it starts where the best stories begin...

Most men, I assume, spend their honeymoon exploring the depths of their new marriage. Yet I spent mine hunched over with a smartphone camera, stalking a flock of geese.

You see, we went to the UK and spent some time at Kensington Gardens. While the sensible world was captivated by the swans, I found myself utterly fascinated by the geese. They were noisy, inquisitive, and possessed a delightfully aggressive sense of purpose that the "perfect" swans couldn't hope to emulate.

I suspect my wife spent those first days of marital bliss wondering if she had accidentally married a man with a poultry fetish as I snapped hundreds of photos from every conceivable angle (land, water, flapping wings, the lot) before we eventually retired to our room to spend the evenings sketching goose poses on a fresh pad of paper.

These poultry-inspired interactions, melded together with a galactic theme that had been rattling around my head months before, forged the name Super Space Goose.

But it all comes down to why

The name is more than a whim. It is a reaction to a decade spent working in digital marketing and ecommerce. I've seen first-hand how easy it is for brands to become polished, generic and almost completely indistinguishable from one another.

So I chose a path that some might consider career-ending show-off...ery.

For this website, I decided to take the long way around. The visual identity started with pencils and paper, while the website itself was built as a custom HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP project. Why? Because I wanted to understand the thing I was making, from the way it looked to the way it worked.

That doesn't mean doing everything the hard way for the sake of it. I use the tools that help me get where I need to go, but I like to stay close enough to the work to understand the decisions being made and take responsibility for the finished result.

Your brand is a piece of your dream. It deserves the messy, human and occasionally absurd touch of somebody who actually cares about what they are making. That's what Goose made means to me.

About the man behind the goose…

I'm Ben Appleton, the messy human clutching the pencil and paper.

For the last decade, I've managed digital marketing and ecommerce for a major New Zealand retailer supplying the education sector. Along the way, I've navigated the complexities of both B2B and B2C ecommerce, backed by a Bachelor's degree in Media and Communication and a Graduate Diploma in Sales and Marketing.

Having worn the client's shoes for years, I've experienced the ups and downs that come with working alongside agencies and development partners. I've also had the chance to work with some genuinely talented people, building complex ecommerce systems and connecting websites to mind-bogglingly complicated ERP systems. Watching that work happen made me want to understand it properly for myself.

So, while holding down a high-demand, high-stakes job, I chose the long way around. For years, I dedicated seven days a week to earning my Diploma in Web Development and Design, maintaining an A+ average across every course.

It gave me the skills and confidence to build this website for myself.

The industry has changed a lot over the years. Tools that once took years to learn can now produce something presentable remarkably quickly. That can be brilliant. It can also make it very easy to settle for something simply because it was easy to produce.

I've always been drawn to work where you can feel that somebody made decisions along the way. Not necessarily the hardest way, or the most traditional way, but with enough understanding and care to know why the finished thing looks and works the way it does.

I'm here to offer my hands, my head, my tools and a decade of hard-won experience.

looking for some help?

If you're ready to work with someone who creates bespoke digital experiences.

Reach out, the Goose is ready to listen.