The job keeps changing names. I don’t.
I have spent my whole working life looking at what somebody has and working out what's interesting about it. In magazines that was called editing. At WGSN it was called forecasting. At Royal Caribbean it was called innovation. At Wink it’s called publicity and content.
In the beginning
I started in London at Elle, The Daily Telegraph, and the BBC, before moving to New York, where I worked at Bauer Media, Condé Nast, and Hearst (to name a few).
An editor's day is mostly saying no. You read things people are proud of and decide they aren't the thing, over and over, until you get fast at seeing what someone has and hasn't noticed they have. That is the whole skill, and everything since has been a version of it.
WGSN and Stylus came in the middle of, and during, the editorial years. Trend forecasting is the business of being right about next year in writing, for clients who plan against it. It moved me from finding what was already there to calling what wasn't there yet, which is a different job and a harder one.
Then came the corporate side.
Royal Caribbean
I was one of two founding members of the digital content team, which we grew to a group of more than twenty-five land- and sea-based content creators and managers.
When the company began its digital transformation I ran content across web, mobile, email, print and onboard signage for three cruise brands, and got the Royal Caribbean and Celebrity apps onto five ships in ten months. 15,069 content items. I also built what came after me: the style guides, content matrices and training that let the team keep scaling once I'd gone.
Then innovation, where the job was dreaming up and building the products themselves. Apps. VR games.
But the one I still think about never launched. Royal Caribbean had thousands of crew who had spent years in ports that the marketing team was describing from a desk in Miami. Nobody was treating that as expertise, because it sat in operations rather than marketing. I took it to Lonely Planet and brokered a partnership around it, designed to move the brand from cruise expert to travel expert. Covid ended it before it shipped. The idea reached Lonely Planet's table, which is the part worth knowing.
Chewy
Chewy's COO called because people were leaving the fulfillment centers and saying why on the way out. To their peers, to anyone thinking of applying, and on Glassdoor. That was the brief: fix the internal PR.
The actual problem was that nobody out there felt like part of Chewy. They felt like an individual on their own fulfillment island.
I listened until I could name it, took it to the C-suite and HR, and built the products that changed it. Recognition, rewards, a way to be part of the company rather than adjacent to it.
Retention went up 20%.
Wink Communications
I have been running Wink for eighteen years. Luxury, hospitality, arts and culture, and maritime, with clients in the US, Europe and Australia.
I also co-founded Abroad & Away, a travel and hospitality studio.
I take fewer clients than I could. You work with me, and when a job needs more hands I bring in people I have worked with for years. I stay on it either way.
Most people come to me for publicity and content. But take note: very little of the first conversation is usually about either.
Current clients include The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection and Aman at Sea.
How we work
We take on clients whose work we believe in and whose standards match our own. That means fewer accounts, more attention, and communications that actually move something.
We work across PR, brand strategy, content, copywriting, and editorial, with a particular depth in luxury, lifestyle, arts and culture, and maritime. Our clients are based across the US, Europe, and internationally.