What One Week on a Remote Pacific Island Taught Me About Presence Over Productivity
I’m standing on the tarmac of one of the smallest airports I’ve ever seen, watching tropical birds I’ve never heard of circle overhead. The plane that just dropped me here is already taxiing back for takeoff. There are barely any gates or baggage claim, just a tiny building and two people waving at me from the other side of the fence — my clients, who I’ve only ever met on our online calls.
A year ago, if you’d told me that someone visiting the Green Socials website would lead me to a remote Pacific island (with a population of 1,700), I wouldn’t have believed you. But here’s the thing about good digital marketing: it offers opportunities you could never see coming.
Emily Bay, Norfolk Island
How a Contact Form Led Me Here
Eighteen months earlier, someone from a place I’d never heard of found the Green Socials website. They read about what we do, filled out a contact form, and we started talking. They ran a small family business called KOOSHOO — an ethical hair accessory brand based on Norfolk Island. The name means “feeling good” in Norfuk, the island’s language (a mix of Tahitian and English).
When I looked up Norfolk Island on Google Maps for the first time, I had to zoom in three times just to see it. A tiny green speck, 35 square kilometers, sitting alone in the Pacific Ocean between Australia, New Zealand, and New Caledonia. 1,400 kilometers from the nearest mainland.
That contact form submission turned into a client relationship a year and a half ago. And that client relationship turned into an invitation I couldn’t refuse, this past October 2025.
Why I Wanted To Visit
We started working with KOOSHOO in early 2024 as their social media management team.
Four posts per week, three-story sets, all focused on building brand awareness for their sustainable hair accessories. We covered the behind-the-scenes of their business, their community, and the quality of their products.
But there was one content pillar I kept circling back to: the connection between Norfolk Island’s unique endemic species and the inspiration behind KOOSHOO’s product designs.
Rachel, KOOSHOO’s Co-Founder and Creative Director, grew up on the island. She’s deeply connected to her culture and determined to preserve it against the rising tide of hyper-consumerism and fast-paced Western culture that’s slowly reaching the island’s shores.
We’d been telling KOOSHOO’s story remotely with great success — like we do with all our clients around the world. But when Rachel and Jesse invited me to visit the island, to see it through my own eyes and capture content in person, I knew it would add another layer of depth to our work.
Not because you need to visit a place to tell its story well, but because experiencing it firsthand would give us even richer material to work with.
Rachel Evans, Co-Founder and Creative Director at KOOSHOO, picking up a passionfruit
The Island That Appeared From Nowhere
Back to that tarmac moment. The five-minute drive to their place winds through roads lined with tropical trees. Birds I can’t name are singing frantically. Kids of all ages are riding bikes on the streets, no parents in sight, completely safe.
Norfolk Island is 8 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide. That’s it. The population hovers around 1,700 permanent residents. The island has one of the most fascinating origin stories in the Pacific: first discovered by Captain James Cook in 1774, it became a British penal colony in 1788, then closed in 1855. Its true heart emerged when descendants of the Tahitian-British Bounty mutineers relocated here from Pitcairn Island in 1856. They brought with them a beautiful fusion of Polynesian and English heritage that created the distinctive Norfolk culture alive today.
From the moment I arrived, I felt it. Something was different here.
The Rhythm of Island Life
Everywhere we went with Rachel and Jesse, they knew people. Not just knew them — actually stopped to talk, asked about life, shared stories. There was no rushing to the next thing, no checking phones mid-conversation, no “sorry, I have to run.”
This hit me hard. In our busy city lives, we’ve internalised this idea that time is scarce. We fill our calendars, stack our to-do lists, and tell ourselves we’ll enjoy life later — when we finish this project, when we finally have enough money, when we retire.
But what if we’re doing it backwards?
The people on Norfolk Island aren’t waiting to live. They’re living right now, in every conversation, in every shared moment. They’ve figured out something most of us have forgotten: the point isn’t to rush through life to get to some imaginary finish line. The point is to actually be present for the life you’re living.
Where Everyone Creates
Nearly everyone on the island is entrepreneurial by necessity. When you live on a 35-square-kilometer island, traditional career paths don’t really exist beyond tourism. So people get creative.
Kids learn this young. I watched children pick wild passionfruit and guava from the roadside and sell them to passing cars. Not because their families are struggling, but because that’s just what you do here. You create value. You participate.
Adults learn skills like pottery, crochet, and herbalism, and then teach workshops to share their knowledge with the community. Many people work two to four different jobs, not to make ends meet, but to be wherever they’re needed. Knowledge circulates, skills multiply, and everyone contributes.
It’s entrepreneurship in its truest form.
The Radical Act of Buying Only What You Need
At the island’s supermarket, I witnessed something that would never happen on the mainland.
The island depends on freight ships and planes for most of its produce — eggs, fresh vegetables, certain fruits, dairy, and specialty items. Shipping schedules can be unpredictable. So when something arrives, it’s limited.
And here’s what happens: people buy only what they need. If there are six cartons of eggs left, someone buying eggs for their family of four doesn’t take three “just in case.” They take one, maybe two, and leave the rest for others.
Remember the toilet paper panic buying during COVID? That would never happen here. I’ve learned that the community comes first, always.
This blew my mind. We live in a world of abundance and instant access to everything, yet we hoard and overconsume constantly. Meanwhile, on an island where scarcity is real, people practice restraint as an act of care.
The Trust That’s Been Lost Everywhere Else
Houses are left unlocked, and kids roam freely on bikes after school. Not because crime doesn’t exist, but because the island is small enough that someone you know is always around, keeping an eye out.
It’s the kind of community trust that has vanished in most modern societies. We’ve traded it for Ring doorbells, neighborhood watch apps, and the constant low-grade anxiety of living among strangers.
Norfolk Island reminded me that we didn’t always live this way. And we don’t have to keep living this way.
The Challenges Beneath the Surface
But I'd be painting an incomplete picture if I didn't mention the challenges. Norfolk Island isn't immune to the problems facing the rest of the world — they're just more visible here.
At the island's waste management center, piles of discarded clothing tell a familiar story. Fast fashion has reached even this remote corner of the Pacific. The island's small size means waste management is a constant struggle — there's limited space for landfill, and shipping waste off-island is expensive and complicated.
It's a stark reminder that no place is untouched by modern consumption patterns. Norfolk Island is doing its best with what it has, but it's a microcosm of the larger tension we all face: how do we live well without destroying the places we love?
What This Means for KOOSHOO (and for Us)
This journey deepened how we approach KOOSHOO's brand storytelling at Green Socials. We’re weaving narratives about intentional living, endemic inspiration, and cultural and natural preservation.
The content we captured during that week will continue to fuel our strategy for the next few months (at least!).
But here's what surprised me: the experience didn't change our ability to tell KOOSHOO's story — Rachel and Jesse had always communicated their vision beautifully from afar. What it changed was the texture of how we tell it. We now write from memory, not just from briefing notes.
Why This Matters Beyond One Client
I work in digital marketing. I help purpose-led businesses grow their online presence. I spend my days thinking about algorithms, content strategies, and how to cut through the noise of endless scrolling.
And yet, this trip to Norfolk Island reminded me of something essential: the metrics that matter most aren’t always the ones we can track in analytics dashboards.
Sometimes the most important measure of success is whether we’re creating space for real human connection. Whether we’re preserving what makes us unique in an increasingly homogenised world. Whether we’re choosing to actually live in the moments we have instead of constantly optimising for some future version of life that never quite arrives.
That’s what Norfolk Island taught me. That’s what KOOSHOO embodies in their business. And that’s what we’re trying to honour in every piece of content we create for them.
Dinner with Rachel & Annina @iopartosola
The Digital Connection That Started It All
Here’s what still amazes me: none of this would have happened without digital marketing.
Someone on a remote Pacific island typed a search query, found our website, read about our values, and later decided we might be a good fit. And that simple digital interaction eventually led me to one of the most profound experiences of my life.
This is why we started Green Socials in the first place. Not to help businesses get more followers or drive more sales — though those things do obviously matter. But to help purpose-led brands share messages that might actually change how people live. To create connections that matter and bring people closer to what’s real, not further away from it.
Your website, your social media, your digital presence — they’re not just marketing tools. They’re bridges. And you never know who’s going to cross them, or where those connections might take you.
For me, it was a tiny island in the Pacific where community still comes first and where time moves differently.
All because someone found us online and decided to reach out.
That’s the kind of digital marketing worth doing.
