A running blog and a restless feeling

Looking back, one of the best career moves I ever made had nothing to do with accepting a job offer, moving country or taking on a more senior role. It was starting a running blog.

Back in 2010, I was working at Jack Morton Worldwide, leading experiential marketing programmes and client relationships for global brands. I loved the pace, the creativity and the sheer variety of agency life, but I had also begun to suspect that the communications landscape was changing faster than my role within it and, truthfully, in my heart I always wanted to be a creative director again.

Social media was becoming mainstream, digital experiences were becoming increasingly sophisticated and audiences were starting to expect something far richer than traditional marketing. I wasn’t dissatisfied with my career, but I could see the centre of gravity shifting beneath my feet and knew that if I wanted to remain relevant, I needed to broaden my horizons beyond account leadership and client management.

At the time, I had no grand strategy. I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself, launch a business or build a personal brand. I simply wanted somewhere to experiment.

Learning by doing

That place became a running blog called Cheeky Running.

Built on Google’s Blogger platform, it started life as little more than a creative outlet and an excuse to write about a hobby that had become an increasingly important part of my life while training for a series of marathons. What surprised me was how quickly my attention shifted away from the running itself and towards the mechanics of the platform. I became fascinated by how websites were structured, why some articles attracted readers while others disappeared into obscurity, how search worked, how content travelled and how digital experiences were assembled.

I also discovered something that was surprisingly addictive. People read it. The audience grew steadily, sponsors began to appear and, long before the term existed, I found myself building an audience, creating partnerships and learning firsthand how digital communities form around shared interests. Looking back, Cheeky Running was less a running blog than an excuse to become the sort of communicator I wanted to be. It gave me permission to write, design, experiment, publish and build an audience long before those skills became central to my career.

What hooked me was the immediacy. Unlike client work, there were no approval processes, stakeholder meetings or creative reviews. If I had an idea, I could build it. If something wasn’t working, I could change it. If I wanted to publish something, I could do so immediately. The distance between an idea and its execution had effectively disappeared and, once I’d experienced that, it became difficult to ignore.

When side projects become opportunities

The funny thing about side projects is that they often become valuable long before you realise they are doing so.

What began as an evening hobby gradually opened doors to opportunities that simply wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Consultancy work followed with myGlu, a patient social platform backed by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, as well as New Balance’s Reach The Beach relay series. Both projects pushed me into unfamiliar territory, exposing me to digital strategy, UX, content development, community engagement and online behaviour at a time when many organisations were still trying to understand what digital transformation actually meant in practice.

Those projects stretched creative and strategic muscles that my day job wasn’t fully using. More importantly, they changed how I thought about my own career. Until then, I had largely defined myself by my role. Increasingly, I started thinking in terms of capabilities instead. The distinction sounds subtle, but it proved significant. Once you stop defining yourself by your current job title, you become much more open to where adjacent skills and interests might lead.

That shift in thinking ultimately helped me secure my next role at Bain & Company as Marketing Manager of Digital, a move that would have seemed highly improbable only a few years earlier when I was writing race reports on a free blogging platform.

Looking back, what fascinates me most is how little of this was planned.

Career advice often presents progression as a neat sequence of carefully considered decisions. My own experience has been considerably messier. The most significant shifts in my career have usually begun with curiosity rather than ambition, with side projects rather than formal development plans and with opportunities that only made sense in hindsight.

The thread that never disappeared

Over the following decade, my career became increasingly focused on larger organisations, broader responsibilities and more complex challenges. Bain was followed by Novartis, where I worked across communications, creative leadership, ethics engagement, organisational change and eventually Eurovision 2025. The projects became bigger, the audiences grew and the stakes increased.

Yet the instinct that had led me to start Cheeky Running never entirely disappeared.

I’ve always been drawn towards the spaces where disciplines overlap. Communications and creativity. Brand and experience. Digital and physical environments. Strategy and execution. While organisations often separate these activities into different functions, they rarely feel separate when you’re actually trying to solve a problem. The most interesting work almost always happens somewhere in the overlap, where seemingly unrelated ideas start to connect.

The technology changed dramatically over those years, but the attraction remained remarkably consistent. I enjoyed understanding how things worked, experimenting with new approaches and finding better ways to connect ideas with audiences. Whether the challenge involved employer branding, ethics engagement, corporate communications, live experiences or digital platforms, the underlying motivation was usually the same.

I enjoyed building things.

The return of alotté

For much of that period, alotté existed quietly in the background as a portfolio and occasional outlet for side projects, advisory work and creative experimentation. It was useful, but hardly central to my professional life.

Then a couple of things happened.

A period of professional upheaval coincided with the emergence of a new generation of creative tools, creating the sort of inflection point that only becomes obvious in hindsight. For the first time in years, I found myself with both the time and the motivation to revisit a project that had spent much of the previous decade sitting quietly on the sidelines.

What interested me wasn’t the technology itself, but the possibilities it unlocked. Many of the disciplines that had traditionally existed in separate worlds were beginning to converge. Writing, design, publishing, research, visual creation, optimisation and audience development increasingly felt like parts of the same ecosystem rather than separate specialisms. The boundaries between strategist, communicator, designer and creator were becoming less rigid, creating opportunities to work in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when I first started experimenting with Blogger fifteen years earlier.

The result was a complete rebuild of alotté.

What started as a portfolio evolved into something broader: part journal, part creative laboratory and part professional platform. A place to write, design, experiment, publish and occasionally disappear down rabbit holes that would struggle to survive within the structure of a large organisation.

Building, not directing

One of the things I appreciate most about alotté is that it allows me to remain hands-on.

As my career progressed, my responsibilities increasingly shifted towards leadership, strategy and organisational influence. That’s a natural progression, but I’ve never been entirely comfortable becoming someone who simply directs the work of others. I still enjoy designing, writing, building, editing and experimenting myself.

The platform was designed and built independently using Pixpa, with responsibility for everything from information architecture, navigation and user journeys through to visual identity, content strategy and editorial direction. Every article is researched, written and edited by me, while every page structure, image treatment, category architecture and UX decision has been refined through countless iterations.

The process has become increasingly multidisciplinary. A typical article might begin as a passing observation, develop into a research exercise, evolve into a design problem and eventually become a publishing challenge involving SEO, analytics, image creation and audience optimisation. Rather than existing as separate activities, they increasingly feel like different aspects of the same creative process.

Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Apple Photos remain central to how I work, while tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Mistral have become valuable collaborators for research, ideation, image development and content refinement. Google Analytics and Search Console provide a constant feedback loop, helping me understand not just what I want to say, but how people actually discover, consume and engage with it.

What interests me most is not any individual tool, but the convergence they enable. Writing, design, publishing, optimisation, audience development and creative strategy increasingly sit within a single workflow. The traditional distinctions between communicator, designer, strategist, publisher and creator feel less meaningful than they once did, creating opportunities for individuals to operate with a breadth that would have been difficult to imagine when I first started experimenting with Blogger fifteen years ago.

Perhaps that’s why projects like alotté continue to hold such appeal. They allow me to remain both strategist and practitioner, moving freely between ideas and execution without having to choose one or the other.

Why I still build things

I’ve spent much of my career helping organisations communicate through campaigns, experiences, platforms, content and communications programmes, but I’ve gradually realised that I am equally motivated by the act of creation itself. There is something deeply satisfying about taking an idea, shaping it, refining it and eventually sharing it with an audience. The medium is almost irrelevant. Sometimes it’s an article. Sometimes it’s a website. Sometimes it’s a conference experience, a communications strategy or an entirely new platform. The satisfaction comes from turning something abstract into something real.

What began as a running blog in 2010 ultimately helped shape the next fifteen years of my career, not because it was part of a carefully considered plan, but because it provided somewhere to explore, experiment and build. Looking back, the consulting projects, the move into digital, the transition to Bain, the relaunch of alotté and many of the opportunities that followed can all be traced back to a simple decision to start something for no reason other than curiosity.

The platforms have changed, the audiences have changed and the tech has changed beyond recognition. The instinct that started the whole thing never did.

If you’d like to discuss communications, creativity, digital experience or the practical application of emerging technologies, feel free to get in touch.