A brief history

Thortful

CEO and co-founder

A year in the making, exciting things are happening in our latest start-up thortful.com.

We want to harness the power of modern design & technology to build the best online global destination to buy & sell greetings cards.

At thortful, it all starts with our creators, a selection of independent creatives from the UK and around the world.

Our technology connects the artists with customers looking for the simplest way to discover and buy beautiful and unique cards, which are perfect for every life occasion.

By learning about our customers card buying habits we can deliver content which is timely and relevant to their buying motivations, meaning they will always return to us whether to get inspiration, buy cards or build their card selling business.

thortful is launched in June 2016

Before thortful, came Powwownow

Back in 2003 I became a founding investor of Powwownow with CTO Paul Lees. As soon as I was released from my golden handcuff deal with Domestic & General, who had bought my successful business Inkfish call centre (for £12,000,000, in 2004) I joined the company as joint CEO and Marketing Director. At that time the company had a turnover of £80,000 and three employees.

We gradually built the business, making the strategic decision early on to spend 20% of the turnover annually on marketing. The business had 60 staff and was turning over £14,000,000 when we finally sold Powwownow in December 2013 to US listed company PGI for £37,500,000.

Prior to Powwownow, I founded Inkfish

In 1993 I Established Inkfish Call Centres, an outsourcing business.

Having worked in a small call centre during my late teens i recognised one key issue all call centres had, I like my co-workers were just bums on a seats!

With this in mind I decided to set about changing this. By caring about my employees, leading, training and motivating them, ensuring they were rewarded well and by giving them an good working environment, my belief was we'd win business.

and we did!

This attitude gave us success and within 7 years we very quickly grew to £26m T/O and 2,500 employees. Our Customers included O2, SKY, Renault, Tracker and many other household brand.

In the late 1990's there was a lot of talk about all call centres moving to India. So in 2001 I decided to sell Inkfish to Domestic and General Group PLC for £12,000,00 but this came with a 2.5 year tie in. well the least said about that the better