Ibiza Delivers :: Magento-based Yacht Provisioning Website

Ibiza delivers is a online supermarket offering 24/7 deliveries to hotels, villas and yachts on the island of Ibiza. It has been compared to Ibiza’s version of Ocado and is used regularly by thousands of customers including celebrities like P Diddy, Jay Z, Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and David Cameron. I have been heavily involved in all aspects of their Magento-based site from its inception and on an ad hoc basis as a Technical consultant. I have just created a new site / app for them that caters for their growing business in Yacht Provisioning enabling Chefs to order provisions for same day delivery via boat. It has been optimized for both Mobile and Tablet.

Ibiza Delivers :: Magento-based SuperMarket / Delivery Site

Ibiza delivers is a online supermarket offering 24/7 deliveries to hotels, villas and yachts on the island of Ibiza. It has been compared to Ibiza’s version of Ocado and is used regularly by thousands of customers including celebrities like P Diddy, Jay Z, Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and David Cameron. I have been heavily involved in all aspects of their Magento-based site from its inception and was responsible for the UX, the UI, the Design, the functional and technical specifications and the management of the development of a range of custom Magento extensions modules.

Native Design :: Lead Creative Technologist

Native Design is a leading integrated experience design company that delivers both industrial and interaction design solutions to many of the worlds’ leading brands including Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, HP, Audi, Mercedes, Bentley and the BBC. They are based in London, San Francisco and Amsterdam. I was employed as their lead creative technologist, helping them create the cutting edge, intelligent products of tomorrow that help disrupt key industries and markets. The majority of my client-based work for is still under very strict NDAs but involved working on key Hewlett Packard, Pernod Ricard, Bowers and Wilkins and SFR products. In addition to the client-centric creative technology i was also responsible for more Technical Direction-orientated roles like sourcing, recruiting and managing their Windows, Android, IOS and Arduino developers, establishing a secure, scalable developer environment (GitHub Enterprise Edition, Jira, HipChat), setting up a Dev, Staging and Production (EC2) server and the associated work flows to support it. I also technically vetted all their internal Labs projects, installed a company-wide knowledge sharing platform and assisted the directors, both technically and creatively, on many successful pitches too.

Pernod Ricard's OPN :: Lead Creative Technologist

Pernod Ricard: digitalizing the world of premium drinks

Press Release: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/technology/opn-pernod-ricard-cocktail-library/

Press Release: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2017/01/pernod-ricard-takes-lead-on-cocktail-hometainment/

As the lead Creative Technologist at Native Design I was responsible for a new intelligent product and platform for one of the worlds largest drink manufacturers, Pernod Ricard whose brands include Absolute Vodka and Beefeater Gin. They have released a press release of the project I was involved with, entitled Project Gutenburg. An NDA prevents me from disclosing any specifics other than the fact that the product was extremely disruptive to traditional retail methods, it aimed to be sustainable, it utilised both Wifi Direct and Bluetooth LE and had numerous patentable aspects in software, hardware, data and the wider ecosystem.

In addition we had to build both IOS and Android powered control apps that demonstrated a wealth of functionality including rich interactive, premium photo realistic experiences, product catalogues, social interactions, inventories, mCommerce and logistics.

I was also responsible for designing and building the eCommerce Platform that was based on Magento, allowing realtime ordering and fulfilment of the product.

The project required regular visits to Paris to meet the clients face to face, and involved numerous board level presentations and demonstrations to the relevant parties.

The project was run using Agile methodologies, utilising both GitHub and HipChat for communications and versioning.

Billington Cartmell, Brave and Closer Live :: Technical Director

I was appointed Technical Director of Billington Cartmell (www.bcl.co.uk), their sister adverting agency, Brave (www.brave.co.uk) and their experiential arm, Closer (www.closerlive.co.uk) in January 2012. The group of companies between them represent a phenomenal array of leading clients including Carlsberg, Panasonic, Sennheiser, Philips, Unilever, Kraft, GSK, Lexus, Morrisons and Ernst & Young.

Ellas Kitchen :: Global Website, Email and eCRM Platform

Ellas Kitchen, a Billington Cartmell client, is one of the worlds leading organic baby food manufacturers and i was responsible for the build and roll out of a new eCRM platform that consisted of a multi-site WordPress-based platform for websites with email, Facebook and customer service functionality built in.

Global Website Platform with Localised Sites

The website was designed on the clients request to emulate the cartoon look and feel of the brand including ‘wiggly borders’ on all assets. The site was a full rebuild mainly in PHP and HTML5 with the odd flash asset for selected animation. Full localisation for European territories, America and Australia is possible and further territories could be added at will. All content and functional modules could be seamlessly deployed between territories creating both content aggregation, convenience and economies of scale. Customer details were also stored centrally and a Single Customer view was achieved that proves invaluable in email marketing and intelligent design and communication. eCommerce was the most recent addition to the platform enabling all their products to be purchased and their inventory to be managed centrally.

Email Marketing

Part of the eCRM Platform was the ability for the client to login and create targeted email campaigns at will from editable templates that we had designed for them. Using Campaign Monitors API we seamlessly connected the global customer view from the websites and Facebook apps into a filterable mail list enabling detailed user segmentation for the creation and serving of highly targeted messaging.

Facebook Apps

The final significant piece to the Ellas Kitchen eCRM platform was the Facebook App management technology that we encoded within the environment and ran off a multi-site SSL. This enabled Facebook Apps to be deployed as easily as a new site, containing all the predefined generic functionality that apps require like like-gates, accepting permissions, sharing, identifying top ten friends, storing user data etc. The only ‘work’ that needed doing was the creative and content layer to sit on top.

To find out more about the Facebook Apps I technically directed for Ellas Kitchen please click here.

Ki Performance :: Chief Technical Officer for StartUp

I was appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Ki Performance, a leading health and wellbeing provider to primarily manage their technical relationships with third parties, spec and develop white-labelled health and diet portals and create affiliate technologies that could increase sales opportunities. It was a very hands on role with considerable time was spent using Open Source, namely WordPress and Magento. Whilst there i was also designed and built a rich media campaign to increase armband sales and even planned and deployed the placements of these ads on Google’s Ad Network. Additionally I had to maintain and develop their ASP-based ecommerce site, their Word Press-based blog, their YouTube channel and other online press and PR. Internally, I was involved with the day to day running of the business, acting as a catalyst to working smarter at every opportunity. Areas included creating a content archive, introducing cloud-based collaboration including the externalising of all communications and creating an in house support ticketing system utilising trellis desk. Substantial time was also spent investigating the migration of their current .ASP eCommerce store to an open source Magento-based system.

Drive Business :: Technical Director

I was appointed Drive Businesses Technical Director to primarily install process and bring strategy and innovation to this rapidly expanding, ecommerce provider whose clients included Bench, Gant, Reiss, All Saints, Hooch and celebrities like Kelly Brook and Randy Jackson. The majority of my time was taken up liaising with these lead clients and assisting with their digital strategies to push sales both in store and online through good use of technology. I also was responsible for assisting in client pitches in both a creative and technical capacity. Other areas included:
  • A full evaluation of their existing ecommerce platform, enrich, and the scoping of a new, improved version whilst using Magento for inspiration.
  • Organising the company-wide use of a centrally-managed asset and project management tool (Jira) that massively improved transparency and accountability within their Scottish head office and their London and LA offices too.
  • Working out the logistics and process to transfer all existing client sites and platforms over to Rackspace.
  • Writing new SLA’s to vicariously extend Rackspace’s own SLA’s and investigating service insurance policies.
  • Ensuring that all test scripts are accurate
  • Separating Logic and Design in site builds via templating, specifically smarty templates.
  • Instigating user data analysis to follow user journeys & behaviours in order to increase conversions.
  • Introducing the use of Adobe Scripts to enable easy batching of tedious image tasks on and off site.
  • Improving Localisation on platform by instigating multiple currencies
 

All Saints :: eCommerce UX and eCRM

Whilst at Drive Business I spent a lot of time working closely with All Saints, the phenomenally successful fashion retailer who’s international eCommerce site was turning over £40 million annually. I had the task of improving their websites User Experience (UX) from both a functional and physical perspective in order to increase sales and site performance. This included:
  • Reworking of websites homepage to incorporate dynamic content deep linking to new products and collections.
  • Prototyping a clothes viewer written in flash to enable both image and video based content to have clickable product hotspots in real-time.
  • Improving Navigation and Usability by increasing a logical hierarchy to the sites structure after extensive usability analysis. Again the aim was increase sakes opportunities and decrease drop-off.
  • Advocating the use of SIFR to replace png buttons and brand elements to increase the brand experience whilst decreasing page loading times and optimising the servers performance.
  • Implementing logical switches in database to ensure maximum efficiency.
  • Instigating user data analysis to follow user journeys & behaviours in order to increase conversions.
  • Improving search queries by rewriting meta data including the use of batch bitmap RGB analysis for colour tagging products.
  • Increased visibility of work for client via Jira.
  • Investigating and prototyping the best open source platforms to manage customer services efficiently and reduce the customer services departments dependence on Outlook.

Reiss :: Flash Look Book

Whilst at Drive Business, the leading eCommerce company, I was responsible for the creation of a Flash look book for one of their main clients, Reiss. This flash application resided on the homepage of their main website and after extensive User Experience (UX) research we created a simple UI enabled the user to quickly find the type and style of clothing that they sought in a visually immersive and engaging way.