restaurants. There's Bobby Frank's, Raglan Roast - Victus in town is probably my go-to.
We live in Enner Glynn so we're 10 minutes from Nelson City, 10 minutes from Richmond - we're just right smack bang in the middle of everything and five minutes from work!
From Nelson, SnapCore services a global market. The customers, clients, and partners that we're working with are mainly based abroad.
SnapCore is a hardware manufacturer - we manufacture hardware products that we've designed and developed and we provide those to other companies either within our Snap Group of companies or to external partners. And those partners service global markets – for example, Teem Fish, based in Canada, provide electronic monitoring for fisheries in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and other areas of the globe.
I’ve spent time in the States already this year building our U.S. opportunities with our CEO, Chris Rodley. We've also spent significant time in Canada and Japan building markets and opportunities in those spaces. Within NZ, Pinpoint Earth, another Snap company, services the New Zealand inshore fishing fleet with our hardware.
We recently received investment from the New Zealand government through the Kanoa Fund to establish high-tech manufacturing facilities and scale our operations here in Nelson.
That mission is to help equip New Zealand with the facilities to develop technology in-country. We're specifically working and focusing on supporting companies in similar verticals that we currently operate in, so in the blue tech and agri-tech spaces.