The Garden Party

By building this site our customers can now buy products from our gift shops online.
We have two shops in Auckland and we specialise in unique and beautiful gifts made in New Zealand. We hope by offering the option of online shopping, we will make it even easier for customers to keep track of our rapidly-changing stock.

The website features our best-selling, (mostly) New Zealand made ranges. After all, we want to help and promote local artists and crafts people, as it is their work that makes The Garden Party an interesting and eclectic place to shop. The exceptions are tried and true favourites that The Garden Party staff has enjoyed using or gifting to people.

We get new stock in all the time and we will feature the most exciting things on our NEW PRODUCT page.

To see our full range of products, come in to one of our shops.

With every purchase we offer a gift-wrapping service and provide a matching gift card, all free of charge.

How The Garden Party came to be…

The original Garden Party shop opened in Ponsonby, Auckland in 1994. The idea came about when locals Pam Lim and her sister, Diana Firth, wanted to find somewhere to sell their hand-painted pottery plates. Pam called her daughter Anna, who was in India at the time, and suggested they start up a ceramics shop.

Anna came home, and the mother and daughter team found an old villa on Ponsonby Road and renovated it into a stunning shop with a courtyard garden.

Although, the original idea of The Garden Party had been to sell only the hand-painted plates, it quickly grew to sell all sorts of unusual and beautiful objects.

Lots of local artisans and crafts people bought their products to the shop to sell. It grew into a shop specializing in and championing New Zealand designed products.

We want the shop to be entertaining. We love it when we hear the customers giggling at our stock. We are always getting in new products and changing the displays, so it’s different every time customers come in.

We have always tried unusual products. We have even had a beautiful hand decorated coffin for sale in the shop once.

Pam’s first love has always been the ceramics and by 1998 these were turning out to be extremely popular and we needed more space, so we moved the shop next door, losing the garden, but gaining enough space for a shop and a small ceramics factory.

After a few years The Garden Party Factory became big enough to become an entity in its own right and is now located in Mt Albert and supplies shops nationally and internationally.
The Garden Party Newmarket opened in 1996 with owner-operator Jenny Simperingham.

The Garden Party shops are now well known in Auckland and have attracted publicity from local and international media. Our products are featured in local publications and on television.

We are passionate about NZ made and designed products and try to support local talent. However, in our quest for a truly eclectic mix, we also scour the world to find unusual products to compliment the local stock.

Please come in, explore, enjoy and have fun in our shops and on our website. And remember contact us and we can arrange to have whatever sent to wherever.