About me

The story you’re here for starts in Canada.

There's a kid in the back of Mr Gomez’s Multimedia class photoshopping his friends’ faces onto bikini models and building Led Zeppelin fan sites in Dreamweaver. When the bell goes he’ll rush to a friend’s backyard where they’ve built a snowboard jib park and ride under floodlights until his parents start to worry and come looking.

That double-denim-wearing 14-year-old was me.

Multimedia wasn't my only elective in high school. I got to study psychology too - it hooked me, and got me asking why people act the way they do.

So I found the overlap of those curiosities and studied marketing, but not out of some fake "passion for sales" - it was either study or keep driving a skidsteer at the garden centre for $15/hour.

With university behind me and a brief stint at a startup, I set off on a long lap of the globe - sometimes working in design studios, sometimes in ski resort cocktail bars. The craft work was good when I found it - it just wasn’t why I went. I spent almost 10 years chasing snow and surf solely because it was really fucking fun.

But near the end of my 20s I started slowing down.

I was living in Dublin, surfing on the weekend if the stars aligned, working 9-5 in the outdoor industry. It’s an industry I love, but I couldn’t reconcile that with an hour-long commute in a big grey city.

After a snow holiday in Austria, I quit and uprooted my life one final time. I moved to Innsbruck, dug in, and started shifting out of marketing and into product design - still thinking about what makes people tick, but shipping pixels instead of parkas.

So what now?

I’m coming up on a decade of living in the Alps, and I think that 14-year-old kid would be stoked to see me now - still photoshopping a friend’s face here and there, and a healthy dose of snow and dirt in my 5-9.

Here’s to another decade of searching for powder, projects, and better products.