From a North Island farm to hand-crafted websites

I was born and raised right here in New Zealand, on a farm in the North Island. I left school at 15 and worked hard in various labouring roles through my early twenties before training as a butcher and travelling around the country.

Traditional jobs never quite felt right for me. In my free time I poured my energy into tinkering with computers — software, hardware, anything I could get my hands on. There was no grand plan; I was simply fascinated by how things worked.

When AI started becoming accessible to everyone, I taught myself to build with it. I began with a bot to watch the New Zealand and Australian stock markets — AetherForge AI — and after fine-tuning it through phase after phase and rigorously checking its accuracy, I realised just how much you can create from scratch when you refuse to accept "good enough".

The more I built, the more I saw how underserved everyday New Zealanders and local businesses were online. They were being sold templates and told they were "custom", while the genuinely powerful things — bespoke AI, live data feeds, secure member portals — stayed locked away for big corporates with big budgets.

So I founded AetherForge Design to change that. I design, build and manage genuinely bespoke websites and web apps — every line hand-coded, performance-obsessed, and tailored precisely to your brand. From an elegant company site to a full platform with custom AI assistants like the ones behind AetherForge AI, I build the whole thing to your exact specification.

When you work with AetherForge, you're not getting a factory or a middleman taking a cut. You're getting a fellow Kiwi who genuinely cares whether your website makes your business look world-class — because it should, and it can. Built in New Zealand, for New Zealanders, and for anyone ambitious enough to want the very best.

— The founder, AetherForge