Brand & Website for Masterlink
Masterlink · Brand & Website / Industry Training · 2021–Present
A national apprenticeship programme rebuilt as a single, dependable home online.
Masterlink is Aotearoa’s only national group training programme dedicated to plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying. Owned by Master Plumbers, Gasfitters & Drainlayers NZ, it places, mentors and supports apprentices into host businesses from the far South to the far North. Obvious was engaged to consolidate a fractured supplier history into a single brand-and-digital partnership — and to rebuild the platform that holds it all together.
Masterlink sits in the middle of a national pipeline. On one side: hundreds of plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying businesses around the country who need a steady supply of qualified tradespeople. On the other: young New Zealanders looking for a way into a trade with a clear career runway. Masterlink screens, recruits and places the apprentices, employs them through the duration of their training, mentors them through quarterly appraisals, and handles every piece of admin in between — payroll, ACC, KiwiSaver, leave, block-course logistics, PPE, tools and the wellbeing support that keeps an apprenticeship on track.
That operational depth wasn’t being matched online. Internal stakeholder research conducted across eleven Masterlink staff in 2021 returned an average aesthetic rating of 4.9 out of 10 for the existing website; ratings for tone of voice, language and information architecture were similar. Hosts and apprentices, surveyed separately, gave gentler scores but flagged the same pattern — an information-heavy site that didn’t represent the calibre of the people or the programme behind it. The brand had also been carried by a sequence of past vendors, each holding a different piece, with no shared strategy stitching them together.
Obvious was engaged as Brand Partners — a deliberate term, used in our intro letter to Masterlink’s leadership, to mark the difference between a service provider taking instructions and a partnership built on shared strategy. The first major piece of work was a ground-up website rebuild on a content management system Masterlink could actually run themselves. The partnership has since extended into ongoing brand stewardship, host and apprentice collateral, the Gateway 2.0 student workbook, and an early-adopter relationship across our NoticeBoards in-school broadcast network.
A national programme that needed a single home online
The 2021 stakeholder research told a consistent story across three audiences. Internal staff described a site that was hard to navigate, dated in look, heavy with words, and not earning the calibre of the programme. Apprentices — surveyed across fifteen respondents from Kaitaia to Invercargill — were more forgiving but flagged the same fundamentals: too much content on the home page, mobile experience that needed work, and a tone that one respondent described as addressed more to the older generations. Hosts wanted clarity above all else: how to sign up, what the benefits were, and a clear path to the contact form.
Masterlink’s senior team agreed on the brief. The new website needed a clear idea of audience — current host, current apprentice, potential host, potential apprentice — and to lead each of them to the answer they came for. It needed a contact form and contact details up front, room for what hosts and apprentices say about the programme, services laid out plainly, and a content management system that didn’t require an agency in the room every time a page needed updating.
We rebuilt the site from the ground up — research-led, audience-first, on a platform that hands the keys back to Masterlink. The brief from our intro letter to the team was explicit: websites are never finished. The platform was chosen so the next ten years of iteration could happen without a redesign.
Brand Partners, not a service provider
Masterlink’s history with creative suppliers had been fragmented. Different vendors held different pieces — the brand guidelines, the website, the print collateral, the campaign work — and none of them sat under a shared strategy. The cost wasn’t just inefficiency. It was a brand that was beginning to drift, page by page, from the kaupapa underneath it.
The Obvious engagement was framed deliberately around the term “Brand Partners”. As we wrote to Jo and Rhys at Masterlink in the intro letter that opened the partnership: we’re less interested in being told what to do, and more interested in using our experience in the education, training and trades sectors to guide Masterlink towards better outcomes. The aim was to consolidate the deliverables under one collaborative partnership — improving efficiency, lifting performance, and ensuring every piece of work pulled in the same strategic direction.
That positioning has shaped how the work has run since. Brand stewardship, website performance, host and apprentice collateral, and the Gateway 2.0 student workbook all sit under the same partnership rather than passing between vendors. The brand guidelines — an established document carried forward from the prior agency relationship — are maintained and applied consistently, with logo usage, the four corporate colours (Master Link Dark Blue, Yellow, Aqua and Green) and the Paul Grotesk Soft / Effra typographic system held to the same standard across every surface.
A website built around four audiences
The information architecture that came out of the research phase was structured around the four distinct audiences who arrive at masterlink.co.nz with different jobs to do. Apprentices and prospective apprentices needed clarity on the path in, the qualification, the support and the career runway. Hosts and prospective hosts needed the business case, the host-enquiry form and a clear picture of how Masterlink operates as the employer of record. Behind both, Masterlink staff needed a CMS they could update without an agency call.
The build delivered a homepage that puts the two primary calls to action — Become an Apprentice and Host an Apprentice — front and centre, with the contact pathway and the sign-in to the MyMasterlink portal one step away. Wellbeing on Tap, the apprentice wellbeing programme run with Master Plumbers, sits in its own space. News and content updates run through a CMS the in-house team can manage. The site was designed with the recognition that — as the apprentice survey put it — many users arrive on a phone, want the answer quickly, and don’t reward sites that bury what they came for.
A formal QA pass against the new build, conducted in May 2022, walked the site page-by-page (homepage, footer, About Us, News, Host an Apprentice, Become an Apprentice, Wellbeing, Contact Us) confirming every form, button and link did what it said. The discipline mattered. Masterlink’s funnel — apprentice enquiries and host enquiries — is the business. The website is the front door to it.
The host story, told in print
A national group training programme lives or dies on its host network. Master Plumbers members and other plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying businesses are the ones who take the apprentices on, train them on the job, and pay the weekly host fee that funds the programme. Selling the host opportunity needed more than a website. It needed a print piece a Regional Manager could leave on a desk.
The Masterlink Host Brochure — We’ve got your future apprentice — was redesigned by Obvious to do exactly that job. A foreword from CEO Greg Wallace opens the document. The body walks the host through the regional support model, the ten reasons to use Masterlink, the apprentice’s day-to-day reality, the financial case (only paying for hours actually worked, with Masterlink covering leave, block course, ACC and PAYE), and a closing set of host testimonials — Bridget and Henny Russon at Henbridge Plumbing & Gas in Nelson; Bruce Trenwith at BT Plumbing in Auckland; Mike Gooch at EG Glennie & Co Ltd in Wellington; Dale Lovell at Heron Plumbing in Auckland; Richard Graves at Inside Systems in Invercargill.
The brochure is a tangible proof point of the programme. A Regional Manager arrives on site, talks the host business through the model, and leaves something behind that picks up the conversation the next morning. It’s a small piece of design infrastructure. It carries a lot of the recruitment load.
It is nice to know all the admin is done for you, like holiday pay, sick leave, block courses, getting PPE gear and such. More than that, though, we like having a third party involved in getting good messages across to the trainees… Having Masterlink on the team also keeps us up to date with trends and technology, like the new online payroll and timesheet app.— Mike Gooch, EG Glennie & Co Ltd, Wellington (host testimonial, Masterlink Host Brochure)
Gateway 2.0, the student workbook for the path in
The Gateway 2.0 student workbook is the resource that supports young people exploring plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying through the secondary-school Gateway programme — the supervised work-experience pathway that often becomes the first step into a Masterlink apprenticeship. Obvious designed the workbook in the Masterlink brand system, holding the same colour palette and typographic discipline used on the website and the host brochure.
The decision to design the workbook to a brand-aligned standard, rather than as a one-off teaching resource, matters more than it first appears. A student who picks up Gateway 2.0 in Year 11 or 12 sees a brand they can trust, made by an organisation that takes the trade — and them — seriously. By the time the same student is reading the apprentice section of masterlink.co.nz a year later, the brand is already familiar. Continuity across surfaces, in a sector where so many touchpoints feel disposable, is itself a piece of the recruitment story.
The workbook is one of several pieces of brand-aligned collateral the partnership has produced for distinct stages of the apprentice journey. Each one is designed to do its specific job, but built to feel like part of the same kaupapa.
An early adopter on NoticeBoards, and a partnership that compounds
Masterlink was an early adopter of NoticeBoards — Obvious’s secondary-school broadcast network, which puts content on screens in front of senior secondary students daily. That early support reflected a shared view of where the audience for plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying apprenticeships actually is: in the schools, watching the screens between classes.
The network has roughly doubled in size since the early-adopter agreement, from 20 schools to around 40. Masterlink’s spend has scaled with it under a partnership pricing model that recognises the value of the early support, and the brand has paved the way for regular content updates rather than set-and-forget campaigns. Messaging is refreshed against what’s working, with creative resources deployed against the channel’s strengths. It’s a small, owned, school-day media buy aligned exactly to the audience the apprenticeship programme exists for.
The shape of the partnership across the website, the brand stewardship, the host and apprentice collateral, the Gateway workbook and the NoticeBoards activity is the point. Each piece of work makes the next piece a little more efficient, a little more on-strategy, a little more recognisable to the audiences Masterlink needs to reach. That’s the case for consolidating with a single Brand Partner — and what the Obvious engagement has been built to deliver since 2021.
If you run a national membership organisation, an industry training body, or a trades-adjacent programme that needs its brand, its website and its collateral pulling in the same direction — and you’d like a partner who’ll hold that strategy across every surface, year after year — we’d love to talk. See Masterlink in the wild at masterlink.co.nz.
Working in trades, industry training or a national membership programme?
Obvious partners with industry bodies, trades-adjacent programmes and workforce-development organisations across Aotearoa to consolidate brand, digital and collateral under a single, dependable partnership. From research-led website rebuilds to ongoing brand stewardship and recruitment-grade print collateral — we make the kaupapa visible to the people who need to see it.
