Julie Leuzinger’s two decade long career has witnessed her consistently pushing boundaries, challenging norms and creating communities. In her dynamic career that has spanned industries such as space, agriculture, technology and communication, Julie has prioritized delivering lasting societal and individual benefits over traditional business metrics. As a female executive and business leader, she helps young minds, new entrepreneurs and fresh ideas find collaborations, markets and connect with funding. 

At Ghost, Julie provides both strategic direction and operational curation to deliver best in class services and advisory to public and private sector stakeholders who are seeking to operate at the cutting edge of their domain. 

Julie believes that Ghost, incubated in New Zealand, can be a global boutique firm serving the dynamic and fast evolving Indo-Pacific business environment.

Key Achievements

‍

Transformative Technology Leadership:

Julie played a pivotal role in scaling one of New Zealand’s leading tech consultancies, driving landmark projects such as the country’s first real-time public transport journey planning app. Her delivery leadership also extended to global initiatives, including Fonterra’s enterprise web upgrades and early digital transformation endeavours.

‍

Space Sector Leadership:
As a former member of the executive committee for the Space Generation Advisory Council in Vienna, the voice of the largest global network of students, young professionals, and alumni in the space industry, Julie helped manage day to day operations. In this role, Julie also had the privilege of representing the organization at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, where as a young professional, she had the opportunity to participate in critical discussions shaping the future of space governance and policy.

‍

Global Insights and Strategy:

Julie’s contributions extend to international-scale projects, such as co-authoring Fonterra’s board-level nutrition innovation strategy aligning global trends with long-term growth objectives.

‍

Founder of KiwiSpace:

Julie co-founded KiwiSpace (formerly the New Zealand Space Foundation), a nonprofit organisation dedicated to advancing New Zealand's participation in space exploration and industry. Notable initiatives include launching New Zealand’s first Rocketry Competition for schools, hosting events such as the international SpaceApps Challenge, and introducing NASA’s Cassini Scientist for a Day program, inspiring the next generation of space leaders while fostering innovation and public engagement in New Zealand’s emerging space sector.

‍

Digital Innovation in Fashion:

Julie’s early brief foray in the world of film and fashion led her to delivering the world’s first digital-only fashion museum for the New Zealand Fashion Museum, a groundbreaking project that earned international acclaim, including recognition in The New York Times.

‍

Digital Transformation at Spark:

As a key leader at New Zealand’s largest digital agency at the time, Julie led the high-profile digital transformation of Telecom to Spark, New Zealand’s largest telco, with Andrew Hawley, taking the new brand and digital experience to market. 

‍

Andrew is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in building and leading innovative creative and digital agencies. A co-founder of three independent enterprises and a former head of a major network agency, Andrew founded and shaped one of New Zealand’s pioneering digital businesses, acquired by Omnicom in 2013. His diverse experience across New Zealand’s corporate and creative sectors inspired the foundation of Ghost, in which he teamed up with Julie Leuzinger to create a digital-first solutions consultancy obsessed with impact, and designed to address the technological, environmental, cultural, and commercial challenges facing humanity today.

Andrew excels in challenging convention and connecting ideas, people, and organisations to add the speed and scale that drive transformative outcomes. Empathy, contextual intelligence, and a values driven culture have come to define Ghost and why it is appraised as a reliable and trusted partner under the leadership of Andrew and Julie. 

Andrew’s creative and digital endeavours have received international recognition, including golds at Cannes, Caples Awards (New York), Future Marketing Awards (Global), and domestically in New Zealand.

Key Achievements

Digital Transformation Leader:
Andrew led the agency-side digital transformation of New Zealand’s largest telco, Telecom, into Spark in 2016.

Pioneering Innovation:
Andrew launched New Zealand’s first dedicated mobile youth brand in 1999, redefining service experiences, packaging, and sales channels.

Creative Campaigns:
Andrew directed the global fan campaign for Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy and brought several Weta Workshop collectible products to market globally.

Educational Sector Impact:
Andrew contributed to the design and delivery of Education New Zealand’s Innovation Programme and Export Education’s offshore marketing funnel.

Growth Recognition:
Andrew’s previous business featured three times in the Deloitte Fast 50 index of New Zealand’s fastest-growing companies, ranking 46th in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific index, and 6th in New Zealand.

Andrew’s relentless focus on innovation, collaboration, and excellence continues to shape Ghost as a leader in solving complex challenges for clients in New Zealand and beyond.

With fifteen years of relationship, account and project management experience within the digital environment delivering projects for some of New Zealand's largest organisations, Katherine is General Manager at Ghost.

As a campaigner for human-centred design Katherine has had extensive involvement in large scale digital projects across the years.

Over this time she has delivered a range of projects from large government and corporate research projects through to interactive solutions, applications and digital platforms. Some of her key clients have included Immigration, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency, Wellington City Council, ACC, BNZ and New Zealand Rugby.

She is adept at balancing the needs of a clients business, their users and how to best engage to deliver value. She is a versatile thinker and strong manager, with a knack for understanding the challenges client organisations face so that the team can set approaches to problem solving and delivery to meet those constraints.

‍

As Ghosts' Operations Lead Rachael is focussed on continuous optimisation of Ghosts' 'blended' operating model; making sure the systems and processes make things easier and more intuitive for clients and for staff.

With over 13 years working behind the scenes in leading digital, advertising and film companies, Rachael brings a strong financial and operational understanding to keep Ghost and the wider team on track and the lights on.

‍

A passionate advocate for human-centred design and co-creation, Mark leads the Ghost Customer Experience practice. He works with teams to uncover customer needs, and define business objectives to create better experiences, products and services.

Mark is a proven design leader and customer experience (CX) specialist and has over 22 years leading his field. He's built award-winning experience design teams within an agency environment, and led the service design practice in a 'big four' consultancy. He's also spent time embedded in iconic kiwi brands to help transform their business around CX.

Career highlights for Mark include directing the experience design of the NZ Criminal Justice Reform Summit, successfully embedding service design as a valued practice at Z Energy, and driving the CX delivery of Spark's digital brand transformation.

As one of New Zealand’s most experienced and well-regarded UX practitioners, Belle leads the Ghost UX team. Her specialties include rapid prototyping of digital experiences, always-on research throughout the product lifecycle, and working deeply with cross-functional, agile teams.

Belle has led the UX of projects for the likes of Spark Business, Tourism New Zealand, and nib health insurance. These involved working with the client teams to create “vision prototypes” (interactive wireframes proposing totally new flows) and running lean user testing to validate and iterate the concepts.  She has also worked with the ANZ bank team through her previous agency, and is well-versed in the needs of banking customers across the personal and investment spaces.

A leader in the conversational design space (think Alexa, Siri, voice-enabled apps, and more), Belle’s achievements include creating a framework to help speed up path-to-delivery for several digital human deployments. The framework adapts the Google Design Sprint, reimagining it for a conversational design context. It involves voice prototyping an idea and testing with real customers in the same week, and allows the wider team to facilitate and observe remotely. The framework can be operationalised as a repeatable BAU practice for any client working in this space.

Belle is also dedicated to fostering teams’ personal growth and supporting behaviour change at an operational level. Her UX leadership within the CountdownX digital team saw her mentor and grow internal capability, and she was instrumental in building a culture of Design Thinking in an agile context.