Chris Vernon-Smith

Chapter 1: A bit of history

As a kid I loved drawing, football and Nike trainers (specifically, Air Jordans). I also remember really liking History but I think that was down to the teacher being the football coach and really good at drawing Tudor battle scenes.

I never really felt myself at senior school. Maybe it was me. Or maybe most people felt they didn't fit in either, but did a better job of it than I did. Thankfully it was all change when I started at Goldsmiths College tucked away in South East London.

There, no-one cared who you were or what you liked; it was a melting pot of free thinking and creative minds. I felt like my inner-child had rebooted.

After it ended I was in a quandary: do I go safe & traditional, or do I go bold? The internet was still on dialup, so I went traditional and joined the Marks & Spencers finance graduate scheme. Back in the day this was a gold-standard gig. Access was granted via numerous interview rounds culminating in a 48 hour overnight "assessment" centre (think The Apprentice but with less glamour and no TV cameras), but once in - you were set. Sort of.

The grad scheme certainly had some highlights, and I was thrown into the mix helping finance managers run groups of stores. From financial control and protection of assets to business planning and management responsibility.

After that I secured a Head Office role in their Store Financial Operations team. In principle the role was the same as it was in stores, only this time I was working across the entire UK store portfolio, reporting on and analysing a £50M budget. But ultimately, while I enjoyed the challenge I found it too dry and needed to move on, so I took the plunge, got out and rebooted again moving to Digital.

Chapter 3: And now?

For the past four years, I've been working in-house for a global beauty retailer. The majority of that via for a creative production company and latterly for direct for the client helping them transition to an in-house team

In addition to content-production, my role has spanned reviewing and taking ownership of the display ad production process, defining and optimising processes, creating and reworking templates for editoral markets, and conducting a discovery process into their new CMS (Amplience), making a wide range of recommendations and being the technical point of contact for the studio and client marketing teams. I also continue to be hands on with development and motion.

And it is at the intersection between content production + processes + technology that I am at my very best, helping clients maxmise their content by exploiting their systems and optimising their workflows.

I have also been working with an eLearning startup as their tech consultant helping them get their business set up and growing. I love this as the business is nimble and so my role is often looking at tech solutions, be it assessing a Learning Management system, investigating ecommerce solutions for their Wordpress site or delving into CRM platforms.