Yes, it's offficial! New Zealand Odysseys (your journey of discovery) is now rebranded Learning Journeys (education adventures in New Zealand).
Why? It's a long story: a move based on expert marketing advice and the need to make the company brand more distinctive. We do have a clearly defined niche (Making serious education outside the classroom fun for secondary students - and life-long learners who've never really grown-up). However not enough people knew about it to meet our targets for growth.
Part of the issue was that the old name, New Zealand Odysseys, doesn't really let people know what we do. Yes, it speaks of adventure and discovery, setting off into the unknown and meeting and over-coming challenges like Odysseus (Ulysses) in Homer's ancient greek "Odyssey". However, it doesn't clearly convey education in the sense of supporting class-room learning, though it does conjure up the wider benefits of education outside.
And, of course, the image is watered down by the fact that a drug rehabilitation centre here in New Zealand carries a similar name. There's also a model of car called the Odyssey. (No discredit intended towards the organisations involved!)
So Learning Journeys it is! The name felt right as soon as we settled on it. Thank you very much to the great team of clients and suppliers here in Tauranga who gave up an afternoon to join a focus group and give us their input.
If you'd like to read more about our activities over the past year have a look at some newsletters:
Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.
During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 90 per cent in the past 10 years, or on the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti.
