A top Samoan shipping executive, Michelle Brunt is returning home to take on a key appointment and will use her experience to bolster trade shipping routes for Samoan exporters.

As part of a major upscaling of their local services scope, TransAM has appointed Ms. Brunt as their new NPDL Senior Sales Manager, covering American Samoa and Samoa.

These initiatives include a substantial increase in the line’s general and refrigerated cargo capacity in the California-South Pacific Islands trade, and this service will be Michelle’s main focus.

Born and bred in Apia, Ms. Brunt is making an enthusiastic return to these territories after successful secondments to Fiji and New Zealand.

“In terms of customer service in the container cargo space, she’s ace,” said line president Greg Wilson.

“People of Michelle’s calibre are always in demand, and we could have deployed her elsewhere. But these markets are key for NPDL, and when TransAM started bidding for her services, we were only too happy.”

Ms. Brunt’s shipping experience goes back 28 years, the last 20 of them with NPDL and its corporate forebears. And she has fulfilled many roles in the course of her career.

“Documentations, operations, administration, sales – I’ve done it all,” she said.

She is now looking forward to catching up with everyone she has worked with before, and to making new friends in the industry.

“This is home for me, and the shipping scene here is family,” she said.

A long time ago, Ms. Brunt Michelle was advised that she should identify her passion, and then be the best at that.

So, she took that advice and has never looked back.

“There is a romance about ships and shipping, and I fell in love from the start,” she said.