Maybe some of you have already heard the news. In the last few weeks, next to our normal work at Elmastudio, Manuel and I spent lots of time preparing for our long awaited move to Auckland, New Zealand. And after quite a long wait for our business visas and lots of preparations, we are finally ready to go: We are moving with our complete Elmastudio business from Stuttgart, Germany to Auckland, New Zealand :)

Why did we choose New Zealand?

Family and friends as well as people we met here in New Zealand have ask us this question a lot recently. Because even though New Zealand is undeniably a beautiful country, the question why we chose a country so far away from your home, of course still comes into mind.

But since we were able to spent one year in New Zealand in 2009, this place always kept a special place in our hearts. It was back then in New Zealand that our small Freelancer business started to get into the form and structure it still has today.

Only since then we started to really enjoy and love our work. We got more and more into WordPress and theme development and it became clearer to us, in which direction we wanted our Elmastudio business to go. Somehow everything started to fall into place.

But the decision to move to New Zealand completely, instead of only coming here for holidays whenever possible, is still a very personal one. We don’t think that it really matters where you are in this world, as long as you are following your heart and are motivated and inspired by what you do.

Over the last years we have worked from tiny rooms with not even a real bed, from our parents living rooms, from hotel rooms and other, slightly chaotic work situations. And even though it was not always perfect, we have never ever doubted for one day that we are not on the right track. Today we are happy and extremely thankful for this incredible adventurous journey that our little Elmastudio is taking us on.

What will happen next?

We received the final approval for our visas on a rather short notice, so we will probably still be a little busy with our move over the upcoming weeks. We definitely plan to write further posts on our Elmastudio blog about our transition from Germany to New Zealand (especially in regards of moving to another country with your entire business). So we will keep you updated regularly.

Besides that we are already excited to be able to attend the WordCamp Cologne on June 6-7th. Since we are invited to a wedding in Cologne a weekend later, this fits perfectly. In case you don’t know what to do on the first weekend of June yet and you live somewhere close to Cologne, why don’t you come as well! We are 100 percent sure it will be an awesome event and we would love to meet you there in person.

What else will change?

Actually not much will change besides our address and a slight increase in evening work shifts, due to the time difference. Since we can run our Elmastudio completely online, we are able to just continue our work as usual. Also all theme prices will continue to be in Euro (although we are working on offering multi-currencies in the future) and the same VAT charges will apply for our EU customers. In the first months we will also continue to work from our home office here in Auckland. Later on we are planing to move into a coworking or shared-office space or maybe even start our own coworking space.

Do you have any questions you want to ask us?

Do you have any questions regarding Elmastudio or more private questions about our move to a new country or about New Zealand in general? Or do you have any ideas or suggestions for blog posts that would be helpful or interesting? Please let us know, we would love to hear from you!