Selwyn is one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing districts, and the introduction of the Waikirikiri Selwyn brand marked a clear shift in how the council wanted to engage with locals, visitors, and businesses. The brand was designed to promote the region’s identity, values, and momentum — and the website became the primary medium for delivering that story at scale.
While the project initially began as a visual reskin of selwyn.nz, it quickly became clear that the ambition of the Waikirikiri Selwyn brand needed more than a surface-level update. To properly support the brand long-term, the platform itself needed to evolve.
At the heart of the brand are four core values:
These principles informed how the digital platform needed to function — flexible, practical, inclusive, and built for momentum rather than stagnation.
The council also wanted the website to clearly represent its five core pillars — Visit, Taste, Business, Live, and Participate — each with its own visual language, colour palette, symbolism, and calls to action. Achieving this consistently across a growing website required more than templates; it required a system.
Our solution was to design an adaptable design system where core foundations could be updated centrally, allowing every page, component, and experience to inherit those changes. This ensured the Waikirikiri Selwyn brand could evolve over time without fragmenting — keeping the platform aligned, recognisable, and future-ready.
Traditional tourism platforms are built around static listings and marketing-style content. Businesses describe what they offer, but much of what actually matters to a visitor never makes it onto a one-page listing — who the experience is really for, what makes it different, how it fits into a broader trip, or the story behind it.
We saw an opportunity to rethink this model entirely.
Instead of treating tourism listings as static marketing assets, we designed a platform where local businesses could tell a richer story — including their customer profiles, value propositions, points of difference, and the experiences they’re best suited for. This deeper layer of information becomes structured knowledge rather than surface-level content.
Built on our VibeCMS platform, we introduced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), large language models (LLMs), and machine-learning workflows to turn that knowledge into something useful for visitors. The itinerary builder engages users through conversation, learning about their preferences, constraints, and intent, then dynamically generates recommendations and itineraries tailored to them.
This marked a fundamental shift for the website — moving away from static, pre-built itineraries toward a conversational, agentic tour planner that adapts in real time. Rather than browsing pages, users explore Selwyn through dialogue.
Behind the scenes, this required careful engineering. Extensive learning workflows, validation layers, security guardrails, and computational controls were put in place to ensure recommendations were relevant, safe, and reliable.
