What Jade does at Zea
Zea is four brands. Zea Relief for natural pain management, Zea Essentials for aromatherapy, Zea Gourmet for Australian native honeys and bush foods, and Zea Active for sports recovery. Four audiences, four sets of expectations, one company behind them.
Holding that together is Jade's job. As Chief Brand Strategist she decides what each brand is for, who it speaks to and where the lines between them sit, so the range reads as one considered company rather than a collection of products that happen to share a logo.
Brand architecture
The four-brand structure is a deliberate choice. It lets a pharmacy buyer stock pain relief without needing to care about honey, and lets a customer who came for essential oils find the rest of the range on their own terms. Jade owns that structure and the positioning underneath it.
Voice and identity
How Zea sounds, what it will and will not claim, and how it looks on a shelf, on a screen and in a pharmacy aisle. Jade sets the standard and holds the line on it, which in a natural health category full of overclaiming is a commercial decision as much as a creative one.
Purpose, held to account
Zea is a Certified B Corporation and a member of 1% for the Planet. Certification is not a badge you buy, it is an audit you pass and re-pass, and it constrains real decisions about suppliers, packaging and who Zea will work with. Jade is a driving force behind treating that as a standard rather than a marketing line.
Growth and the business itself
Alongside brand, Jade works across strategy, operations and the numbers. She was central to Zea's equity crowdfunding raise, which brought hundreds of customers on as shareholders in the business they already bought from.
Before Zea
In 2012 Jade founded Event Head, a boutique event management and styling business, and spent more than fifteen years in event management and business development across the corporate, not-for-profit and entrepreneurial sectors. She has run events in some of Australia's best-known venues, worked with high-level corporate partners, and helped raise more than a million dollars in charitable donations.
She is also an internationally awarded business coach, certified through the Beautiful You Coaching Academy, and has coached founders and business owners from start-ups through to multi-millionaires. She has spoken about events, niching and networking in Australia and in New York, has written for HuffPost and Foundr, and is the author of Home, an ebook of lessons and exercises drawn from her own entrepreneurial journey. She continues that coaching work at jademckenzie.me.
That background is the reason Zea's brand work is grounded rather than decorative. Events are unforgiving: the room either works or it does not, and you find out on the night.
People before products
People before products.
That was the title Jade and Hayden gave their conversation on the Chronic Pain Australia podcast, and it is a fair summary of how she approaches brand at Zea.
Most of Zea's customers are people who have tried a lot of things that did not work. They are sceptical, and they have earned the right to be. Jade's position is that a brand talking to that person has to be careful with what it promises, specific about what a product actually does, and honest about the limits, because the alternative is a short-term sale and a customer who never comes back.
In practice that means the same discipline you will find across the site: Kunzea Pain Relief Cream registered with the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods as a listed medicine rather than sold as a cosmetic, realistic timeframes instead of overnight-miracle language, and named practitioners behind the health content.
Book Jade to speak
Jade takes on a small number of speaking engagements, podcast interviews and panels each year. She has spoken on stage in Australia and in New York, and is a natural fit for conversations about:
- Building a purpose-led brand, and what B Corp certification actually demands
- Equity crowdfunding, and turning customers into shareholders
- Running a multi-brand business as a family
- Brand architecture: when to split a brand and when to hold it together
- Events, niching and networking
- Building a business without the hustle narrative
Tell us the format, audience and date and we will come back to you.
Listen and read
Podcasts
- Pain Lives Here, "People Before Products" - Chronic Pain Australia, with Hayden Brass, for National Pain Week
- Bright Red Marketing, episode 31 - crowd sourced funding and the future of marketing
Writing and profiles
On air
- TVSN Health and Wellness Month, January 2026 - presenting the Zea range live on air
Articles by Jade
- 7 simple ways we serve the earth at Zea
- 7 family-friendly natural wellness products from Zea
- Nurman Noor: boat-rocker, chaos-maker and baker talks cooking with Kunzea
Other enquiries
For wholesale, partnerships or media requests about Zea, the team can point you to the right person.
