Category: Industry Voices

What made you want to work in the magazine industry?

I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. Working in newspaper and magazines seemed like a productive thing to do while I thought of a good plot.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

After leaving school with an E in English at A-Level, my mum got me a week’s work experience on a local paper called the Bootle Times. I graduated to become a district reporter on the Daily Post and was so bad the Editor of the paper called me in to suggest I think of another profession. I got a job soon after as a sub-editor on the Liverpool Echo and found I liked design and layout. I ended up on the Daily Mirror where I eventually became Production Editor, Head of Features and then Publisher of Mirror Online. Quit that in 2012 after 18 years to work for a Barcelona design agency, Cases And Associates and then spent two years in Latin America, mainly Argentina, helping media organisations do digital. Then my wife got pregnant (yes, it was mine) and I had to get a job based in the UK so I joined David Montgomery’s Local World and when that was sold to Trinity Mirror, I joined Archant as Chief Content Officer, where, for the first time in my career, I was responsible for some terrific magazines. I also launched a new newspaper called The New European, but that’s a story for another day.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

No. I alternate between jeans and trainers and two-piece two-button suits. Depends how I feel that morning. The more anxious I feel, the smarter I dress.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

Medication

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

Being one of four people alive who knew that I had secreted a reporter into Buckingham Palace as the Queen’s butler. It was one of the best tabloid scoops in the last couple of decades.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

The budget I work to.

Walk me through your typical day.

I don’t really have a typical day, but I do a lot of thinking (people often confuse this with inactivity) and I spend a lot of time working out how I can help the 300 and something journalists I manage be the best they can be. I spend much of the weekend thinking about The New European, but I’m blessed by having a small (and you wouldn’t believe how small) team of journalists who help me make that paper as fun and interesting as it is each week.

How has being a member of the PPA helped you/added value to your brand?

I think the PPA does a great job in helping us remember that although we are all fiercely competitive and would cut each other’s throats if given half a chance, there are some common interests we all benefit from and should work together to achieve.

If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?

Reading about how to write a great novel. Basically, anything other than actually writing a great novel.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

A photograph of a sketch of what I wanted this week’s New European cover to look like. (See below)

What’s your guilty pleasure?

I like decent wine and am trying to educate myself about it. But I only drink alcohol on alternate months.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Kenny Dalglish’s.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Keep your head down.

What/where is your happy place?

Bird How, a small cottage owned by the National Trust on a fellside in Eskdale, Cumbria.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I am consumed with doubt.

What would be in your Room 101?

Rod Liddle.

Introvert or extrovert?

Both. Depends.

Optimist or pessimist?

Optimist. Always.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Film. BFI Channel on Amazon video.

Sweet or savoury?

Savoury

Morning person or night owl?

Morning

Tea or coffee?

Coffee

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

Cool in moderation. The slightly deranged one where the face is laughing so hard it looks like it’s going to piss its pants. That’s how I feel much of the time.

What made you want to work in the magazine industry?

Well I used to be in the food industry, weirdly, I was working in FMCG on Ginsters pasties and then Sugar Puffs, of all places, and I've always been interested by content and media. I was a big cyclist recreationally beforehand and I kind of saw the opportunity to get involved in content and in cycling specifically, even though I only had marketing qualifications. It was a chance for me to work within two of my major passions. So, I came to it quite late, I've only been in the industry for two and a half years and I knew a bit about it beforehand but it was really the subject matter specifically that attracted me with the cycling side of it.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

I grew up in Cornwall and went to university in Wales, in Cardiff. I went to what was called UWIC at the time [now Cardiff Met] and then returned to Cornwall, did a year's traveling and eventually had to go and find some work. I was actually working in a warehouse, palletising pasties for a living and I was applying for a forklift driver job and hanging out at the Elliot building at the end of the interview, and I use the interview word very lightly, the guy said, "Oh by the way, have you got any qualifications?" and I said, "Yeah I've got a marketing degree."

He said, "Oh, there's a marketing assistant job just come up, I'll put you forward for it if you'd like, send me your CV by the end of the day." I said, "Okay, fine, I'll do that."

So, I became a Marketing Assistant and then Brand Activation Manager and then Brand Engagement Manager and I was there four years. I literally went from doing admin work for the team up to meeting with Tesco before I left, and then took that experience to become the Brand Marketing Manager of Halo Foods, or Honey Monster Foods.

My little claim to fame is that I line-managed the Honey Monster himself, because three days a week he moonlit as a Marketing Assistant himself. That was a good one for the CV!

I was there for two years, working out of Southall and Newport and Swindon. I was also working on The Dormen Nuts brand as well, which you might have seen in First Class on trains and in cereal bars.

I had all of the brand marketing responsibility for three or four different brands there and the company was moving up country, I didn't want to move with it and I'd had my fill of working with … supermarkets are great and it’s good experience and so on but it can be quite a tough environment to try and negotiate. It was tricky, and I was falling out of love with the food industry somewhat and wanted to get into something which I felt was a more healthy topic in a number of ways, and cycling definitely fit that bill for me. We're based in Bristol and I love Bristol. I'm a big, big fan of the city and I’ve been here ever since. My role now is Marketing Manager for the sports team here.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

Now, people who know me, know that I am…whatever the opposite of a fashionista is, that is what I am. So, I would say some sort of attempting to be cool extreme sports brand T-shirt. Right now, I'm sat in a Patagonia T-shirt, having never rock-climbed in my entire life. Black jeans are a staple and then trainers that are far too white for good. Also, flip-flops between May and September.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

I would say it's probably, because of my food industry background, I'd probably say I'd go down to the Traditional Cornish Bakehouse, and I would have the giant traditional pasty. That'd be my go-to to get through. It's a good source of your daily calories in one pastry parcel. I don't think I've ever ordered anything other than the giant. If you're going to go for it, you’ve got to go for it.

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

I would say, because I work on partnerships and things, one of our partnerships is with Bike Park Wales and we go down there once a year for a sponsor’s day as part of it. I'm not mountain biker, I'm a good road cyclist, but I'm no mountain biker and because I work across MBUK and a few other brands as well,_ BikeRadar_ and so on, off-road is a part of the role and so I've had to pick up, with no experience, how to ride a pushbike off-road. This is normally alongside the likes of GoPro and Trek and people who are actually very good it. I found myself trying to keep pace with one of the chaps from GoPro and I think it was the moment that I was flying through the air without a bike below me that was once below me, heading off a jump on a red run that was far too big, towards the trees, that it dawned on me that I was perhaps, somewhat out of my comfort zone. I was longing for the boardroom of one of the supermarkets at that moment. I was okay, cut and bruised and pride damaged and bike damaged but, it's something I never thought I'd get paid to do and was thoroughly enjoying myself up until that moment, but I've been back since.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

I don't know if it's particularly interesting, but I'd say just the sheer number of partnerships and of various sponsorships, not only that we get asked to do but also the amount we actually do. There's two of us in this team, myself and Miguel, a Brand Marketing Exec and between the two of us, we manage a phenomenal number of reciprocal partnerships. Historically, it's something when I’d worked in FMCG, we don't do. You pay for your advertising and it's all done on a monetary, transactional basis, whereas here, a lot of it is collective and reciprocal and contra-based stuff. I've never experienced it and it was totally unique to this industry as far as my experience goes, but it's a very collaborative industry, where people try and work together for the good of the sport I suppose. I don't think people would realise the amount of interconnectivity between everybody in the industry.

Again, I don't even know if it's unique to cycling, I've been chatting to some of the guys around the department, but I think it is something that's carried out across departments. In media, it seems to be a very caring, sharing, and let's grow the businesses together and work and use each other's respective sizes and audiences for the benefit of both of us. That's something that I don't think people would realise.

Walk me through your typical day.

I have to drive 30 miles down to Bristol, from where I live in Stroud. Because it's £35.00 a day to park where I work or outside in one of the main car parks, I park on the outskirts of Bristol, and I ride my bike in through the Bristol traffic.

I'll normally have, first thing, a big pot of water [to recover] from the cycle, and get changed, and normally put the things in the drying cupboard if it's rained on the way into work.

Then I'll open up my weekly report thing, which I do for myself. I'm quite an organised guy so I've got a planner, which I build out as I go throughout the week, and see what's the order for the day. I’ll clear any emails that come in overnight. I'm one of those zero inbox guys. I don't like to have any emails in my inbox at all. Everything's filed away quite neatly. I start myself with a clean slate, if you like, for the day and I'll have a very quick 10 minute catch up with the Brand Marketing Executive, about any pieces of information, because she works from home every afternoon, so we catch up in the morning about how the previous afternoon has gone, just very quickly.

Then it's a case of, it will often be brand planning meetings, it might be event planning sessions, it will be responding to day-to-day stuff; so it might be setting up various competition pages, maybe a more structured one-to-one to catch up with the MD, he works in London, so, if it's a mid-week day, then we'll have a catch up of where things are, and where we are against our strategy.

Then I'll always go out for lunch. I like to get fresh air for at least an hour a day, and just get some sunlight. We work in a big tower in the middle of Bristol, so it's necessary for me to go out. We've got a really good Kurdish wrap place around the corner, which I go to far too often. Then I’ll have a little walk around the park, perhaps even a cycle. I might go out for an hour cycle, just to check out the city, and get myself moving, and get myself all good for the wellness stuff. Then in the afternoon, it will normally be working through any emails that have come in, any immediate responses that need doing.

Then cycle back to the car, drive home, and spend time with my new-born son, Oscar, who was born last month. It's all hands on deck when we get home, and going through the changing, feeding, sleeping cycle that new-born parents know all too well.

How has being a member of the PPA helped you/added value to your brand?

Yeah, I think it has. Certainly the awards process that we go through, that's fantastic for exposure. When you're in this industry, it's highly competitive, as I'm sure you guys know. Having an award from the PPA gives a brand massive kudos. I think it's also really useful for us when we're networking. So, again at the awards ceremonies and that sort of thing, there's an opportunity to meet with the industry.

I think it's an industry which has a lot of lifers in it; people find this industry, love it and stick with it. It's almost a bit like a Friends Reunited. At some of the awards ceremonies sometimes, people have known each other for decades and it's been nice to get inducted into that world over the last couple of years. It's a great forum for sharing best practice. It really reflects the caring/sharing industry I think that we operate in. The PPA definitely helps facilitate that.

*If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day? *

I'm going to be very sad and say riding my bike. I'm a proper bike nerd. I did Land's End to John o’ Groats in September, which put strain on me in a number of ways. My son was obviously coming. I finished the ride two weeks before he was born, so my wife was cursing me. It meant doing 25 to 30 hours training a week for that on the bike, so eight/nine hours at a time perhaps. I just fell in love with it. And that's how I spend my time, when I can. Right now, obviously, it's an hour a week or two hours a week maximum, but I really love just getting out, and losing my head in the road. It's fantastic compartmentalisation time.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

About two weeks ago, my mum came up from Cornwall. My wife had a caesarean section, so she's been incapacitated for the last six weeks. We had our first day out together at Westonbirt Arboretum. I'm not sure if you've heard of that, but it's up near me. It's a massive Arboretum, really famous. We took Oscar out in the pram, and it was our first family day out, as a family, literally. So there's some really nice photos of us walking around the autumn trees.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

I'm quite a big gamer. I'm known for sitting up until very late at night, getting into some form of game. I've got a PlayStation 4, which my wife still calls me a child for owning. I'm a big, big car fan, so I'll often be up very late at night racing, what is probably an eight-year-old on the other end of the internet. I love sports games, and I love racing games, and I like Grand Theft Auto and Gran Turismo. I've not really ventured much beyond on that, I'm not like a shoot them up guy or anything like that. I played a little bit of _Fortnite_, because everyone has, right? That thing is just far too addictive for somebody like me. I think I got it, and I spent about 16 hours on it the first time I played it. I actually just put that away. Normally racing games and that sort of stuff, I'd say are probably my main vice.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

I'd probably phone [Scottish Comedian and Writer] Frankie Boyle, I think. I'm quite a cynical person in many ways, so I quite like watching satirical programs. I feel like when I want to exercise my cynicism, I can't sum up the words that I want to use to effectively cut down whatever it is that I'm reading or viewing. I think if I was to ring him, he would have probably the perfect sentiment to describe my feelings, because we are quite aligned on the way we think about things. He's the world's greatest cynical poet that exists, in my opinion.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

I had a boss years ago, and there was a lady [at work] who had just had a baby, and this guy was an absolute task master. He was just nose to the ground as standard and expected everyone else to be. He once said to me, "Make sure when you have kids, that you choose your work over your kids," and it's never left me, that sentiment. I actually finished working for him three months later. Not just solely because of that comment, but certainly that was a part of the character of who that person was and that was a terrible piece of advice. I think nothing trumps family. You work to feed your family, not the other way around. It should come first, your family, so it's definitely something I ignored wholeheartedly.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

I was working at, as I said, Ginsters, and I'd only been there two weeks. I was working in the dispatch office and there was a guy who'd been there 15 years and he was a proper, broad, promethean kind of character who just was really, really straight down the line. We had ice and snow and stuff on the road, and there were lorries that weren't able to make deliveries. I was really panicking that we were falling behind schedule and stuff wasn't going to get delivered, and I'd only just started.

This guy came over and put his massive pasty hands, if you like, on my shoulder, and he said, "I'll give you one piece of advice, we're delivering pasties, not hearts." That's all he said. He didn't contextualise it or anything, and I didn't really get it at the time. I was just wanting him to go away. But whenever I've got stressed at work since, I've always thought of that line. No matter how important you may think it is in the moment, you're delivering pasties, not hearts. I've said it to people who've worked for me and it helps you remain grounded and helps you prevent having stress in your career.

I think he'd laugh if he knew I was telling you that, but 10 years ago, that meant so much to me, it's just what he thought, and it was a very clean way of describing how to manage stress and I've always loved it.

What/where is your happy place?

We [my wife and I] went to Malaysia. I've been to Malaysia three times and we went to this place, the Perhentian Islands. They're kind of North-East Malaysia and we went there for our honeymoon last year. It's a very, very quiet place. There are two islands. We went on the quieter of the two, and then there's this beach that you have to properly track through the jungle for an hour to get to. My wife was just cursing me like, "What are we doing?" We saw a snake. We hadn't slept for the last three nights. We were properly out of our comfort zone. I kept saying, "Look, it's going to be worth it. It's going to be worth it. I've looked on Google Earth. I know what I'm doing." And after an hour, we got to this place, and it was, in every way you can imagine, perfect. A kind of crescent moon shaped beach. Amazing, bright coral, around about 300 meters, in an arch. White sand. Palm trees. No boats. The view of just sea, and then obviously this kind of turquoise, midsummer 30°C kind of conditions. It was incredible, absolutely unbelievable. It hasn't even got a name, It's one of those places that you can see from Google Earth, but it's got no name so no-one really knows about it. Believe me, with the trek that you have to do to get there, it's worth it, but most people wouldn't necessarily think so. They wouldn't make that journey.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

Surprised to know about me? I'm quite a big guy, so I'm like 110-odd kilos, something like that. Maybe 105 kilos. I don't think people would really think I would be doing Lands End to John o' Groats, for example, or that I used to swim for Team GB, as well. I don't look particularly like I have any athletic heritage, so that probably would be quite surprising. That's one that you'd have to see me to appreciate. I was young. I was only about 13, but it's not something you'd look at me and think, "Oh, he's definitely an athletic swimmer." You wouldn't at all.

I'm also very straight down the line. A little bit heart on my sleeve.

What would be in your Room 101?

Bad drivers, people who do not pay any attention on the road when they're driving two tons of metal down the road very fast.

Introvert or extrovert?

Extrovert.

Optimist or pessimist?

Optimist.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Yes. House of Cards has picked back up, so I'm back on that now.

Sweet or savoury?

Savoury.

Morning person or night owl?

Night owl.

Tea or coffee?

Coffee.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

The aubergine. I tell you a fun little game. If you go to a friend's phone and look at their recently used emojis, it tells you so much about them.

What made you want to work in the magazine industry?

So, I'm an accountant, and I wanted to do anything that made being an accountant less boring, and media seemed like a really good idea at the time. I joined, what at the time was, a small entrepreneurial, very fast growing, very exciting media company called Incisive Media, and as soon as I walked into that office, I thought that it had a buzz and an environment that I just fell in love with. I think that's really been something that's kept me excited for over 20 years.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

So, I started working for Incisive Media and we had about 25 staff, one main brand, a very small, very entrepreneurial team, and we grew that company very aggressively and organically with new launches, but also through a number of acquisitions. While I was there for over 15 years in the end, I had a number of different roles within that organisation and the organisation changed very dramatically over time.

At its peak we had 2,000 staff, with offices in Hong Kong and America. We'd been through being a fully public company. Then we did a management buyout and were backed by private equity. Then we went through a variety of other ownership phases, and during that time my career changed quite dramatically.

I qualified as an accountant and I became the Finance Director. For a couple of years, I worked on the mergers/acquisitions side of things as the Group Integration Director, sort of looking after businesses that we acquired along the way and helping them to integrate into the new Incisive Media fold.

I had another couple of years as the Group Finance Director, and then, frankly, I was bored. I didn't really feel like I had much of a challenge. The financial crisis had been going on a really long time, and life had just become about cutting costs and closing things down and looking at the numbers, and basically making people's lives uncomfortable.

I just wasn't really challenged, and I wasn't particularly engaged at that point in time, and then an opportunity came along to run the business's consumer division, because Incisive Media's primarily a B2B company. In fact it is a B2B company, but we had never intentionally launched, but we had acquired a number of consumer brands along the way as part of larger acquisitions, and we'd lumped them all together and called them the Consumer Division, and the guy who was running it decided to leave, and I saw that as an opportunity to try something completely different.

So I asked the board to take a leap of faith, which they agreed to, and that's when I became the publisher of the British Journal of Photography, amongst other titles and really very quickly after that I realised that this was my real passion, actually running that business, and I could see a lot of opportunity for that brand in particular, British Journal of Photography, and I realised the quality of the team as well.

I had this fantastic team working for me who were so passionate about the product and the industry. It was this sort of sexy side of what Incisive did in a sense, Incisive's a fantastic business, but the majority of the content is very much business to business.

I could see a big opportunity for that brand [BJP], outside of Incisive, as an independent company, because it had sort of bounced from one owner to another within the company, it didn't really have a natural home, because it wasn't called to the main business.

So, I approached the board and said I want to buy BJP. I'd already discussed it with the team and they were excited about the prospect of going independent. Long story short, we did that deal. That was five and a half years ago, and we formed at the time Apptitude Media, because the future was apps. Everybody was excited about apps, everybody thought that apps were the silver bullet that publishers had been waiting for.

We went quite quickly, prior to the acquisition and hearing people talk about apps and the future of digital publishing, and when we launched our own app, we saw a lot of success and we were one of the very early, really immersive, sort of interactive touch screens magazines to launch. We launched a very immersive version of British Journal of Photography on the iPad, and it took off in a way that we hadn't anticipated, and that was really one of the catalysts for the acquisition as well. We just thought: this is the future.

We won PPA awards, we won other awards. It just seemed very exciting, and to put that into context, BJP is a very niche monthly magazine, sales of a few thousand copies, yet the app was downloaded a quarter of a million times.

We quite quickly built up a subscriber base of thousands. We raised some finance and, sort of, set our stall to become the digital publisher of the future, called ourselves Apptitude Media, and the attempt was to build a portfolio of digital magazines, which we started to do, and also to create a studio where we were working with other publishers and other businesses who wanted interactive, touch screen content.

We launched two other magazines, we launched a quarterly iPad magazine called Fade To Black, which was all about independent film-making industry and obviously within that touch screen device you could show the films and show the trailers, so it was a really lovely product.

We launched the world's first smartphone magazine, built for the iPhone, all about smart phone photography. That was called Fltr, without any vowels, because we'd filtered them out. And they were both fine. They did okay. They got a bit of commercial support, and they built a loyal, but small following, but it just became quite apparent around about two years into the business that digital publishing wasn't actually the future, the panacea that we thought it was going to be, and these magazines without massive marketing budgets, which we didn't have, could never scale to something exciting, and we were running low on funds, and we didn't have the resources we needed to really take the business to another level.

We took a fairly brutal decision at that point, which was a couple of years in, to basically close down everything we'd started. It wasn't working, and we had to make about a quarter of the team redundant. It was a very hard time, and really had to start bootstrapping the business a bit. We were going back to basics and thinking we've got this fantastic 160-year-old brand, that we haven't really been focusing on, because we've been so busy looking at all these other shiny, new ideas, and getting all of our attention being diverted to new things, rather than actually being on this amazing asset we had.

So that was a time, really, for real reflection. We went back to the drawing board. We looked at BJP. We said, "well what can we do with this brand to create other brand extensions and use that as a catalyst for launching our business and being all about photography?"

So, we launched some awards, some new awards.

That was kind of the reset the phase of the business, was a deep look at ourselves and thinking, “what do we actually want to be here?”

We had an exciting business which had potential, but needed resources, so we did a crowd funding, our first crowd funding. That was in 2016.

We thought: we've got an incredible team. Here's half a dozen different ways that this might work. We don't know exactly what format this is going to take yet, but we're excited about it and photography's growing as an industry and as an interest, a hobby for people, but we needed some capital.

We got phenomenal response to that campaign, so we basically did crowd funds, and we sold equity in the business, and we raised £400,000 in a very short space of time, within about a week. We hit our target within the first 24 hours.

The next couple of years really were about using those funds to transform the business totally, we re-branded last year to 1854 Media, and that's a nod to the heritage of BJP, which was launched first in 1854, but it was very much saying that photography is an art. So, we're passionate about photography, we're not a publisher anymore. We're not a publisher who does some other stuff, we're basically a media company that has photography at its heart, and British Journal of Photography is one of our outlets for that. It's an important one in print, and we expect it to continue to be. The apps are far less important. They're still there, but that's part of the re-brand, is because we found ourselves explaining our name, yeah but we don't really do that anymore, so it didn't really make sense, to the point where we spun off into a separate company.

So, that's now a separate company, not a part of 1854 at all, although we still work very closely with them.

We then launched some other new awards, Portrait of Britain launched quite soon after that, which was a collaboration with JCDecaux, the digital advertising people, and that became, quite quickly, the biggest photographic exhibition ever staged, and that 10 million people saw that in its first year, and more since. It's become something which is, it just had it's third edition. It's grown significantly since then. It's a paid-for award, so people pay to submit entries, and it's obviously a sponsorship opportunity as well, but that's grown into an important part of our business.

We launched our creative studio last year, Studio 1854.

If you'd said to me even two years ago, you won't care about advertising anymore in two year's time, and I would have said you're mad, but it's such an unimportant part of our business now. Partly because it was going that way anyway, and partly because of a diminishing return that was never going to come back, so it was time to do something really, dramatically different, so now we're working with both the brands and our audience. We're working with brands to create the marketing content for them, really visual, amazing content for them.

We're commissioning people from our audience. There are amazing photographers and filmmakers who we've got a relationship with to make the content, and we're then doing all of the digital marketing, and all of the PR for the brand. So basically it's a full service content creation and activation agency, and we don't have nay sales people anymore. We have creatives who develop that business, but that's been the single biggest change, has basically been that complete transformation of the commercial aspect of our business.

And the award has continued to grow. We launched another new one this year, in fact, two new ones this year. The biggest of those is Portrait of Humanity, which we're very excited about, and that's taken the Portrait of Britain concept internationally.

We're working with media brands and sort of partners all over the world to make that the biggest photographic exhibition ever, and it's pretty ambitious and we partner with Magnum Photos, who are probably the most credible photographic agency in the world, in terms of representing photographers. So, as a pairing, and I think partnership's already an important part of any media business, any independent media business, because you've got incredible assets, but you partner with somebody who's got a similar ethos and mindset and attributes that that adds something to you. So that partnership is basically British Journal of Photography, which is the credible voice in photography, it's the place where any photographer would aspire to be recognised by, in terms of having their stuff published. And then Magnum is the agency where any photographer would aspire to be part of that collective, and so if you've kind of got those two very different but very complementary aspects as a partnership, and we're co-presenting Portrait of Humanity as this fantastic sort of platform for photographers, with a really positive message that celebrates diversity. Let's celebrate togetherness.

It's a bit of an antidote to all of the negative stuff in the press and that you just hear about all the time in social media, where people from different communities, whether that's the ethnic background, or the sexuality or the gender, people are not always embracing the way that we'd hoped they'd be. This is a bit of an antidote to all of that, sort of celebrating everybody's … the strap line is "There's more that unites us than divides us".

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

I do actually. I've been developing it independently over time. It's dark blue jeans, but smart ones. Normally I cycle part way to work, so there's a balance. I had to find a balance of smart, so I started with doing a v-neck T shirt and then a sports jacket if I've got a meeting. Maybe a shirt if it's an important meeting, and smart trainers. That's pretty much it. And a beard now.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

Table tennis. The tighter the deadline, the more table tennis I tend to play.

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

So, we punch above our weight and we get through doors that we might not expect to, and even last week I was sitting in a meeting with the Marketing Director of one of the biggest outdoor advertising companies in the world, basically talking about the new Portrait of Humanity project, and some very exciting initiatives that we've been working together on, and I'm just sitting there thinking, "Wow this is really cool!"

There's no way that, even as the Finance Director of Incisive, when it was a very substantial business, that I would have imagined that there was more on the other side. [When you're Finance Director] people come to you because they want money from you.

Standing on Waterloo Bridge the first time we did Portrait of Britain and seeing there's a huge, huge screen on Waterloo Bridge, and one of the JCDecaux digital advertising screens, and seeing our campaign on a takeover of that, and just seeing these portraits that months and months of work on them, they were all over London, but that one screen was just massive, and Dizzy Rascal was one of their subjects.

It was mostly everyday people, but he was one of the subjects and he came up and so I took a picture of it and I tweeted it and at-ed Dizzy Rascal and he retweeted me, and I was like "I've been retweeted by Dizzy Rascal"! He spelt the bloody hashtag wrong, but never mind.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

I think, and this is more so in the last few months, when we've been able to build the team up, I was doing far too much finance stuff, company secretarial stuff, and that was taking up far too much time, so I hired a Finance Manager recently. What that's allowed me to do is just really point myself at what I think I need to be doing. So, today I've spent the whole day basically learning how to use HubSpot, which is a new marketing automation system that we're going to be putting in place and talking to them about GDPR, and all sorts of other, but real nitty, gritty stuff, because this is a big investment.

It's going to be potentially game-changing for us in terms of community income, and engagement, so I want to know it, and I want to be a fundamental part of the implementation, but once I'm there I'll hand it over, but things like that, and before that we're going to build up partnerships for Portrait of Humanity.

So it's just … yes there's an overseeing thing, but actually the ability to really point yourself at a particular project or a particular area and just and get fully immersed into it.

Walk me through your typical day.

I don't have one. That's one of the things I love about [my job]. I don't micromanage, but my team have got a lot of autonomy, but I do have an involvement in most stuff, and have an opinion about most stuff. And literally at any one point in time, there might be six or seven major projects going on. There might be some interesting client meetings and things to be part of. There might be some really dull happening stuff that needs to be sorted out, just literally, I look at my inbox on a day to day basis I'm amazed at the variety of stuff I've actually done in that day. But I love that, it makes it very interesting.

How has being a member of the PPA helped you/added value to your brand?

It's been great actually, and I think for us an important element of the membership for us is the awards program. I've got a great deal of respect for the awards. I've judged them many times now as well, which has given me more of a respect, because I know what actually goes into the judging and the thought process you go into and the two-stage sort of pre-judging and then sitting at the table, arguing with people.

To have done so well in those awards over the years, because we've picked up a number of PPA awards for a variety of things, both in the main awards and the independents over time, I think that's been really helpful. I think it adds credibility to the business, and it gives a buzz to the team as well, so that's cool.

That's been a part of it and then I think I probably haven't made good enough use of some of the aspects of it, but things like the VAT lobbying, I mean that's a conversation that has been going on for so long. I used to sit on the finance group at the PPA years ago, seven or eight years ago, when I was at Incisive, and we would talk about it then, but that was when it was just becoming an issue.

If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?

I wouldn't necessarily do any more work! The way I like to run the business is, I tell people when they start we have a life-work balance, in that order. You work to live, and not the other way around and you should enjoy it, because you spend more time here than doing anything else. It's got to be something you enjoy and that you get a kick out of. I think it would give me a lot more thinking time, which would be great. When it's your business you never stop thinking about it, or it's very difficult to switch off totally. I get pulled in 15 different directions if I walk in the door and to have those days or that times when you could just be like "well I want to really think about this thing now and strategise and talk about it" is really important.

We never have time to. We have a monthly heads meeting, which we never actually have because everyone's always too busy. Just things like that, and I think that's how you can really help to drive the business forward. And I would spend more time with my kids and play a lot more tennis!

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

It was a picture of my daughter, who's five, Rosie on a climbing wall on the weekend. She wouldn't go on it, she was all excited, and then she was too scared, and then we got her on it, and then she let me let go of her to take a picture, and then she made me look at, she was like, "Can I look at the picture?" And I was like, "While you're up there?" She was like, "yeah." So basically it was Rosie on a climbing wall.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

You can't tell anyone in the office, but I love The X Factor. I mean, I'm like the guy who cries in the adverts sort of thing, and the cheesy sob stories.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Steve Jobs, he was such an innovator. The innovator of our time I think. By many accounts of him he wasn't necessarily the nicest guy in the world to work with, but – we could have a good chat.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Probably, you'd make a really good children's entertainer. Which was my mother and my father, I had six years of being a children's entertainer. Puppets, magic, games, animal balloons. I did an amazing balloon giraffe. I was never that good, but when your magic audience is comprised of five and six-year-olds, you don't have to be that good at magic. [My daughter] thinks I can pull anything out of her ear.

What/where is your happy place?

My happy place is with my kids. I take a lot more pleasure from just a bit of just chilling, and actually just calming the mind now. I think is really important, I didn't used to place any importance on doing that but I think in the media's tough business, and you can't sit still. We're always having to move forward and think and innovate, and a lot of it doesn't work, or it takes a lot longer to work than you intended it to, so I think just finding those moments of calm are really important.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

That I was a children's entertainer.

What would be in your Room 101?

Butter. One hundred per cent butter. It's evil, vile stuff. When I'm Prime Minister I'm going to ban it. You can put mayonnaise in there as well. They're just horrible! And Pret. Put Pret in there too, because they put butter and mayonnaise on everything. I think you can also put in people who play their music way too loud and they've got rubbish headphones in, so you can hear it. That's just really annoying, and rude people. I hate rudeness. In fact rude people's probably good enough!

Introvert or extrovert?

Extrovert.

Optimist or pessimist?

Massive optimist.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Film. 13 Reasons Why. The second season now. I've binge watched lots recently, but I'm binge watching the last series of Doctor Who with Peter Capaldi, because I want to watch the new one and I hadn't gotten to that yet, and Strangers. And, oh Butterfly.

Sweet or savoury?

Sweet.

Morning person or night owl?

Night owl.

Tea or coffee?

Coffee.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

I've just recently got into the fist bump one, and heart emojis, but not red ones.

What made you want to work in publishing?

Absolutely nothing, actually. I studied business, and my father said, "You really have to get job." And I was like, "Oh, do I?”. So, first of all, he applied for a job for me, and I ended up being a receptionist in an accountancy practice. I think they fired me after about three months because I was so useless, and then I saw a job actually being advertised for The Times to bring in staff, and just went to an open day, and was hired on the spot. Now, it's impossible to get a job, isn't it? But then, you just walked into places and they just gave you a job.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

I started my career at News International after the Wapping strikes, which changed the whole publishing industry, I think. I spent ten years there, so had a good educational process through them, which I think gave me all the skills that I needed to actually go into publishing later. And then, I spent time in business to business (B2B), legal, financial, financial news, places like that, where I think you learn a more commercial edge to publishing, which is a little more hardcore, than daily broadsheets. Then, I took a career break, because I hit a career wall, where I just thought I couldn't get any further in the industry, and I went to South America for a year. I sold a house for £75,000 and took a year off. When I was there, I thought, it's not that difficult. We're just afraid of risk in the UK, I think, so I came back and set up Citywealth, which was 13 years ago, and here we are today.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

Probably shorts and a t-shirt and sneakers. If I'm going out, then I will dress up, but, really in last couple of years, even that will be a pair of leather trousers and a jumper.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

If we're really on a deadline, I think we just tend to get on with it, and then probably once we've finished, we'll all have a class of wine or something. I don’t know if I have go-to, maybe coffee sometimes.

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

Probably the weirdest one, which is not particularly funny, but after 9/11, if you were a journalist or had anything like that on your career record, you actually had to apply for a visa to travel to the States. So, actually, I could potentially be stopped at the airport going to the states, so I had to go through a whole process with the American Embassy, and then they gave me a five-year work permit.

Someone had put me down in the States to ask me to come over to speak at a conference or something and because they'd officially put me down, I was then blocked, because I was officially put through all the government agencies as a journalist, and they'd changed all the rules about journalists coming into the country. It was really strange and something which would have affected the whole industry I guess.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

I think that it's quite fun, actually. That you can actually own a company and enjoy yourself. You don't have to go to work and hate it, if you are the boss, you can run things how you want, including having your dog, or saying, "Oh, let's all go home early," or have a big lunch.

It’s about working in a way that fits into everyone's lives rather than the other way around. I think they expect everyone [in wealth management] to be straight laced, and I think, in a way, most of the industry is, but we choose not to be. I think as the industry changes and modernises, actually, people are attracted to that. We're very informal with how we do things.

Walk me through your typical day.

I wake up, go and get coffee, take the dog out, start at 10.00am, and generally, I’ve found at the moment, it's literally just meetings with clients, traveling, lunches, and a little bit of time with the team just to talk to them. The more you grow [as a business], the more staff need to talk to you about stuff, basically, just to get one-on-one time. I find business trips a bit hard going. We really enjoy meeting everyone, which is really fun, but the point of a business trip is to try and get value out of the expense, isn't it? So, if you spend £500, you're trying to somehow say it's a business development marketing trip, and there should be some value from that. The problem is, you tend to put 10 meetings in, come back exhausted and sleep for 48 hours, so I don't know. I can deal with it, and I like [business trips], but not too many of them.

How has being a member of the PPA helped you/added value to your brand?

It's helped us with processes; going through the awards process, which I think is good for a company to do, to just look at their own benchmarking, but also helped us benchmark against other people in the industry.

The people in the [publishing] industry might not be in the same industry, but still doing the same innovations and still doing the same tech, so we could say, "Look, alright. If other people are winning against us, why are they winning? Let's have a look at their size," there's benchmark against different industry. My staff love it, and for me, I want to keep the tradition of publishing alive and not be so far removed from it that they don't know what publishing is. It’s a great industry but I think now, there's so much pressure to make money or make things work, that people are losing sight of the fact that it's come from a very ethical industry. People should be allowed to work properly and have time to do that, but, I think the pressures of publishing are such that people don't have time to do that anymore. So, I think the membership with the PPA helps people understand better ways to work.

If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?

If I didn't sleep, probably I'd be walking on the beach in Miami on South Beach. I love art galleries, so I'd probably be visiting museums and galleries.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

Of my amazing nails that I got done at Nails On 7th Ave in NYC by Jenny Queen of Bling, Cardi B’s nail artist.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Shopping. It could be perfume, art, fashion, watches, rings, jewellery, you name it.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Channing Tatum, he's just hot.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

In a way, I think, possibly it was the worst, possibly it was the best, but being told never to have a business partner. From the early stages, because people who'd all started businesses have said, is that they would fall out with them. In many ways, businesses do explode when their partners break up and stuff like that, but, I think it makes a long, lonely journey if you don't have a partner in your business, so just pick the right partner is what I think the message should be.

What/where is your happy place?

Definitely walking with my dog, Benny (pictured). I really like Hyde Park, walking along the Serpentine, that's very nice. You even forget you're in London for a little bit, you just think, it's so gorgeous outside.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I'm quite a tomboy I think, and they think I'm quite girly, but I'm not at all. I grew up with brothers and, we just fought all the time, and so, I'm like a man in girl's clothing, basically.

What would be in your Room 101?

Tourists in London.

Introvert or extrovert?

Really down the middle of both. I don't know what you call it, but I can do parties to the latest, latest hour, laughing with everyone for about three days, but then I have to have two days at home not doing that, just to survive it.

Optimist or pessimist?

Optimist.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Film, I don't watch box sets. I do love Guillermo del Toro, though. I really loved The Shape of Water, but nobody else does. It's so beautifully shot, it's just one of those old school romances, and that's interesting.

Sweet or savoury?

Savory.

Morning person or night owl?

Morning. Although, sometimes I do both.

Tea or coffee?

Coffee

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

Really cool. I love them, especially the poop emoji. I say it all the time to everyone. "Oh my god, that's so poop emoji." And they're like, "So poop emoji."

What made you want to become a writer?

I've always written, ever since I was tiny. I didn't entirely know what to do when I finished university so I ended up working in ad sales. I used to work on the British Airways magazines, because that's what you do when you have an English degree and you finish university; you end up working in media sales. I wasn't entirely sure where that would lead.

I then started writing for a website called Londonist and I just carried on writing, and then someone offered to pay me for my writing, which was great. After that, I jumped in headfirst into freelancing.

I had absolutely no idea how it worked. I had no idea that the website that I had left my well-paying job for was going to fold four months later. I didn't know how to pitch for work. This was when Twitter was incredibly new, so there was no sort of digital online network. I was scrappy and really irritating until people commissioned me, but I had no idea what I was doing. That was, I think, about 11 years ago.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

I guess I'm always wary of starting with Domestic Sluttery as when it was a website, because that's part of its history. It feels like it's such a long time ago now, so Domestic Sluttery essentially started in 2009. It was one of the first lifestyle blogs in the UK, which seems madness now. At the time, there were magazines that didn't even have websites. It was actually quite ground-breaking. That carried on until 2014. I realised, that although the site was profitable, and we were paying a small amount to our contributors, we had 12 writers at the time, it just wasn't sustainable.

It took over my life, so I closed the site, and I was freelancing for a lot of other companies at the time. I continue to work as a freelance writer. I went in-house for a couple of jobs, but I missed it [_Domestic Sluttery_]. I hated not having my own thing to do. I then launched a travel website, which was my last bad job, shall we say?

While I was doing it, I read a newsletter called Thread by Jean Edelstein. It's amazing newsletter, she's now just written a book off the back of the success of her newsletter, which is really cool. I discovered this brilliant world of women writing newsletters and having a space to talk about what they wanted to. It made me feel very much of how blogging used to be, so I started my own [newsletter].

It was literally that afternoon, I read the email at lunchtime and thanks to TinyLetter, I had setup my own newsletter by the end of that hour. It was called _The Friday Wishlist_, and it was based on a column that was on the original blog. It was literally just a quite funny, very pretty list of seven or eight nice things. That was it. That was all it was. It grew very quickly, and it was scalable, and it was profitable instantly. I used affiliate links, and it didn't take up a huge amount of time. There was a huge chunk of that that paid for me to go back to university. It paid a lot of my MA fees for the first year.

That is what eventually led to _Domestic Sluttery_.

I mean, there's a late-night dinner and a bottle of Prosecco in the middle of that story… Laura's [Brown, Co-Editor of _Domestic Sluttery_] based in Dundee, and I had dinner with some old DS writers, although I was just chatting with Laura on Twitter after everyone had gone home.

It sparked something in me. I woke up at five in the morning adamant that DS should come back as a newsletter. I don't know where it had come from, and I couldn't shake it. I was going on holiday the next day. By the end of the day, we'd just planned it all and we were so excited. I had to force myself not to sit by a pool in Italy making a business plan. We were just having secret conversations with each other. Whenever my fiancé, Tom, went off to do something, I'd message Laura and just go, "What about this? What about this?" Absolutely not being on holiday at all. That was two years ago. I still freelance and love doing that.

I think how we consume media is changing. We don't necessarily have time to seek out the best content anymore. But there's more to read, more to discover. So we distill that into one daily email, rather like getting a magazine in your inbox. We cover everything from women's history to fashion and food, but we only share the best of those topics. We've built up a huge level of trust with our readers, they know we truly love what we're sharing each day. Despite it being seen as a largely professional space, there's still an intimacy in email. You're next to emails from someone's best friend, their boss, whoever they're flirting with so we need our content to nail it every single day. Our inboxes can be overwhelming, Domestic Sluttery is a lunchtime respite from that. It feels like a club of brilliant, like-minded women and we love the community that we've created.

I Absolutely love my clients and I have quite regular clients now, which is great. I don't have to pitch and go crazy, because I don't necessarily know that freelancing suits me. I also run a newsletter called Freelance Writing Jobs.

Tell me more about your Freelance Writing Jobs newsletter, how did that come about?

I started that because I had a really, really crappy year freelancing last year. I had to postpone the second year of my MA, just because I hadn't made enough money. It was horrible. It felt like I was failing at something I really, really wanted to do. I mean Domestic Sluttery is brilliant and I love it, but we've started from scratch again. It will take a while before that is making the money that I would love it to be able to make.

Freelance Writing Jobs was very much born out of love and wanting to help people. I'm so fond of it. It's really nice when you get an email from someone saying, "I got this job because of this newsletter." People send me the articles they've written. I now open it up and do a semi-regular advice surgery. If people are struggling with being freelance, they can get in touch and I will help as best I can. I just want freelancers to be happy and get work that they wouldn't otherwise know about. I think freelance writing, it can be quite insular; you don't talk to anyone. If you're getting your foot in the door, you don't know about those opportunities. You don't necessarily know someone who works at a newspaper who would give you freelance shifts. I hope that editors come to me and say, "Can you put this in the newsletter? I need people to pitch. I think our representation, as editors, needs to change. When we're busy, I think we commission people we know and writers we know. That tends to be the same pool all the time. Everyone finds freelancing tough, and no one talks about it.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

If I've got a tough job to do, I will put lipstick on. I will absolutely put lipstick on before I make a scary phone call, but I put lipstick on before I do anything scary. I run in lipstick. I've just started ballet classes, and I'll put lipstick on before my class. It's a power thing for me. It makes me feel a little bit more together.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

I cannot start anything without a cup of tea, literally nothing. It bookends my to-do list basically. Once I finish the task, it's a cup of tea. Once I've started one, cup of tea. Yeah, nothing gets done around here without tea.

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

I went to the Arctic Circle, it was a really, really strange thing. It was to talk about the technology behind wake-up lights, which was an unusual way to end up in one of the most incredible places I've ever been. It was pretty great. I didn't understand when the PR called me, because I live in Greenwich. There's a bar in Greenwich called the North Pole. When I was invited to the Arctic Circle, I was just like, "Oh cool. Whereabouts in London is that opening up?" I genuinely just thought it was another bar. It was a complete surprise when I realised that actually I was going to fly to the Arctic Circle. That was pretty cool!

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

I think people are surprised by how much research goes into what we do, especially with the newsletters. Some of the newsletters are quite in-depth, they are very heavily researched. I can sometimes spend a whole day on research.

The writing is the quick bit, I think that's the surprising thing, I spend more time doing stuff that people don't see.

Walk me through your typical day.

It depends. The newsletters bookmark my day a little bit. Each newsletter has a different theme and that helps us structure our week a little bit. My priority in the mornings is always the newsletter. It's something that we are done and dusted with by midday.

I'm not particularly creative first thing. I tend to leave most of my writing until late afternoon. So, newsletters first, everything else comes in the afternoon.

Tell me about giving a talk at PPA’s Magfest in Glasgow earlier this year?

I loved it. It was, without a doubt, the most friendly and inclusive conference I've ever been to. There were so many students there. I didn't know they were students, they were on the same level as all of the other professional journalists and editors there. It was really lovely. I've never seen so many students be so engaged with everything that was going on. We had a really nice feedback from our talk.

Just the positivity around an industry that everybody keeps saying is dying was actually lovely. It's an industry that has a huge heart to it, I think, and really, really talented people. That was all packed into one day, The positivity was overwhelming, it was great!

** If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?**

I'd sleep, even if I didn’t need too! I really enjoy sleep, it's lovely. I'd read more books, but don't take my sleep away. I would also read more books, it's part of my MA and it's my break, away from work. It's what I do when I'm sitting on a bus or something like that. Sitting on a bus is my reading time at the moment, because I'm writing my dissertation. Every spare minute that I'm not working is reading a book. I think there's a big difference between studying and reading for pleasure. I don't think I get to pick up a book for fun until February now.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

Delightfully, it’s of my new skirt covered in monkeys, from Joy!

What’s your guilty pleasure?

I don't have any. I like what I like, I think the Domestic Sluttery tagline sums it up. The tagline is “Take your pleasure seriously”. If you enjoy something, don't feel guilty about it.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Fiona Bruce. I really, really want to be pals with Fiona Bruce. I think she's so smart and so switched on, and a bit sexy.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

There's been quite a lot of chat recently about women being more like men in the workplace. I was having a chat with the writer, Sarah Perry, about this on Twitter. There's a really weird thing that to get on with work, we have to be ball-busters and assertive and not apologetic and basically not kind. At some point in the whole conversation about women in the workplace, being more masculine has become the answer. I don't think it's the right approach.

I feel like being kind and polite and patient is just a really great way to approach your day. I'm uncomfortable with that approach. The idea that we shouldn't be tentative in an email, we should take out just and apologising. Women certainly shouldn't need to apologize in any space or apologise for doing their jobs. There is a nuance and the sensitivity and brashness aren’t always the answer. I say this as quite a brash person. I think just hiding who you are and being less of who you are is terrible advice.

What/where is your happy place?

I'm a real homebody. Angel in London is my happy place. My flat is my happy place. This is where I live and it's been my home for a few years now. I'm such a Londoner. I love to travel, absolutely love it, I would go around the world at a drop of a hat, but I've never felt more content than arriving home from a trip. There is something about it, especially if I get to Charing Cross Station and have to go over the bridge, getting a bus over the river is genuinely one of the nicest experiences that anyone coming into London can do. London is my happy place.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

Everyone I've spoken to who knows me is surprised by the fact that I've just taken up ballet classes. Ballet is the one hour that I have each week where I totally switch off. I'm not thinking about anything else. It doesn't matter if I'm crap at it as long as I'm a little bit better than I was last week. That's it. It's totally for me. No one sees it. I get to go at my own pace. Everything else I do is pretty much judged and put online so it's really nice just to have something that isn't.

What would be in your Room 101?

Cinema fidgeters. I was absolutely, absolutely so furious at this really, really fidgety guy sitting next to me in the cinema last week. It was so infuriating. They did not sit still for two hours, I nearly moved to the front of the cinema, it was that bad!

Also, Waiters who top your water up when the jug is on the table or any drink actually. I don't really like total strangers topping up my wine. You stop talking when a waiter comes over and I don't need my water topped up, I'm a grown adult. I can do it myself.

Introvert or extrovert?

I'm both. I am a very outgoing introvert.

Optimist or pessimist?

Total optimist. I don't think you can be freelance and pessimistic.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Television. We're re-watching all of ER as it's on TV at the moment. God, I love it. I love it so much.

Sweet or savoury?

Savoury.

Morning person or night owl?

Night owl.

Tea or coffee?

Tea definitely.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

Okay. Every newsletter that DS sends out has two or three emojis at the end of it. It makes us stand out in inboxes. I love them. I really, really love them. I think it was Beyoncé that said they were the same in every language. That's something that I really took to heart, because if you're going to take anything to heart, it should be Beyoncé. Which do I use the most? All of the food ones, they get used a lot, and the little dancer woman.

What made you want to work in the magazine industry?

I've loved magazines since I was reading Game Boy Advance, back when I was like 13 years old. I studied English at university, and always had sort of a guilty love affair with magazines. Like you're supposed to be reading big, serious books, but magazines are just easier, and more fun, with more pictures. So yeah, I guess I've always loved them.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

When I was at university, I edited a section on the student newspaper and in one of the summers at university I did work experience at FHM, in the year 2000. That was my first time in London. I think I was properly bitten by the bug. So, I loved that experience and once I graduated from university, I just took the first job that got me back down into London, doing editorial stuff. Although, that led to a slightly boring job, making in-flight magazines. But, it was while doing that and looking for something a bit more exciting to do, that I ended up finding independent magazines and writing for some of them. Then I got to know the people who made them, and it got me thinking, "Why don't more of my friends know about these magazines?” That really was the first step to starting Stack.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

I guess one of the benefits of running your own business, is that you don't have to adhere to anybody else's dress codes, so I tend to wear jeans and a T-shirt.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

When I'm on a deadline, and I'm in the office and wanting to just be here doing stuff, cups of tea definitely. But I suppose if things get a bit more serious, a coffee somewhere else might provide a bit more of a substantial boost.

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

I wish I had an unusual situation through magazines. For a while I did some reporting on Radio 4 and ended up milking a donkey. So, I guess that was unusual, but nothing to do with magazines.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

Probably that we even exist. But most people are not aware of independent magazines, or of Stack generally. So, we've got a lot of work to do to just make sure that people know that we're here, and that these mags are here.

Walk me through your typical day.

I get the boys up in the morning, and take the older one to school, and then head into the office. We work with a very small, tight knit team here, so some days I'll be contributing to the blog, today I've been making video reviews. Other days I'll be meeting up with people and trying to come up with ways for Stack to do interesting new things. But, because of [having] the boys it means that at 5.30pm every day I am out of here. So yeah, I'm working a pretty strict 9:30am to 5:30pm day.

*If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day? *

I would read some books. Probably the worst thing about running Stack is that there's always a pile of magazines to read and that means that I don't get a chance to read books anywhere near as much as I'd like to.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

This was taken when we started shortlisting the Stack Awards this year, and it shows some of the magazines entered into the Magazine of the Year category.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

The honest answer is fruit crumble. We've been growing rhubarb in the garden, so I've been making a lot of rhubarb crumble. The thing is, you can't make a small rhubarb crumble, and nobody else in my house really likes it that much, so it means I end up eating vast amounts of the stuff.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

I wish I had Boris Johnson’s phone number because then every time I hear Brexit being discussed and I start to feel depressed or worried, I could text Boris and tell him he’s a prat and it would make me feel better.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Back when I started Stack, and this wasn't really a piece of advice but, David Hepworth, who is obviously a magazines man, wrote on his blog at the time, “I bet my house it won't work.” So that was, for someone who read his blog on a regular basis, a bit of a blow, but I took it as a motivating factor.

What/where is your happy place?

At home with my wife and two boys, just having a nice weekend together.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I’m proud to say I won the 1985 BP Photo Competition (Under 10s category) and here’s my trophy to prove it.

What would be in your Room 101?

Definitely people using their mobile phones inconsiderately.

Introvert or extrovert?

Introvert

Optimist or pessimist?

Optimist.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Film. Watching Killing Eve and The Deuce.

Sweet or savoury?

Savoury.

Morning person or night owl?

Morning person.

Tea or coffee?

Tea.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

Cringey. I think that it's embarrassing for a man of my age to use emojis.

*What made you want to work in the magazine industry? *

Working with big, well-known brands and publishers sounded exciting. The digital side of the magazine industry is also always evolving and there’s lots of opportunity for growth.

*Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position? *

I graduated back in 2015 with a degree in Business Management – Law. After I had finished University I went onto become a digital marketer for a health company whilst also trying to set up my own digital marketing agency. Being a one-woman band was a little hard but it definitely gave me the necessary skills to get to where I am today. In January 2017, I joined Rhapsody as a freelance Digital Marketing Executive and a few months later I was given the opportunity to become a Digital Project Manager. Only recently I was promoted to become the Head of Creative Projects, which I am extremely happy about.

*Do you have a go-to work outfit? *

No. I usually decide on the day when I get out of bed in the morning. A lot of it depends on the weather. Luckily Rhapsody is pretty relaxed with what we wear – it’s a creative environment so it’s chilled to work in.

*What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks? *

Neither I’d say. I need my silence and try to put on my “do not disturb” face.

*What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job? *

Sharing an office space with our beloved “honey”. Here’s a photo if you are wondering who that is…

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

We have a music playlist! At the start of every month, my colleagues and I choose 5 songs each that we then listen to throughout the month. We have 1 rule: the song has to be released within the same year but can be of any genre and it gets played even if it’s not to everyone’s choice!

*Walk me through your typical day. *

I get into work around 9am and straight away check my emails. In our creative department we are big tea and coffee lovers, so if it’s not me making a drink for everyone else, I am for sure waiting to receive one.

I then catch up with our developers to check what tasks are outstanding from the day before and fix any issues. I’d say that 70% of the time there are, as creating code is never as straightforward as everyone would like it to be. Technology moves so fast and there are so many different devices and sizes out there! I spend a good few hours making sure we are on schedule and will work through the QA process before delivering projects back to the client.

Before you know it, it’s lunchtime already. Occasionally I go to the park to enjoy the weather, however a lot of the time I eat in front of my computer either testing a new app or website we are building.

After lunch I may have a meeting either with internal or external stakeholders discussing project briefs, budgets and timelines.

An afternoon cuppa is also always needed, so another round is made by a willing volunteer in our creative department. Then before end of play, I always make sure everyone knows what the tasks are for the following day.

*If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day? *

Surprisingly I’ve thought about this myself before. Although I love sleep, a part of me thinks we spend too much time sleeping. Did you know an average person sleeps 25 years of their life?

I’d like to say study and try to invent something new.

*What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why? *

*
*

Screenshot of the Walstead Group site as I was testing how it looks on my phone and wanted to share it with our developers.

*What’s your guilty pleasure? *

Chocolate. Who doesn’t love a bit of chocolate?

*Whose phone number do you wish you had? *

Elon Musk. Would most definitely learn a lot from him.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

“Stick to what you know”. I say this because only when you are taking a risk and being curious can you develop and grow as an individual.

What/where is your happy place?

30+ degree heat in a tropical country lying on the beach.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

That I drink tea without milk and I play basketball as a hobby.

*What would be in your Room 101? *

Spiders and lots of insects

Introvert or extrovert?

Extrovert

*Optimist or pessimist? *

Optimist, although I do question a lot of things…

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Film. TV series called Power.

*Sweet or savoury? *

Savoury.

*Morning person or night owl? *

Morning person.

*Tea or coffee? *

Coffee.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

First of all, which team do you think will win the World Cup?

Had you asked me this question at the start of the tournament, I would have said Germany or Spain. However, I did fancy England to do well – quarter-finals maximum. That said, I hold my hands up and have to say I completely got it wrong with Gareth Southgate. He has more than proved me wrong about all my preconceived ideas about him and I owe him an apology. Sorry Gareth…oh, and England vs France final. England to win it.

Which team do you support?

I support the world’s greatest football club, the mighty Newcastle United. Always have, always will.

What made you want to work in the magazine industry?

I never really knew what I wanted to do until I did my work placement at school, where I was placed on the art desk on the local paper The Evening Chronicle, making tea and watching grownups have fun and be creative. Other suggestions I managed to dodge included an Airport Trolley Collector and working in a sports shop…because I like sport.

After perfecting everyone’s brew and a week of work, I realised this was pretty good fun and not like a proper job, but that might have been down to the fumes from the Cow Gum (cracking cultural reference for all you kids out there!), so I made my mind up I wanted to pursue graphic design from there onwards.

All of this twinned with seeing my dad come home from work every day from a job he hated and collapse on the sofa exhausted really just hammered it home –  if I'm going to be working all day, I may as well try and get a job in something I love doing, which is, to this day, a luxury I wish my dad could have experienced during his working life raising his family.

I always loved magazines and used to sit and read them while my mam went food shopping, Thrasher magazine being a favourite along with Your Sinclair computer magazine and various music mags – a window into a different life really. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but maybe that was the start of it all.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

The abridged version goes like this: My university final show work was shown at The Young Designers Exhibition in London and I was subsequently asked to come down to London for various interviews. I was offered a job working for Autocar at Haymarket and worked my way up through the ranks on a number of other Haymarket titles. I was later approached by Red Giant Projects, a small design agency, to work on various magazines and projects. Daily deadlines were a very steep learning curve!

Years later, Haymarket approached me to return to redesign Stuff magazine and then I finally got my hands on FourFourTwo mag – the reason I took the job at Haymarket from the get-go – and have been here ever since.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

Not really, although I cycle to work every day and, being from Newcastle, I wear shorts pretty much all year round living in London…or until it starts snowing. Staple footwear is Adidas Gazelle trainers. They cannot be beaten in my eye.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

Coffee. 11am Coffee Club is mandatory for me, although I'm coming round to tea. I don't really snack, but I do have a sweet tooth.

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

Too many to mention through the years, but off the top of my head: Looking after a young Lewis Hamilton before he could drive on an Autocar photoshoot; spending a few hours in a hotel room chatting with Pelé and wondering how to address him; being shouted at by Neymar; being mocked by Pep Guardiola; and fixing David Beckham’s hair on a photoshoot. Playing on the pitch at Wembley and scoring the winning goal in the final and being presented with my winner’s medal up the steps by Alan Shearer will not be topped. It was a career highlight for a lifelong Newcastle United fan.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

That we don't talk about football all day or watch football all day – and the standard of football player on the team is far from Premier League standard, however we can hold our own. Any challengers?

Walk me through your typical day.

Up. Breakfast. Drop the kids off at school. Cycle to work. Shower. Emails and catch up. Designing and planning features and photoshoots. 11am Coffee Club. Lunch. More designing. Cycle home. Pick the kids up from nursery. Pick up my partner from train. Home. Bath the nippers. Story time. Bed. Food. TV and relax. Bed. Sleep.

If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?

I’m a night owl – or I was until I had kids (twin girls Molly and Eve), so that’s changed. I would probably do some more illustration work or tinker with other design ideas I have for other things outside of my day-to-day work.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

The last pic I took on my phone was a picture of my girls taking in the views from the top of Richmond Hill in the sun.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Not entirely sure. I don't really feel a lot of guilt for things I like, to be honest. Maybe singing songs from Moana with the girls behind closed doors.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Bob Mortimer – one of the funniest people on earth and he's from the North. I would love to go for a pint with him.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

To not follow a career in graphic design and to learn a trade instead, because "You can't even draw that well.”

What/where is your happy place?

I have a few happy places: On Tynemouth Beach in Newcastle or on Ingrina Beach in Portugal with my partner and kids around me and a cold beer in hand; or swimming; or being on my bike, which clears my head.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I came very close to representing the UK at springboard diving in my youth. Also, I hate football (joke).

What would be in your Room 101?

Sunderland in its entirely.

Introvert or extrovert?

Extrovert.

Optimist or pessimist?

Optimist.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

One thing I miss a lot since we had our children is the treat of going to the cinema. We used to go a lot so I would have to say television now. The model of watching TV has changed so much now. Imagine waiting week after week to watch a serialised show – I want it all now and will binge-watch with the best of them.

We just finished the third season of The Bridge, which is a fantastic Scandi police drama. However, if I had full control of the remote control in our house, it would be documentaries on 24/7. Last doc we watched was Wild Wild Country on Netflix – a phenomenal story. What amazed me most was how on earth hadn't I heard about this story before. It’s worth watching.

Sweet or savoury?

Can I choose both…?

Morning person or night owl?

Night owl. I am not good in the morning

Tea or coffee?

Coffee, although I read Johnny Marr’s autobiography and he suggested a white tea (Bai Mudan), which is very refreshing, and frankly, if it’s good enough for Johnny Marr, then I'm interested.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

I despise emojis, especially in design. However, it’s probably the clappy hands one or the hart. A good well-timed gif is always a winner.

What made you want to work in the publishing/marketing industry?

I have always loved reading, so working in publishing in one form or another was always on the cards for me.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

When I first graduated, I was sure I wanted to be a Copyeditor, so I applied to basically every entry-level copy job there was going without getting even one interview.

Desperate for a foot in the door, I took a telesales job at Haymarket Publishing and worked my way up until I was running the list rental department. It didn’t take me long to forget about editing altogether and realise I was much better suited to commercial roles. I loved that job and was at Haymarket for several years. The thing I liked best about that job was promoting the department – essentially, marketing it!

As a long-time admirer of the London Review of Books, when a job in marketing came up seven years ago it was truly my dream job. The thing is, seven years later, and I still love it just as much. I love what I do, I love the brand I do it for and I love the people I work with. Plus, it turns out I would be a terrible Copyeditor. I talk WAY too much and I get genuinely excited about spreadsheets. It was only a matter of time before marketing and I found one another.

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

God, I wish! As an American, I never had school uniforms growing up and I envy them so much. I would have loved a uniform. Since I can’t convince anyone else to share this opinion, I have to wear outfits like other normal people. I quite like vintage dresses and skirts. I cycle to work most days, but I have a skirt guard and go about a third of the speed of everyone else, so it doesn’t impact me too much!

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

Coffee. I tried to give it up once and then three days in I was like, “What am I DOING? I love coffee!”

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

Probably schlepping the LRB up a mountain in Sri Lanka on my holiday to try to get a great #readeverywhere photo for our summer campaign.

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

I expect people conceive of us as a small literary magazine, which is true. We drink a lot of coffee, talk about books and worry about the standard of the punctuation in our marketing copy (all of which you would expect!). We are also more digitally-savvy that you might think – we run about 30 in-house pay-per-click campaigns on AdWords and are running interesting experiments with video, Facebook, email segmentation and automation and segmented web experiences, etc. As a company, we are currently investing a lot in our web development. I would like to think we’re more advanced in those areas than people might think.

Walk me through your typical day.

After cycling into work, it’s straight to the coffee. I like to start my day looking at the previous day’s figures and then clearing out my inbox. I love how much my days fluctuate between anything from strategic meetings on our digital transformation to looking at new campaign artwork for Christmas. If I am doing anything like detailed reporting, I like to listen to show tunes (I am mad about musical theatre). I am so lucky to live in London and have all sorts of great cultural institutions at my fingertips. I go to the theatre after work pretty regularly and still feel lucky about it every time!

If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?

I hope it would be reading and not bingeing Netflix, but I love to sleep – I can fall asleep mid-sentence, so I would be very sorry to lose it!

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

The odds of it being a photo of my cat were probably a good 80-85%. I photograph him a lot, but I mean, why wouldn’t I?! Look at him!

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Peanut butter in pretty much any form (but preferably on a spoon).

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Lin-Manuel Miranda [In the Heights, Hamilton]. I have been trying to think of what I would say to him if I ever just ran into him in London (he’s been in the city a lot recently) and I still don’t have anything clever. I would mumble something about him being a genius, but what I would really be thinking is, “Please see through this terrible mumbling and become my friend!”

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

“What are you going to do with an English degree? Open up an English store?”

What/where is your happy place?

I have an actual happy place! There’s a little room in my flat that my husband made the mistake of saying I could do whatever I want with and so it’s covered in flowers, pastel paint, fairy lights and my sewing machine. It looks a bit silly, but I don’t care at all – being in there just makes me intensely happy.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I am not sure there’s much that would surprise people (I wear my heart on my sleeve and talk a lot), plus I am a really terrible liar. People who don’t know me well probably think I am far less misanthropic than I really am.

What would be in your Room 101?

People who write “hope your well” and people who say “give 110%”.

Introvert or extrovert?

Extrovert.

Optimist or pessimist?

This is probably something that people would actually be surprised to know about me (see earlier question). I am sure most people would say I am an unquestionable optimist, but what I really am deep down is an incredibly happy, smiley pessimist. I love my life and think everything is perfect and wonderful right now, but it is likely to go horribly downhill at any time, so I should get every second of happiness out of now as I can. See? Pessimist!

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. She’s a feisty, strong, independent, happily childless middle-aged woman wearing gorgeous costumes with a fabulous bob, while kicking some crime-solving butt with her lipstick and heels intact. I love her.

Sweet or savoury?

Sweet (excessively). I would just skip real food to get to the sugar.

Morning person or night owl?

Morning person.

Tea or coffee?

Coffee.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

Smiling emoji

Cool, although in our team, it’s all about the gif. Our team WhatsApp group and Slack channels sometimes have more gifs than words.

What made you want to work in the magazine industry?

I tried a few roles before I knew there was something beyond being Editor or Stylist in magazines. As soon as I realised that I could combine my love of fashion and imagery with business acumen in media, I was in. Sold.

When I was younger, we always had magazines around. Interestingly, it was Pattern magazine that I would always look at. My grandmother used to sew and create these fantastic dresses from nothing, making magic from a piece of cloth. The reference images in pattern books were always glamorous ladies wearing gloves and hats. That led me to start collecting old magazines. I have some great ones from the 50s and 70s. I just have always had a love of them.

This graduated into a fascination around current magazines and the content, so I’ve always collected them. It would be great if they were deemed valuable in pounds, but they’re worth so much to me personally that it really doesn’t matter.

Can you chart your journey from when you started out to your current position?

When I went to university, I didn't know what a Publisher actually was or did. It's serendipity that I studied management and sociology, because as a Publisher, I am calling on those lessons a lot – decades after leaving university.

Magazines are about society, reflecting what's going on and being tapped into the zeitgeist. Social trends and shifts in behaviour have always been really interesting to me, hence the sociology studies. My sister is a brilliant Sociologist and a Professor at Oxford University. She’s one of my inspirations.

My degree was also really useful for the management side of things. It helps me in managing the business of British Vogue in its scale and complexity. I studied and then I worked in retail for a bit. I worked for MatchesFashion.com, which was incredible. I learnt a lot from its then owners, Tom and Ruth, whom I still see today.

I moved from there to working in events, which I loved. Then a friend of mine, Kirsty Cocker, who actually works for Condé Nast now [as Associate Publisher at Brides and Condé Nast Traveller], said I’d be great in media. She gave me some great tips and I eventually got a job at the London Evening Standard, which led on to magazine publishing.

What's been the most exciting aspect of being involved with British Vogue?

What's happening at British Vogue now will be one of those where I tell future generations, "I was there." As consumer behaviour has changed so much, the way we work in the media industry needs to be significantly different. It's incredible to be at Vogue at a time where we're really embracing that and succeeding at showing how you can produce super aspirational luxury content that is part of the zeitgeist and has a lot of cultural importance and significance. Something being exclusive doesn't mean that it needs to be excluding, so it’s really incredible to be a part of that shift.

In addition to our huge digital revenue growth this year, it's been phenomenal for us to see the power of print again. When I had just been appointed, Edward's [Edward Enninful, Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue] first issue, the December 2017 issue, was coming out and he asked me to join him for a signing of the print issue. The queue literally wrapped around the building. That issue caused such a stir, because it was selling out everywhere and people desperately wanted to get their hands on it. We were offering digital editions, but what people really wanted was print, based on "the newness."

A small part of me feared that that would be a one off, but I knew I had to be a part of keeping that momentum going. With our new strategy, sales press coverage excitement has actually increased. The print issue is driving so much excitement – it’s the anchor to all else we do in digital social experiential. Our circulation is strong and I hope that’s good for the wider industry. We’re here to stay!

Do you have a go-to work outfit?

The pressure at Vogue is on another level – you’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada! I have quite a broad wardrobe. What I tend to do on a Sunday evening is put together five outfits. I have a little rail in my spare room for them. As the week goes on, I adapt or change the looks based on the weather change, my mood or different meetings or dinners that enter the calendar, but it means that I have something I know I'm going to feel confident in, if all else fails. We work long days and if I'm short on time, it takes away one of these extra things to think about. If you see me in all black, there was some sort of time or wardrobe malfunction or deliberations.

What do you turn to when you’re on deadline – tea/coffee/snacks?

We’re always on deadline now. A big part of my role is about building Vogue’s digital revenues. It’s going so well (up 155% year-on-year to date) so every day is a deadline day. A more holistic, long-term maintenance strategy is essential now – no sugar highs or caffeine crashes. Work is a marathon, not a sprint.

I'm big on holistic supplements. I get teased a lot by the team for my green juices and matcha teas. I'm a big advocate of yoga for mental and physical preparation and maintenance. I don't drink coffee at all – it puts a plaster on things and you feel more awake, but the brain function is not right for me. I don't eat chocolate. It sounds disciplined, but the truth is I don’t like the taste of either, which helps!

What’s the most unusual situation you’ve found yourself in because of your job?

Vogue has been full of revelations. For example, I've been to Buckingham Palace several times in connection to work and it never gets dull. The most unusual thing is the variance, so one day I can be in an industrial park in some far-flung area of the country seeing a client to close a business deal. Then two days later, I might be at the home of someone unfeasibly fabulous and celebrated for a private dinner. That's where the wardrobe challenge comes in. What do you wear that segues from industrial park to London’s finest?

What would people be surprised to know about your job?

Since we live in an Instagram age, what we tend to do is post the most glamorous edits of our lives. I’m as guilty as anyone. I think people are surprised about how numbers-driven my job is. I spend most days pouring over a spreadsheet. That might be to do with sales and circulation of the magazine or advertising revenue and trends. Being very numerate is basically my day-to-day job. Although, it looks like I spend my time going to great parties (partly my fault), my job is ultimately about increasing British Vogue’s profit.

Walk me through your typical day.

The thing I like most is I don't have a typical day, but broadly speaking, I get up pretty early, usually between 5am and 6:30am. I try to do about 30 minutes of yoga and listen to a podcast. Vogue's podcast, Appearances with Film Director Steve McQueen, is so brilliant. I would say that, of course, but it really is.

It's a really clever concept and Steve is a British Vogue Contributor and the most brilliant collaborator. He plays on the notion that you are the only person who can't see yourself in the first person. You need a mirror or you need how other people perceive you in order to understand what your appearance is and whether you're attractive. Almost everyone will identify with at least one of the great people he interviews.

I try to start work ahead of the team and our clients, because once they are in, my time is pretty much theirs. I tend to have various internal meetings at Condé Nast and lots of external meetings, usually a lunch with a client, or with someone related to content. Branded content is the area of our business revenue that's growing the most. Almost every evening there's some sort of event or dinner, whether it be a store launch or a dinner to celebrate a brand.

What's coming up for Vogue?

As you can imagine, everybody wants the spoilers for Vogue! What I can say is that British Vogue will continue to push the boundaries and continue to represent more women intelligently. For us, the zeitgeist is really about taking chances, in ever more luxurious ways and normalising the marginalised. We’re proof that the media can be both inclusive and luxurious. The high taste level Vogue shows in this symbiosis is what affirms that British Vogue is THE fashion bible for our time.

If you didn’t have to sleep, how would you use the remaining hours in the day?

I feel like I don't sleep enough anyway, but I would love to read more books related to work. I've got stacks of books that I say I’ll read when I’m on holiday or when it comes to Christmas. I tend to read magazines in any down time to keep abreast.

I contributed to a HarperCollins book called Slay In Your Lane and everyone keeps saying, "I can't wait to get to your chapter" and I haven't actually read my part yet. I’ve read most of it, but not my contribution. I would finish reading that first.

I really love to cook, so I would cook even more. I get a huge sense of joy from it. I tend to cook mostly on the weekends and my partner cooks in the week.

What is the last photo you took on your phone (at time of interview)? Why?

I was on a pseudo work trip with Krug Champagne, one of our clients, recently. We did this incredible train journey with Michelin-starred chefs and Jools Holland was the conductor. We had various different stops along the way at these Thomas the Tank Engine-style stations where different musical acts performed. The last picture on my phone is of a bottle of champagne with the British countryside whizzing by.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

JOMO, the joy of missing out. I love nothing more than a Friday night in eating stodgy food and watching boxsets. You know that thing where somebody calls you and says, "I'm so sorry, but I can't do that drink anymore" and you sort of feign disappointment? I spend so much of my time socialising with amazing people that a treat for me is to be on my own! It helps keep the balance.

Whose phone number do you wish you had?

Very difficult, but Prince if he were still with us. I'm a huge Prince fan and he was the second ever concert I went to see. I listen to his music all the time and he would be a brilliant barometer of cool. He was also the king of shade and so would be good for those great one-liners on text.

What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

That I should become a Nurse from my Careers Adviser at school. If I hear good advice, I really hang on to it. If I hear bad advice, it can also drive me to disprove it. At school, I liked math, art and drama, and they did not know what to do with me. My mother was a brilliant Nurse – she got an MBE for her decades of midwifery. In the absence of understanding where I might fit in, they just said do what your mother did, despite my different interests. Lazy advice is worse than no advice.

In a way, it was good, because up to that point I thought that my career would somehow reveal itself to me or someone would help me see what path I needed to take. I realised I needed to figure it out for myself and this sparked a light in me.

What would people be surprised to know about you?

I'm full of surprises and "contradictions" – all part of being a woman today.

What would be in your Room 101?

Fake feminists. With what’s been going on in the media industry and the film industry, across all industries really, we've seen some incredible women become much more vocal. We still have a long way to go, but there have been some real shifts. Hopefully, this will lead to some more significant change in working practices.

I get slightly frustrated when people are not genuine and they jump on the bandwagon in order to look contemporary, to tick a box and to absolve the need to address real inequalities and challenges. It's really about action over words and images. You can see more long-term action when people and companies are making changes that help women in the workforce and help women in terms of having more seats at the table and properly acknowledge their ideas and achievements.

We really need to look at the division of labour at home and how work responds to that. Issues around child care and maternity affect all women, even those who don't have children. The perception of a woman being of child-bearing age can lead to her being held back as much as actually having a child and being assumed to be out of the game. Really talented women leaving the workforce to go and create a future generation is essential, but they are still often unwittingly held back on their return.

Introvert or extrovert?

Introvert.

Optimist or pessimist?

Optimist.

Film or television? What are you binge-watching at the moment?

Television – we have such great streaming at the moment. I love this series on Netflix called Explained. There's a brilliant one on exclamation marks. It's really good bite-sized TV for when you have 20-30 minutes. I also really love Glow on Netflix. It's great escapism.

Sweet or savoury?

Savoury. I don't really like desserts or chocolate, but I would murder a cheese board.

Morning person or night owl?

I'm naturally a night owl. When I was at university, I got all of my best work done at two in the small hours. However, managing a team means I have to be a morning person. I'm pretty jolly in the morning, despite that!

Tea or coffee?

Herbal tea.

Emojis – cool or cringey? Which emoji do you use the most?

Like everything, it depends on context. I'm quite happy with an emoji. I cringe a little bit when I get an emoji on the end of a business email. On text, it's definitely cool. I also love a gif. Some of my team and I have an Instagram gif group with a "chief gif dealer."

The one I seem to be using the most is the lady with the hands on her face, which is quite telling.