The strange thing about a leap is that you commit to it before you can see where you'll land. You gather everything you know, you feel the edge under your feet, and then there is a moment — brief, irreversible — where the decision is already made and your body simply catches up. Powershop began in one of those moments. Not with a plan, exactly, but with a refusal to keep doing the obvious thing.
In 2008 the New Zealand electricity market behaved the way most utility markets behave. It was a category that had decided, on your behalf, that you didn't care. Power was a grudge purchase, a direct debit you set up once and never looked at again, a bill that arrived in a beige envelope and told you nothing you could act on. The companies competing for you all sounded the same because they were all selling the same invisible thing in the same invisible way.
What made Powershop unlikely is that it came from inside the system it set out to disrupt. It was born of Meridian — a generator, a state-owned enterprise, the kind of organisation the textbook says cannot move quickly or take a real risk. And yet the proposition we kept circling back to was the most disruptive idea in the market: what if you could buy power the way you buy anything else you actually like buying? Online. In advance. In the amounts you choose. From a company that showed you the price before you committed, and let you shop around without punishing you for it.
"Power was a grudge purchase in a beige envelope. The radical idea was to make it something you might choose on purpose."
The obvious thing, refused
Every category has an obvious thing — the move everyone expects, the move that keeps the existing logic intact. In energy retail the obvious thing was to compete on a slightly cheaper plan and a slightly friendlier call centre. To win at the existing game. The harder, stranger idea was to refuse the game entirely: to treat electricity not as a contract you were trapped inside but as a product you could browse, compare and buy in deliberate, visible units.
That reframing did almost all the work. The instant power became something you could see and choose, every other decision fell into place — the tone, the interface, the naming, the way a "special" of cheap power could go on sale like anything else worth queuing for. The brand wasn't decoration applied at the end. It was the argument itself, made legible. Design didn't dress up the proposition; design was the proposition.
People inside the industry told us, kindly, that customers didn't want this. That nobody would log in to manage their power. That the grudge purchase was grudge for a reason. They were describing the world as it was, which is always the most reasonable-sounding thing to do, and almost always the thing that keeps you from the leap.
"They were describing the world as it was — which is always the most reasonable thing to do, and almost always what keeps you from the leap."
What the leap costs
It is easy, years later, to narrate a leap as if it were obvious. It wasn't. The thing about committing before you can see the landing is that the uncertainty is real and the people carrying it are real. There were nights when the most rational reading of the evidence was that we were wrong. What carried it through was not certainty but conviction — a different thing entirely. Certainty is about the outcome. Conviction is about the direction.
Powershop landed. It became, for a stretch, one of the most-awarded and best-loved energy brands in the country, and it did it from inside a state-owned generator that the textbook said couldn't. But the part worth keeping isn't the landing. It's the jump — the willingness to see the category differently enough to do the unreasonable, deliberate, visible thing, and to commit to it before the evidence was in.
That is the pattern this book is about. Not a formula, because there isn't one. A disposition: to find the obvious thing your category expects of you, and then, carefully and on purpose, to do something else.
Extract
From See Different, a book in progress on building purpose-led businesses across energy, FMCG and consumer goods. This is Chapter Two — the Powershop story, drawn in part from the 2010 talk "The Now Future."
Editorial — sample extract drafted to demonstrate the READ layout. Replace with the real Jump chapter text, the correct portrait hero artwork, and final credits before this goes live.