Sir Michael Hill, pictured at home at The Hills, died earlier this week aged 86. Photo / Mark Hill
He was generous, clever, astute, musical and a little bit wacky. Jane Phare looks back on the life and times of Sir Michael Hill, jeweller. Oh, and violinist, philanthropist, businessman and adventurer.
The first time I met Michael Hill I thought he was slightly unusual, eccentric even. He and his wife Christine were in Auckland to promote a book he wrote, Toughen Up. I walked from the shabby, old Herald building (since demolished) down Albert St to the five-star Stamford Plaza Hotel, where President Clinton stayed during Apec in 1999. It was ultra swish.
Yet Hill had brought with him a paper bag of what looked like wilted carrot tops and other vegetable offerings. Not for him the hotel’s buffet breakfast, loaded with carbs and calories. He travelled with a little blender with which to make a green smoothie – and this was in an era before green smoothies were a thing.
Working on his health and fitness was almost an obsession. One colleague described him as a “fitness freak”. He took supplements, jogged, played tennis and golf, followed the Pritikin diet, and meditated to turn you’re-not-good-enough thoughts into of-course-you’re-good-enough thoughts. Better even.
The Hills were staying in a suite. He never booked a flash room at a hotel, he told me, just asked for an upgrade at check-in. Worked every time, he said with a grin. He sold gold and diamonds, made plenty of money but he and Lady Christine rarely visited cafes on their travels. Instead, they packed sandwiches and a Thermos to have on the way, a habit from way back when money was scarce.
And now he’s gone, aged 86. Despite the green smoothies and the vigorous health regime, cancer sadly caught up with him in the end earlier this week.
Hill’s story is so familiar that most Kiwis from his era will know it: The shy, picked-on boy who hated school but found solace learning the violin at primary school and later at Whangārei Boys’ High. He went on to build a multi-million business with 287 stores in New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
He dreamed of becoming a professional violinist, practising up to eight hours a day after he dropped out of school. Hearing about a Herald violin competition, his parents agreed to support him if he won. Young Michael played a Haydn violin concerto, came fourth and that was the end of that.
He was put to work as an apprentice watchmaker in his Uncle Arthur’s Whangārei jewellery shop. Uncle Arthur thought his nephew was pretty “useless” and eventually sent him out to the shop front instead, a move he might one day have lived to regret. The teenage Michael loved the retail side, the thrill of a sale.
He might have stayed there forever – he endured it for 20 years – had it not been for a devastating house fire. By then Hill had met the love of his life, Christine Roe, a young arts teacher from Yorkshire. They met in November 1964 and married four months later.
They had two children, Mark and Emma, and slowly built their Claude Megson-designed dream home, inspired by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, on the Whangārei Heads. The family went to the movies one night and came home to find it ablaze.
Shocked at the sight, Hill rushed inside to rescue his 150-year-old violin and his wife’s jewellery. Those rescued items were to dominate the rest of his life.
Devastated by the smouldering – and uninsured – remains of his house, he vowed that things would change. When his uncle refused to sell him the business, he opened his own shop – Michael Hill Jeweller – five doors away in 1979.
But this shop was nothing like Uncle Arthur’s or any other jewellery shop at the time for that matter. Gone were the traditional clocks, china, crystal, trophies, china and silver. Michael Hill Jeweller would sell only jewellery and watches. The shop had a wide entrance and the goods were temptingly displayed in generous-sized glass counters.
He did a turnover of $400,000 in his first year; six years later the turnover had increased to $7 million with the help of six shops and 70 staff. Hill might have had a late start but the “useless” jeweller was on his way.
He wrote in his book Toughen Up, by which time he was a multi-millionaire, “I took him [the uncle] at his own game ... and I won.”
The school drop-out went on to build a global business which made him rich enough to own a Stradivarius violin, build a beautiful home near Arrowtown, and establish The Hills, an 18-hole championship golf course and a nine-hole course known as The Farm, built on a 200ha estate dotted with stunning sculptures.
He used to drive his Aston Martin very fast on the private road between his home and the golf club, just for the thrill of it.
Hill named his first superyacht (34m) VvS1, a jewellery term for an almost flawless diamond. That was something he had learned in life, he said. “Nothing is perfect, that’s what keeps you striving for more.“
Hill’s ambition was limited only by his imagination and, by all accounts, he had plenty of it.
Family friend Anne Rodda described him as “an entrepreneur, a dreamer and a big thinker”.
“There was a lot to Michael. That fizzy brain, the one that’s always coming up with ideas, some brilliant, some absolutely unattainable and wacky. One out of 10 of his ideas would be absolutely brilliant and we’d go with that.“
Rodda, a trained classical cellist, met Hill 25 years ago in her role as artistic manager for the Auckland Philharmonia. She heard he wanted to organise a violin competition and she helped make it happen. Since then she’s been the competition’s executive director.
The resulting Michael Hill International Violin Competition (the next one is in May 2026) is now recognised as one of the most important events in the cultural calendar. Sixteen competitors, selected from 160 applicants around the world, are flown to Queenstown to audition in front of seven international judges. The finalists then perform in front of a packed Auckland Town Hall audience and the judges.
In 2023, 350,000 people watched the livestreamed finalists’ performance, and the competition auditions attracted 1.3m views online.
Hill was not just invested financially in the competition but on a deep personal level, Rodda says.
“He was sitting in the front row of every competition. He would bounce up in the interval full of enthusiasm, sure that the last one he heard play was going to win. He sat through all the auditions as the panel selected the competitors.”
In his own way, Hill was helping talented young musicians achieve what he had been unable to do, have a career as a professional artist.
“It’s an incredible story,” Rodda says. “The competition is what was closest to his soul and the thing that gave him the most resonance and the most joy in his life.”
Although he never played professionally, his love of the violin endured. In his 80s he still practised Bach on his 190-year-old Italian violin, kayaked on Lake Hayes and played golf.
In a moving video tribute to their violin mentor, the 11 first-prize winners from the violin competitions contributed to a recording of Bach’s Chaconne in D minor in his memory, each playing a different part of the movement.
But the wider public rarely saw the dedicated violinist who practised for hours. Instead. many will remember Hill from his excruciating TV ads that ran through the 80s. “Hello,” he’d say in his best nasal tone, smiling at the camera, “Michael Hill ... (pause) jeweller.” He’d purse his lips to emphasis the “M”.
The ads were irritating, to the point where DJs would mock and impersonate him. The jeweller even tried to teach his daughter Emma to impersonate him, but no one could quite pull it off.
If anyone pointed out to him how awful his ads were, Hill would laugh. He was the first to admit they were “unbelievably boring and amateurish” and that he looked “terrible” in those early ads.
But the point was, they worked. Everyone in New Zealand knew who Michael Hill was and what he sold. And they came to buy his jewellery.
In 1987, Michael Hill International listed on the NZX, buoyed by steadily increasing sales and successful shop openings. Four months later the stock market crashed, a day that became known as Black Monday (October 19). Kiwis investors lost fortunes overnight and billions of dollars were wiped off the value of New Zealand shares. (The company had a less eventful listing on the ASX in 2016).
It could have been the end of Michael Hill, jeweller, but no. Several smaller jewellery businesses didn’t survive and Hill saw it as an opportunity to pick up new business when the economy recovered.
That year he won the Air New Zealand enterprise award for business entrepreneurship and made it to the big smoke, opening his largest shop in Auckland’s Queen St. And he started moving into the Australian market.
Not one to arrive quietly, a September 1989 newspaper clipping trumpets: “Michael Hill’s sale a riot.” And indeed it was.
Hundreds of bargain hunters broke into a Canberra shopping mall at 4am, eager to get first dibs on $1 diamond rings, stock that Michael Hill International wanted to clear from a shop before displaying its own range. By the time the shop opened, 700 people were crowded outside and a woman punched a shop assistant when she was told she could only buy one ring. It took four carloads of police and the mall security guards to clear the crowd.
Australians were also incensed to see a series of jewellery bargains scrolling in a TV ad, accompanied by the piercing sound of a bugle playing The Last Post. The ad caused pandemonium at the Michael Hill head office as complaints poured in, the Australian Ministry of Defence was enraged, there were bomb threats in Sydney and it made front-page news. But, as Sir Michael said at the time, “sales went through the roof”.
In his own way, he was a showman, full of ideas – often quirky - designed to make a splash. In 1988, he hired a woman, clad in a black sports bra, a striped bikini bottom and black tights to show off $450,000 worth of jewellery at the maiden annual shareholder meeting in Whangārei.
Hill wasn’t one for clustering his shareholders into boring meeting rooms. Instead, he’d take them for a joyride on the Waitematā Harbour, entertained by a jazz band; or a cruise to a vineyard on Waiheke Island, or to Pakatoa Island, or to the Ellerslie Racecourse.
One time his shareholders met in an aircraft hangar in Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology (Motat). At each AGM they were usually told the joyous news that the company could expect another tax-paid profit, and that new shops were about to be added to the fast-growing chain.
For the company’s 10th AGM in 1997, 250 shareholders were loaded onto a train in Auckland bound for Waimauku. Hill, nattily dressed in pinstriped pants and sporting a red tie decorated with yellow worms, served bubbly and wine on the journey to his faithful followers. Again the news was good: a plan to open 100 stores and move to other countries as the market became saturated.
Former Herald writer Bernadette Rae was on the train that day. As she put it: “So many fingers to ring, so many necks to chain.”
In the early 1990s, everything Michael-Hill-jeweller touched seemed to turn to gold. (He famously sold his wife’s engagement rings four times after they were admired, each time replacing it with a bigger stone).
Then came the stumble of the shoe era. He bought the assets from a Christchurch shoe company and by 1992 had added nine shoe shops to his 41 jewellery stores. The trouble was they not only didn’t make money, they lost money, a lot. By 1994 all nine shoe stores had closed and “Michael Hill ... cobbler” was no more. He later acknowledged that the foray into shoes was a “disaster” and that the company needed to stick to jewellery and watches.
Undeterred by the footwear trip-up, the group continued to expand. Well on his way to saturating the Australian market, Hill based his family in Queensland’s Sanctuary Cove in the mid 1990s, with his launch Rough Diamond parked at the back door.
He couldn’t understand why more people didn’t want to get into retail. By 2009, he had 250 stores in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, opening new stores so fast he couldn’t find enough staff to fill them. He was puzzled why Kiwis were willing to work in hospitality but thought a male working in a jewellery shop was a “wimpy, poncy thing to do”.
So he wrote Toughen Up (the proceeds of which went to Cure Kids) as a recruitment tool. He told me during an interview that his CEO earned three, possibly four, times more than the (then) Prime Minister John Key. Don’t ever suggest working in a shop is a dead-end career, he said.
By then he had invested in Joe’s Garage in Arrowtown and had no shortage of applicants wanting to work in the cafe, but he was struggling to find good people to join his jewellery empire.
Take his group diamond buyer at the time, Galina Hirtzel, he said, a girl from Invercargill who stated on $10 an hour. She was now (in 2009) flying round the world spending $100m of the company’s money on diamonds every year. He thought her hippy long hair and floaty dress tricked merchants into not realising she was a tough negotiator.
Knighted in 2011 for services to business and the arts, Hill was exhilarated by the company’s growth and didn’t mind talking it up, describing himself on one interview as “the Ferrari of the jewellery business”. He was a businessman in the quick lane overtaking the rest of the jewellery world.
At the same time he told business journalists he wanted “controlled, sensible growth”.
He and Lady Christine built a home on land that used to be a deer farm. Locals nicknamed it “Hillbrook” and some took exception to the building, complaining it was too “pink”. That caused the council to request a colour change; the Hills held firm. The “terracotta” house later won the South Regional Architectural Award (for its colour scheme), a victory that used to make Hill chuckle.
The Hills are a close family. Children Emma and Mark, and the four grandchildren, all live on the estate, with sculptures by Mark Hill among other artworks strategically placed through The Hills.
He preferred to be low key and with the family when he was on holiday, often escaping Otago’s winter to cruise in the Pacific on The Beast, his 40m adventure catamaran. In the summer The Beast’s captain, Andy Grocott, who has worked for “the boss” since 2006, would sail to remote places in New Zealand’s Far North so the Hills could fish, swim, hike, dive and kayak. Jetskis were not their style.
As tributes poured in this week, members of The Hills golf club penned their own. “Rest peacefully Sir Michael,” it said at the end. “You will forever be part of The Hills.” Beneath is one of the many cartoons he drew for his own and others’ amusement. It shows an aviator clinging to a rocket as it zooms into space.
Underneath Hill has signed off with the quote, “Live every day as if it was going to be your last, for one day you’re sure to be right.”
Jane Phare is the New Zealand Herald’s deputy print editor.
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