A personal detour
I'm an army brat who grew up across South Africa (Dutch father, British mother) and completed high school in Dubai. I rarely lived in the same place for more than a few years, so cultural diversity and adaptability were skills I had to learn early. After school, I hadn’t quite figured out what I wanted to do yet, but I knew I was good with people, creative, and adaptable so I decided to move back to Cape Town and explore it's rich and vibrant hospitality scene.
Creating moments for people came naturally to me, so I thrived in hospitality. By day, I worked in the wine & spirits and F&B industries, and by night I ran my own brand and events initiative as a paid form of self-education. Over six years, I grew into management roles and landed in Qatar as a pre-opening manager, launching 11 restaurants and franchises for the FIFA World Cup 2022. Along the way, I completed two Harvard Business School Online courses to deepen my business acumen. You can learn more about my foundational decade in brand and hospitality on LinkedIn.
Along the way, I filled the creative gaps at the companies I worked for and the personal brands I created, teaching myself strategy, marketing, graphic design, and web development. The two paths fed into each other and what I learned at night sharpened what I delivered by day. My ability to operate across disciplines didn’t go unnoticed, and I was later offered a Brand Manager role, a position where both my business and creative strengths could flourish. It became the turning point that validated the value of being multidisciplinary. What started as filling in the blanks became a career built on bridging them.
Today, I work with founders & teams around the world, offering fractional creative services to full-scale brand management. For early-stage or lean teams, I’m often the only person they need to design, build, and develop the entire brands infrastructure. For mature businesses, I tend to fill a dynamic role or creative gap, helping the brand through a critical growth phase or contributing towards long-term success plans. I bring cohesion to ideas, infrastructure, product, and people, shaped by years of hands-on experience and a natural drive to solve problems across both creative and business fields.