Rising to new heights

When production company Curious Films approached Camelspace to commission a ‘big cheese’ for an advertising campaign, commercial director, Phil McConchie, knew good things didn’t need to take time!

The commercial and industrial scaffolding company specialises in unusual structures for advertising and events.

“Clients regularly come to us with weird requests so we’ve developed a reputation for being able to build anything,” Phil says.

“We will build temporary structures for advertising, events, marketing or promotions and we have loads of in-house expertise. We’ve learnt plenty of tricks about how to build this kind of stuff.”

While Phil says he is unsure as to where the massive cheese, measuring more than 12 metres in diameter, will appear he expects to see the company’s work on screen.

“We’ll end up seeing it on TV I’m sure; we’re often surprised to see where our work appears!”

Other major Camelspace projects have included constructing a fully-functioning, life-sized pinball machine for a Mountain Dew advertising campaign; developing the world’s longest bar and helping build the main stage at Queens Wharf’s party central for the Rugby World Cup.

The company, based in Mt Wellington, even played a minor role in Peter Jackson’s film The Hobbit. However, to Phil, there are no small parts, only small companies.

Phil started Camelspace in July 2006 with business partner and operations director, Mick Spratling. In addition to the team’s penchant for unusual scaffolding projects, their marketing and advertising initiatives and planning for future growth, have been crucial to their success.

“We invested heavily in marketing and advertising to get our name out there. We achieved brand awareness and now we pretty much have as much work as we want,” says Phil.

“In the past two and a half years we’ve gone from about nine employees to around 30 and we have some 90 projects on the go.

“We had a mindset about making the business scalable from the beginning. We weren’t looking to create jobs for Mick and I because we had good jobs. We planned a scalable business that could continue growing.”