About Me
Photo by Paul Foster: taken on a Wild Things Gifts shoot at The Exeter Studio (that's me on the right)
Twenty years of my career sit under titles like Marketing Manager and Ecommerce & Marketing Manager: none of them mention 'creative direction', 'content designer' or 'copywriter', but look at what actually filled those roles, and the thread is clear.
What I Do
words matter
"Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me." – Michel de Montaigne
Content strategy & governance
Defining structure, editorial standards and ownership for content that has to stay consistent as a business, catalogue or team grows.
Tone of voice development
Building brand voice guidelines from a blank page, then holding the line on them across every channel.
UX writing & plain English
Translating complex or jargon-heavy information into copy people can actually act on.
Information architecture & journey mapping
Identifying where audiences get lost or drop off, and restructuring around what they actually need.
Editorial standards & style guides
Setting the reference point a team can write against, even where none existed before.
Stakeholder collaboration
Working directly with founders, designers, developers and buying teams to get content decisions made and shipped.
At Calendar Club, The Range, Emile et Rose and Wild Things Gifts, and through a run of freelance consultancy work in between, I've built tone-of-voice guidelines from a blank page more than once, personally signed off every piece of customer-facing copy against brand standards, mapped user journeys to strip friction out of confusing sign-up flows, and owned content governance across ecommerce catalogues running into the thousands of SKUs. That's content design work. It just never had the label.
The breadth is real too. I've planned and delivered integrated strategy across email, paid search, PR and social; managed teams and budgets (a team of 15 at The Range, a six-figure media budget at Calendar Club); built and launched Shopify sites from scratch for freelance clients; and, earlier in my career, worked hands-on as a graphic designer and production assistant before moving client-side into digital marketing in 2006. I still do the visual work myself in Canva, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop when a project calls for it, which means the content and design decisions on a project rarely get made in isolation from each other.
How I work
direction matters
"No wind favors he who has no destined port." – Seneca
Most of the work on this site was produced inside small, resource-lean teams – often without dedicated content tooling, formal research budgets, or a content design function to sit inside. That's shaped how I work: fast, collaborative, comfortable with ambiguity, and focused on getting good content shipped rather than running a perfect process. If you're looking for someone who's only ever worked inside a mature content design system, this isn't quite that. If you want someone who can build the thinking from scratch, under real constraints, and still land on something that measurably works – that's what the case studies here are trying to show.
Twenty years in, that's still the thread: knowing what a piece of content, a campaign or a career move is actually for, before worrying about how polished it looks getting there.