Wayne Brown is wearing 100 startup T-shirts and somehow it works

Wayne Brown has found a new use for the mayoralty, and it is apparently modelling startup merchandise. For 100 days, Auckland’s mayor is wearing a different branded T-shirt from a local company, filming a short introduction to what it does and using his social media following to put the business in front of people who might otherwise never hear its name.

The campaign is called 100 Days of Startups, and it will run through to Auckland Startup Week in October. The council says the idea is to showcase local founders across areas including biotechnology, gaming and sustainable design, while giving the city’s startup sector a bit more public visibility.

It is easy to laugh at a mayor in branded merch, and the campaign seems aware of that. Brown opened the series with Roam With Kids, an app helping parents find child-friendly places and activities, before admitting on camera that it was probably not going to be a major personal use case for him. In the launch video, he also joked with Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck about needing a job once the mayoral one was finished. The whole thing has the slightly loose energy of someone being handed a T-shirt and a rough understanding of the product five minutes before filming.

That is probably why it works better than it should.

Startup promotion usually arrives with far too much language around it. There are ecosystems, innovation pipelines, founder journeys, scale pathways, investment readiness and entire conferences devoted to making a person with a working product sound like a regional economic development initiative. By the time the public sees any of it, the actual business has disappeared behind a photograph of six people pointing at a panel.

The T-shirt is at least honest. Here is a company. This is its name. Here is the thing it is trying to build. The mayor has put the shirt on, so you might look at it for 20 seconds before moving on with your day.

Brown says Auckland is home to more than 1,000 startups, many of them working from garages, basements and ordinary offices without the profile of the city’s better-known technology companies. His argument is that Auckland is not loud enough about its risk-takers, and that the mayoral platform can give some of them the kind of attention they cannot afford to buy.

Visibility will not solve the difficult parts of building a company from Auckland. A founder still needs customers, capital, good people, sensible regulation and a reason not to move closer to a much larger market. A daily video from the mayor will not repair procurement systems that favour established suppliers or make Auckland housing suddenly affordable for the people a startup hopes to employ.

It would be unfair, though, to dismiss a small campaign because it does not solve every large problem around it. The shirt is not pretending to be economic policy. It is a simple use of public attention, and public attention is one of the few useful things a mayor can hand over without another committee having to approve the budget.

There is also something refreshing about seeing startups presented as actual local businesses rather than a collection of future billion-dollar valuations. Some of the companies will become large. Plenty will not. Some will make specialised tools, solve boring problems extremely well or build something useful enough to employ a small team for years. That still counts, even if nobody rings a bell at the Nasdaq.

The campaign leads into Auckland Startup Week from October 12 to 16, which will include workshops, pitch events, investor sessions and programmes for companies at different stages. All of that has a place, but the 100-day lead-in may end up doing the more interesting job by showing people how many businesses already exist before asking them to attend a panel about the potential of the sector.

There will be 100 companies, 100 short explanations and, presumably, an increasingly complicated laundry situation at the mayor’s office. It is not a grand strategy, but Auckland has had plenty of those. The shirts are easier to understand.