My Story
I’m a British creative who ended up in Thailand, spent ten years at one of the world’s leading wellness resorts learning every corner of marketing, and now works as Chief Strategy Officer at an Agency. It started with a teenage obsession with music and a fan website I built for a band. Everything since has been a variation of the same idea: use creative work to connect people to something that genuinely matters to them.
I didn't start out thinking about marketing or strategy. I started out thinking about music.
In secondary school I spent my evenings designing flyers for local bands playing gigs around England. Just a teenager who loved music and wanted to do something useful with it. It was the first time I discovered that you could take something creative and use it to connect people to something they care about.
That hobby quietly became something more when I was 16. I built my first proper website through Dreamweaver: a fan site for an American heavy metal band. What happened next still surprises me when I think about it. The band found the site. I ended up making friends with the bassist and earned VIP access to their UK shows, plus was mentioned in their album sleeve.
That experience taught me something I've carried ever since: if you put real effort into work, it creates real human connections.
After school, I went on to study Media at college, which gave me more formal grounding in page layout and design, media marketing, and image manipulation.
When I finished college, I did what a lot of people do when they're not quite sure what's next: I got on a plane.
The plan was three months of travelling with a mate, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. I landed in Thailand first and I never left.
I cancelled my flights to other countries, and somewhere in that unplanned extension, I fell completely in love with the country. It wasn't a difficult decision in the end. I knew I wanted to make a life there, and I was going to find a way to do it.
What followed was a stroke of luck I'm still grateful for. I landed an internship at Chiva-Som, the pioneering wellness destination in Hua Hin and one of the most respected wellness resorts in the world. The role was Guest Profile Management, not exactly what I'd been studying and nothing close to what I'd been doing with bands and websites. But I said yes and gave it everything I had.
It didn't take long for the design instincts I'd built in school to find their way into the job. I started contributing to the company's internal newsletter, bringing what I knew about layout, visuals, and getting a message across clearly. It landed well. Well enough that when the internship ended, they offered me a full-time position in the Bangkok corporate office.
My first years in the corporate office were some of the most formative of my career.
I was taken under the wing of the Marketing Director and given exposure to everything: branding, production, material development, and graphic design. Looking back, it wasn't entirely different from what I'd been doing as a teenager. Finding the right visual language to tell a story. Using creative work to communicate something meaningful. But now I was doing it for a world-class brand with real stakes.
I became the in-house graphic designer, and my love for the discipline deepened. Not just making things look good, but using visuals to communicate something. To make someone feel something. I also became the go-to person for presentations, combining storytelling instincts with a strong eye for layout. Getting a complex idea across clearly, whether through artwork or a slide deck, became one of my favourite things to do.
From there, I moved under the Head of Communications, whose mentorship also played a pivotal role in shaping my career trajectory. Working my way up through the team under their guidance provided the foundation for the strategic, high-level approach I bring to my work today.
The work got broader. I was still across design and brand, but I started getting my hands on websites and social media, too. One of the most valuable projects of this period was being part of the team that launched a new Chiva-Som website, the first one in years. We worked closely with a leading agency based in the UK, and I made it my mission to absorb everything I could. How they planned. How they thought. How they approached decisions. I treated it like a masterclass.
After a few years in MarCom, the Head of Communications sat me down and asked if I wanted to go fully digital.
More than half my role was already there. Digital marketing was clearly the direction everything was heading. I said yes.
It was one of the best decisions I've made, and also one of the more overwhelming periods of my career. I was the only digital marketing person in the corporate office.
What that meant in practice: I was managing the website, social media channels, SEO, paid advertising, e-commerce, and email marketing, all at once. And I wasn't doing this just for the resort. The corporate office covered multiple brands: Chiva-Som Hua Hin, the corporate entity, the Academy, and the Boutique Retail Store.
Was I overwhelmed? Genuinely, yes. Did I learn more in that period than at any other point in my career? Without question.
Having no choice but to figure out every channel yourself teaches you something you can't get any other way: how they connect. How everything, done well, works together. That joined-up understanding of digital marketing is something I now consider one of my biggest professional assets.
As the workload grew, we brought in external agencies to support our digital marketing at Chiva-Som.
I approached those relationships the same way I'd approached everything else: as a learning opportunity. I paid close attention to how the agencies worked, how they thought, how they structured and presented their strategies. I filed it all away. There was a thought that kept coming back to me: it would be interesting to be on that side of the table one day.
That day came after ten years at Chiva-Som.
The decision to leave wasn't easy. Chiva-Som gave me everything: my first real job, my mentors, my craft, my career. But I was also aware that it had been my only employer, and that staying indefinitely, as comfortable as it was, wasn't how I was going to keep growing.
When the opportunity came to join the digital marketing agency, Marketing Bear, I took it.
The shift in perspective was immediate and profound. I had spent a decade as the client, writing briefs, hiring agencies, and evaluating their work. Now I was the agency, on the other side of those conversations, building strategies for clients across different industries and contexts.
Everything I accumulated over those ten years found its place in this role.
The design thinking. The communications work. The digital channels. The campaigns and productions. The people who mentored me and the agencies who worked alongside me. It all came together under one discipline: strategy.
At Marketing Bear, I develop strategies for clients across various industries. And one of the most important things I've learned in this role is something I hold to firmly: there is no one-size-fits-all. Every client has a different business, a different audience, and a different goal. Strategies can follow similar frameworks, but applying those frameworks without genuinely understanding the specific context of each client isn't strategy.
I also make sure branding is always part of the conversation, even at a digital marketing agency. Positioning and messaging underpin everything else. Digital without brand is just noise.
And that's what I've been building towards since a 16-year-old from a little village in England decided to make a website for his favourite band.
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