You may have noticed that we don’t have a “Meet the Team!” section on our website. This is a deliberate omission; we didn’t want to go down the traditional route of staff bios. But, we do want you to get to know us better, so, over the coming weeks, each member of the Graphic Alliance team will write a short ditty about another member of the team. I know what you are thinking, and yes, this could potentially be a dangerous exercise! The first one up is Stuart Bowler, with Linford Haggie writing about him, and they have no one else to blame apart from themselves…
Stuart Bowler, by Linford Haggie
Some say he appears on high-value stamps in Surrey, and he thought Star Wars was a documentary…
Some say he’s afraid of dogs, and he thinks the credit crunch is a breakfast cereal…
Some say he has code instead of blood, and if you tune into 88.4, you can actually hear his thoughts…
All we know is, he’s called Stuart Bowler. And he’s the brains behind Graphic Alliance!
Stu is undoubtedly the cleverest guy I’ve ever worked with. He routinely overcomes complex technical issues as if they were insulting him. He’s created online banking systems from scratch, made a website for Qatar’s state-owned gas company RasGas, and developed the Temperley online shop which Vogue described “as good as it gets from your desktop”. Unusually for one so gifted mathematically, he also has a fabulous eye for design which is pretty amazing considering he is… wait for it… colourblind!
Stu likes rock music, poker, family, geometric shapes, Howies, drinking and Tesco ready meals.
Stu dislikes religion, public school, bad paying clients, boy bands, and being called Fu Man Stu.
Fu Man Stu’s dress sense has improved over the years. In the early days, he once came to a meeting with a City law firm wearing a t-shirt with a woman blowing her brains out. This prompted our late Chairman, Mike Nicholson, who was also Chairman of Gieves & Hawkes, to make it his mission to ‘get Stu in a suit’. When he finally managed it a couple of years ago, Mike said it was one of his finest achievements in business.
If Stu was a car, he’d be a 1960s Dodge Charger with flames down the side.
If Stu was a drink, he’d be a Jack Daniels straight up, the tipple of rock stars.
If Stu was a recipe, he’d be a full English without mushrooms and extra bacon.
Sitting next to him at work is a constant amusement. When asked “how are you” and he replies “medium”, you know not to bother running a new idea past him. Then for every 10 ideas I come up with, Stu dismisses 9 of them almost immediately with a straight “no”. But that one idea is nearly always put into practice for the benefit of the company. After all, getting board approval is easier than getting his approval! He marks my client proposal documents with great interest and last week gave me a B++ for The Conran Shop pitch document (once he gave me an A- but that was so long ago, I can’t remember what was special about it).
Can you believe it’s been nearly ten years of working together? Surely cause for a party!
Click here to meet more of the team…
