As catchphrases go, it isn’t much.
“Michael Hill. Jeweller” did little more than accurately describe the man who first said it in the early ’80s in a stilted debut television commercial inspired by the awkward but effective personal advertisements fronted by Wellington appliance store owner Alan Martin.
Michael Hill kept on saying the phrase, over and over again — “it was all in the pausing” he once said, in an attempt to explain the commercials’ pop culture appeal.
The ubiquitous, eponymous advertisements were everywhere on TV and radio for two decades or more, and made the jewellery store a household name. They proved to be a canny marketing device which helped propel a humble Whangarei shop into an international chain with more than 300 branches.
On the back of that success, “Michael Hill. Jeweller” became Sir Michael Hill, multimillionaire — and not only a successful businessman but also a generous philanthropist who devoted much of his time and energy to supporting sports, the arts and numerous charities.
He also became a pillar of the Queenstown community, having settled in Arrowtown around 1994.
Little in Michael Hill’s early life hinted at the fame and fortune to come. Born in Whangarei in 1938, Hill showed little academic promise at Whangarei Boys’ High School.
What he did show was some talent at music, having taken up the violin at age 11. He was precocious enough to express hopes of a career in music, but finishing fourth in a competition when he was 17 dampened his hopes and saw Hill marched off to work for his uncle, Arthur Fisher, at his family jewellery store.
Hill explained in later life that he had started playing seriously at too old an age to become a concert virtuoso, but that did not mean his love of playing dimmed. Hill practised solo Bach violin pieces every day his schedule allowed.
Working for his uncle offered little chance for flights of fancy, but it did allow him a comfortable income. In 1964, he met Christine Roe, a young arts teacher from Yorkshire, when she walked into the store.
They married four months later in early 1965 and had two children: Mark, a sculptor who also designs jewellery for the family firm, and Emma, who succeeded her father as the head of Michael Hill International in 2015.
In 1971, the couple began building a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home at the scenic Whangarei Heads. Three years later, with the house near completion, the family went into town to go to the movies. While there, the Hills’ dream home went up in flames.
Totally uninsured and having lost everything, Michael Hill had an epiphany: that same night he decided to buy his uncle out of the business.
He found a backer and approached his uncle nine months later. Turned down flat, an undaunted Michael Hill went ahead and opened up a new store under his own name just up the road. It was the start of a glittering new career.
At the age of 40 and with a young family, few men would have dared do what Michael Hill did, but he was by now possessed with supreme confidence that he was going to succeed.
Hill sold only jewellery and watches, and always had stock at affordable prices.
“Jewellery is an emotional purchase; it has enduring memories,” he once said, explaining the philosophy behind the store.
The upstart shop was soon turning over far more than its predecessor, and within a short time, Michael Hill had delivered on his pledge to open seven stores within seven years. Buoyed by a successful stock exchange listing in 1987, that target was revised to 70 stores in seven years.
Expansion was key to Hill’s success — at one point he targeted 1000 stores — but he didn’t always get everything right: a short-lived venture into selling shoes was, in Sir Michael’s own words, an utter disaster. His attempt to export the Michael Hill formula to the United States also failed to fly, although he enjoyed greater success across the border in Canada.
By the end of his life, 287 Michael Hill stores were trading, across New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
In the early 1990s, the Hills hatched plans to relocate south, to Queenstown.
However, as a colourful character, Hill had a couple of early spats with the local council. Initially, it was for choosing a shade of pink for the house he built on a former deer farm he bought beside Arrowtown — it was said not to conform with the council’s colour palette.
Hill was then ticked off for not having consent for a sculptural piece he had installed.
Meanwhile, his jewellery chain had opened a Michael & Co store in the new Steamer Wharf complex: that became Michael Hill Jeweller two years later.
That store, which later shifted to Rees St, was last year relaunched as the first new-concept store for the business.
Hill published an autobiography entitled Hello, Michael Hill Jeweller, in 1994. He also had two business advice books printed, in 2009 and 2010.
In the mid-’90s, still in fine musical fettle, Hill performed a violin concert in the Gibbston Valley Winery cave.
That concert was the inspiration for what became the biennial Michael Hill International Violin Competition, which launched in Queenstown and Auckland in 2001. His competition is now rated among the best in the world.
Over the years, Hill also hosted concerts by top-notch musicians at his high-end lodge. In 2020, as a Covid-19 fundraiser, he performed his first recital in about 24 years — on a 1755 Guadagnini violin — in concert with his then 12-year-old grandson, Jacob.
He told Mountain Scene at the time: “All communities are better if they’re enriched with a deep understanding of music, and it’s something the human race has always had.”
As Hill aged, he began to accumulate honours which reflected his lengthy and impactful career. He was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002, a member of the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame in 2006 and was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008.
In 2011 came a watershed moment when Michael Hill, jeweller, became Sir Michael, for services to business and the arts.
Sport was also a passion. In the 2000s, he had had a chip-and-putt course built on his Arrowtown property, perhaps inspired by a mini-golf course he formed around his parents’ garden in Whangarei which he charged the neighbourhood children to play — except at The Hills he’d host charity tournaments on it.
He recalled broadcaster Mike Hosking telling him he looked forward to playing it. Embarrassed he couldn’t present a better offering, Sir Michael asked course designer John Darby to add a grunty par-four.
But before long, he told him, “to hell with it, let’s do the whole 18, and, oh, I want it to be a championship course”.
Spending a huge amount on the course — Hill would not tell his wife how much — and an award-winning bunker-style clubhouse, he was then granted three years’ hosting rights for the NZ Open. The course opened just in time for the 2007 Open.
In 2012, The Hills staged the NZ PGA champs, adding on — at the suggestion of ex-All Blacks coach John Hart — a pro-am component. Two such events were so successful that he, along with neighbouring Millbrook, were granted hosting rights again, with that pro-am component then added to the event.
In a nice touch, Sir Michael and Millbrook founder the late Eichii Ishii received the “keys to Arrowtown” before the 2015 Open.
The courses continued co-hosting the event till 2020, and though The Hills hasn’t been involved since, Sir Michael deserves credit for reviving the event.
Meanwhile, in 2019 he’d added a par-3 nine-holer, The Farm, which he said when it opened was “possibly [his] finest achievement”.
Along with The Hills’ development as a top-notch private course, he also turned it into a sculpture park.
He was inspired not only by his son Mark being a sculptor, but also advice from friend Guenther Radler who told him: “No golf course in the world does this — it will give you an enormous point of difference”.
The incredible sculptural pieces, which he kept adding to, include a Chinese sculptor’s statue of a warrior surrounded by 110 wolf figurines, called The Wolves are Coming, which Sir Michael had spotted in a public courtyard in China.
He would open the sculpture park for fundraisers, including for his favourite charity, Cure Kids.
Beyond music and golf, Sir Michael had a financial interest in an Arrowtown hospitality venture and was a prolific cartoonist.
In 2019, he launched a 408-page book of his cartoons, Catch & Release: A Life of Art, Thoughts and Nonsense, and he also produced weekly cartoons for Mountain Scene for the past six years.
Sir Michael always enjoyed the fun side of life and loved dressing in zany garb. His flamboyance was most on display at the closing ceremonies at his NZ Opens, where one year he appeared as a greenkeeper.
He was a very fit and health-conscious individual, who meditated too, and was very proud of Christine, whom he credited for so much of his success, and children Mark and Emma.
Just this March, not long after scoring his first hole-in-one, 72 years after first picking up a club, Sir Michael and Lady Christine celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary — fittingly, it was a diamond anniversary.
Reflecting on his life after turning 80, he said if he hadn’t bought The Hills, which had effectively become “the biggest park in the area”, it would have been filled with 10-acre blocks with “all sorts of funny, unco-ordinated homes.
“I think we need to be custodians for the area and look after it. We’re only here for a blip, really.”
Sir Michael Hill died in Arrowtown on July 29, aged 86.
