Wolverhampton, England, United Kingdom
I'm the kind of person that picks things up very quickly and can turn my hand to most things. In my career this is reflected in the array of things I have done at the companies I have worked for keeping track of complex systems and make connections that others cannot in order to find workable solutions in different areas. My home life follows and I find myself doing DIY projects where I can, I maintain my own vehicles and have built two cars over the years. I'm also interested in electronics and mechanics and can repair, or at least attempt to repair, many items in the home. I'm a family man too, married with 2 kids who like to keep me on my toes.
Head of development producing custom web applications for the daily processing of the business including internal and external access. I have built a team to expand this area of the business allowing Slick Stitch to offer a larger number of services to its customers and bring efficiencies to the business processes. Specializing in systems integrations creating EDI and API connections for our customers systems including direct connections to Shopify GraphQL and Magento API to ensure accurate data exchange of stock. orders and updates. Integrating a new ERP system for the business and working out how our current offerings can fit into that system as well as what the system can allow us to offer further. Research and Development to come up with new embellishment techniques to offer clients and to create processes that allow these to be used at scale efficiently. This includes modelling and 3d printing/laser cutting workholding fixtures where needed to aid in down skilling processes where possible.
IT Manager, Head Developer and software maintainer for a promotional merchandise company. Maintained servers and infrastructure of the IT systems but also custom developed, deployed and maintained over a dozen promotional merchandise web stores for high profile clients. Many of these stores were customer facing websites that are still in use today. I produced the branding and marketing materials used for catalogues, email promotions and events including recording and editing many videos for our social media presence and creating assets in Adobe suite and Corel suite products. I was also involved in the accounting of the business working with the accounts team to ensure accounting was accurate and to find discrepancies that others could not. Used my experience in printing techniques to advise colleagues on the feasability of completing projects and sales. Also represented the company at our local BNI meetings.
Worked as a graphic designer and producer of promotional products. Flags, banners, bunting, t-shirts, pens and many more promotional items. Customers would give us their logo and ideas and we would vectorise the logos and create artwork for the items and when approved create the products. This role taught me a lot about various print processes as well as the software's involved in creating artworks for those various processes. I also maintained the IT at this company keeping the computers and network running and created their first website. This company was subsequently purchased by Merchandise Mania in Hendon.