About

I grew up on Norwich Avenue—house number 5, to be exact. That street was a world unto itself: jacarandas lining the pavements, fruit trees heavy with mangoes and avocados, rain that made you want to run and jump in puddles just to feel alive. It was the first place I learned what it meant to belong, to give, and to see—and be seen.
When I was nine, I started giving “time vouchers” for Christmas. Thirty-minute slices of me. Because apparently my time was so precious it had to be itemised (earth swallow me now). Then I got creative. One brother got a huge box that croaked like a frog, okay, so inside it was just my Nokia 3210, but a call it from my sister’s phone and bam, instant frog. Another brother got marbles… for when he inevitably lost the last one. Another got a rock and an ant. I was the ant, he was the rock. I was alive. He was, well… grey rock personality, silently judging me. My family got their revenge, of course, they gave me blonde hair dye at sixteen, back when Van der Merwe jokes were considered fair play.
After school, teaching reinforced it: each kid in my class got something small but unmistakably theirs, and that’s when I realised corporate gifting was a thing. My first marketing company was basically just me, designing little personal worlds for clients through gifts.
Then life happened. I chose to leave the place I had called home. And with it went the bleeding sunsets, the wild thunderstorms, the scent of petrichor, the scent of potato bush on the Zambezi River, the taste of Mazoe orange juice and Ngwerewere sadza. My heart cracked a little. And suddenly, corporate marketing wasn’t enough. I needed to make things that reminded us that we all bleed the same blood, that our hearts make the same tiny cracking sounds when they’re breaking and that we all need someone to call when they do.
Norwich Avenue, with its jacarandas and orchards and long afternoons of running, cycling, stealing fruit, laughing, and standing in the rain, was my witness. From when my sister and I were this high (exhibit A on the right) we’d pick strawberries and read books on that picnic blanket from the first spring Jacaranda flower in Sunshine City till it was so cold, our teeth would chatter. On repeat, all the way through to My Family and Other Animals, The Tempest and Great Expectations… idyllic memories reminding me that magic really does exist in the ordinary.
Norwich Ave is for introverts, for dreamers, for world-builders, for readers who curl up with a classic and a mug of something hot, for hikers, for cyclists, for divers, bath-lovers, foodies, musicians, snow-chasers and anyone who knows that giving thoughtfully is a superpower. It’s expressly for you if you sing in your head when you hear Miley’s “I can buy myself flowers” because it was made for the lost, the heart-broken, for the overthinkers, for the ones who don’t fit in, for the ones who leave a light on, for when you need to spoil yourself instead of eat a whole tub of ice-cream, I mean, hey, or both. Every gift, every cup, every blanket, every hoodie, every candle is a little story, a little world, a little “I see you” whispered across space and time. And that’s the kind of magic we believe in here.