In the June-August 2026 issue of NZ Marketing magazine, we asked agency founders to tell us the story behind why they started their agency, their favourite thing, what they’ve learned and their best advice.
Stitch
- Founders: Adnan Khan and Simon Wedde
- Year founded: 2019
Tell us the story behind founding your agency.
Stitch started with a simple observation: NZ businesses had invested heavily in martech, but most of it sat disconnected.
The CRM didn’t talk to the ad platforms. Analytics didn’t reach the email tool. The customer experience felt fragmented because the data was.
We saw a gap for a partner who could genuinely stitch it together. Someone with both the strategy and the engineering chops to unify customer data and turn it into growth, not just dashboards. And critically, someone who could close the loop by running the media too, so the same customer intelligence that shapes the strategy actually shows up in the ad platforms driving acquisition and retention.
So we started Stitch to be that partner. We run the full stack: CDP and marketing automation implementation, data engineering and the performance media that puts it all to work. Today we work across ANZ and increasingly globally, helping brands connect their data to their customers’ desire.
That’s what we mean by data inspired marketing: the right message, at the right time, on the right channel, to the right person, delivering measurable growth.
What’s your favourite thing about running your own agency?
Building the team and the work in the same breath.
Every hire shapes what we can take on next, and every project shapes who we want to hire next. There’s a real privilege in getting to choose both the people you spend your days with and the problems you spend them solving. We get to back our own judgement on both, and live with the results.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
Hire for the foundational skill, not the logos on the CV.
In martech, everyone has platform experience listed, but the projects that actually ship on time and deliver are the ones staffed with people who genuinely understand the underlying craft: JavaScript fundamentals, data modelling, the unglamorous engineering bits.
The second lesson, related: capacity is structural, not a willpower problem. If your best people are always the bottleneck, the answer isn’t to lean on them harder. It’s to redesign the workflow so the bottleneck moves, or the work gets done differently.
Both lessons cost us money to learn, and both are now non-negotiable in how we hire and how we scope.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received or given out?
“Lead with value, then talk commercials.”
We try to bring something useful to every first conversation: a quick audit, a fresh angle on their data, something they can use whether they hire us or not. It changes the whole dynamic.
You stop selling and start helping, and the right clients find their way to a commercial conversation on their own.
Anything else we should know?
Beyond client work, we’re invested in the wider industry.
Our team chairs the Marketing Association’s Digital Special Interest Group and sits on the IAB NZ Emerging Technology Council, and we’re regularly on stage and in lecture theatres talking about where agentic AI is taking marketing next.
We’re based in Parnell with a team of around 15, growing across ANZ and increasingly working with clients in the US, EU and Australia.
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 87, June-August 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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