5 minutes on.. How and why we got into digital
To find out what makes us all tick, which technology and apps we can’t live without, why we love where we work and which places are our favourite hidden treasures.
This week we asked: How and why did you get into the digital industry?
Chris Hassell, Founder, Ralph & Co
"I was lucky enough to get a job as a web designer/developer with a design agency in Leeds when I left school. That was just as the dot com boom was starting so it all accelerated from there. It’s an insult to designers and developers nowadays to say I had that title! I was completely winging it, but then so was everyone back then so it was ok!"
Ankita Bhargava, Online Marketing Manager, Crab Creative
"When I planned to move from client side (because I thought I was slowly dying. I hated the job and environment so much) I interviewed at Crab Creative in Shoreditch and when I walked into the office it was insane, there was loud music playing, a beautiful wooden bench right in the middle of the office and very little structure in the layout. It felt so warm, quirky and the vibe was great. I was immediately drawn to the way they work. It was a collective process, pretty much a flat structure, a brainstorm meant that everyone’s input was very very vital. The creative team was great, everyone had their own personality and no one was normal. Also for someone with a pretty analytic and numbers driven job profile it’s been absolutely great fun. Every creative process needs reasoning and it’s amazing how this agency manages to combine the creative genius of the designers and the dogmatism of account handlers and developers."
Anant Sharma, Founder & CEO, Matter Of Form
"A strong love of tech and design; both became a priority for each other around the time i started MOF. It’s a convergence that never fails to excite me when done well."
Luke Thomson, Co-founder, ReChannel
"I used to work for a Venture Capital firm but was looking for a new challenge. After seeing at the sophistication of the B2C market, it became apparent that there were opportunities in the B2B market to streamline and simplify things such as fashion wholesale and line sheets, which is how and why ReChannel was born."
James Siki, Founder & Creative Director, Twentieth Century Boy
"For the passion of creative storytelling, and the dislike of every other industry."
Matt Read, Social Media Manager, Quad Digital
"I first got into social media in a professional capacity in 2009 whilst interning at a great creative agency in London Bridge. It wasn’t so much out of choice, more that I was thrown into it because I was young and therefore apparently knew everything about social media. Which obviously I didn’t. Back then it was still very much an emerging and widely untrusted tool in a business’s digital armoury, but that didn’t phase me - if anything I relished the challenge and threw myself head first into the world of social."
Luke Faragher, Founder, Drawn in Digital
"I was studying Law at University but fell out of love with it, so I taught myself to code, started building and optimising websites. I built up a number of clients and decided to start an agency."
Mark McDermott, Creative Director, CodeAgent
"I started by switching careers from IT consulting in 2002. I enjoyed the technical work but not the corporate environment or lack of creativity in that sector. The digital industry seemed the perfect mix of disciplines for me."
