Insprie

Practical experience, applied selectively.

Insprie was created to bring together practical experience building, operating, investing in and governing businesses. Today, Insprie partners with founders, shareholders and boards to build brands, strengthen operations, enter international markets and create long-term enterprise value.

Brand creation in progress, printed colour proofs, a colour chip fan, typographic specimens and blank packaging mock-ups on a studio bench

Insprie was formed to do a specific kind of work: to sit inside consumer businesses and help build them, not from a distance but from within.

We were shaped by the experience of building brands, running operations, entering international markets and sitting on boards. That experience taught us that most consumer businesses do not fail for lack of ideas or lack of capital. They struggle because the demands of scale, complexity and change outrun the capability inside the business.

Insprie exists to close that gap, with capital when it is useful, and with hands-on operating capability when it is needed.

Philosophy

Build for the long term.

We prefer enduring value over superficial growth.

That means building products people genuinely want, brands with a clear reason to exist, margins that support reinvestment, supply chains that can withstand pressure and teams capable of executing consistently.

Purpose matters, but it cannot compensate for weak products or poor economics.

Profit matters, but it should not come at the unnecessary expense of customers, employees, suppliers or the environment.

Managing partners

Co-Managing Partner

Brianne West

Brianne West is a microbiologist, entrepreneur and internationally recognised founder best known for creating Ethique, the pioneering beauty brand that helped transform solid, plastic-free personal care from a niche idea into a global consumer category.

Starting in her home kitchen in Christchurch, Brianne built Ethique into an internationally distributed beauty business sold across New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Asia and more than 20 markets globally, through major retail, distribution and e-commerce channels.

Her experience spans virtually every part of building and scaling a consumer brand: product development and formulation, brand strategy, manufacturing, supply chain, retail, e-commerce, capital raising, international market entry, sustainability and organisational growth.

Brianne is also an international keynote and celebrity speaker, regularly speaking to corporate, entrepreneurial and leadership audiences about building disruptive brands, entrepreneurship, sustainability, innovation and using business as a force for positive change.

Her work has received significant international recognition. Brianne has been named one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers, One Young World Entrepreneur of the Year, an Obama Foundation Leader, and one of WORTH magazine's Worthy 100 entrepreneurs creating global impact.

In New Zealand, she has been recognised as EY Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Women of Influence Business Enterprise winner, a BLAKE Leader, a Kea World Class New Zealand Award recipient, and has been inducted into the Women Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame.

The innovation behind Ethique has also received global recognition, including being named among TIME's Best Inventions, while the business became one of New Zealand's most visible examples of a purpose-led consumer company successfully achieving international scale.

Brianne now works with and invests in ambitious consumer founders building the next generation of brands. She also founded Business But Better, a free education platform providing practical resources to founders who want to build commercially successful businesses with positive social or environmental impact.

She is a Board Trustee of WWF-New Zealand and continues to work at the intersection of entrepreneurship, consumer innovation and environmental change.

Focus, Brand and product · International growth · Founder partnership · Innovation and sustainability

Co-Managing Partner

Tristan Roberts

Tristan works across governance, investment and operating roles in founder-led and private businesses, with particular experience in consumer businesses undergoing growth, transformation or significant change.

His work spans board and governance roles, investment and transaction activity, business transformation, operating performance and the practical challenges that emerge as businesses become larger and more complex. He is usually brought in when something material is happening: a leadership transition, a period of underperformance, a transaction, an integration, or growth that has begun to outpace the operating model behind it.

He has worked alongside founders, management teams, shareholders and boards on issues including strategy, leadership, operational performance, supply chain, working capital, international growth, acquisitions, integration and organisational change. That combination means he is comfortable moving between the boardroom and the operation, and equally comfortable holding both to the same standard of evidence.

Tristan brings both a governance and operating perspective to Insprie's work, with a particular focus on situations where strategy needs to translate rapidly into decisions, accountability and execution. In practice that often means establishing what is actually true about performance, agreeing the small number of things that matter most, putting the reporting and cadence in place to see whether they are happening, and staying involved until they do.

He also works with investors and shareholders on the operational reality behind an investment thesis: what the business will need after the transaction, what capability is missing, and what the first hundred days should be spent on.

Focus, Governance · Investment and transactions · Transformation

Partner

Ella Crosswell

Ella's particular strength is the combination of brand, commercial execution and operational general management. She has worked inside a New Zealand consumer business as it moved from entrepreneurial scale into a sophisticated international organisation, giving her first-hand experience of the challenges growing consumer brands encounter: entering new markets, scaling retail distribution, holding brand consistency internationally, managing different consumer and channel dynamics, coordinating geographically dispersed teams and balancing commercial growth with a strong underlying purpose.

Her Ethique experience means she brings considerably more than conventional marketing capability. She understands how product, brand, retail, people, supply, customer experience and commercial performance intersect when a consumer brand is growing across multiple markets. That makes her particularly effective in businesses that need someone who can operate between strategy and execution: understanding what the business is trying to achieve, converting those objectives into clear priorities, bringing the right people together and making sure the work is actually delivered.

Focus, Brand and commercial execution · Operational general management · International growth

The wider group and associated initiatives

Specialist capability alongside Insprie.

Read about the Insprie group →

Insprie group businesses

Associated initiative

Business But Better

A free education hub for ambitious, mission-led consumer founders, covering brand, product, retail, exporting, finance and leadership.

A free founder education initiative rather than a commercial business. Founded by Insprie managing partner Brianne West, drawing on the experience of building and selling Ethique.

Visit Business But Better

Experience built in the real world.

Insprie brings together experience from building, operating, investing in and governing consumer businesses across New Zealand and international markets. That includes taking brands from New Zealand into some of the world's largest consumer markets, navigating growth and transformation, and working across the functions that ultimately determine business performance.

Markets our team knows

New Zealand · Australia · United States · United Kingdom · Europe · Japan · Asia

We understand the capital because we put our own at risk.

US$65M+

Capital deployed since 2021

Insprie's principals invest alongside businesses and have deployed more than US$65 million of capital since 2021. That changes the perspective. Growth, margin, working capital, governance, valuation and execution are not abstract concepts when your own capital is involved.

Confidentiality

You won't find a wall of client logos here.

Much of our work involves commercially sensitive situations. We protect the confidentiality of the founders, companies, boards and investors we work alongside rather than using those relationships as marketing collateral.

Where we share examples of our work, identifying details are withheld or generalised. We think that is a reasonable price for being trusted with the important stuff.

Anonymised experience →

The wider team

A small core and a deep network.

Insprie is deliberately small. We work alongside a specialist operating network, operators, functional leaders and advisers we have worked with over many years, brought into engagements where it is useful.

We build the team required for the opportunity rather than forcing every business through the same model.

Specialist areas

  • Brand strategy and identity
  • Product development and formulation
  • Manufacturing and supply chain
  • Finance and commercial
  • Digital, e-commerce and technology
  • Retail and channel management
  • Regulatory and quality
  • Governance and legal

How Insprie works

More involved than an investor. More accountable than an adviser.

Insprie does not simply provide recommendations and leave management to implement them.

Where appropriate, the Insprie team works directly within the business, assumes responsibility for agreed areas of execution and helps build the internal capability required for the next stage.

Explore what we do →

Meet the team

Meet us properly.

The clearest way to judge whether Insprie is the right partner is a direct conversation with the people who would do the work.