June Round Up

Delightful Diana

Diana Vasilescu has joined our account management team, and is settling in well as she brings a wealth of experience from working across marketing and branding services.
Graduating with a BA in advertising in 2010, she dived straight into a fast-paced environment early on and after completing her internship in an ad agency, she became more involved in project managing a variety of through the line campaigns with a strong focus in the FMCG sector.

She later took on a much bigger challenge and moved across the pond, where she discovered her passion for branding and strategy, developing engaging brand stories and delivering projects for the property and interior design sectors. At to the point, Diana is working closely with Charlie and Will, handling day to day client liaising, as well as untangling all the strategic knots that help bring a brand to life. When she’s not running from one client meeting to another, she enjoys getting all the wrong answers at pub quizzes and finding the right answer to the eternal question “What are we having for lunch today?”. Your challenge is to guess where she is from when you get to speak with her.

Tour de Croydon 

Last month the men’s Pearl Izumi Tour Series and the women’s Matrix Fitness Grand Prix Series came to Croydon showcasing the best in world cycling. The big news however was the talent that was the Croydon BID/Pearl Izumi bike team, consisting of Matthew Sims Croydon BID, Georgina Dawkins Croydon BID, Tony Middleton AIG, Steve Avery Home Office, Simon Schutte Home Office and our very own Simon Hutton. The conditions were not ideal but that didn’t stop our valiant heroes from tearing round the circuit. They raised money for The Mayor of Croydon's chosen charity: http://www.croydoncommitment.org.uk/About-Us. Congrats to the winners - The Met police or MPCC to their cycling friends.

Jeff Koons at Newport St Gallery

Escaping the thunderstorms, Brexit, football, and the general sense of impending doom last Saturday, James did something that most Londoners struggle to do at the weekend and went to an art gallery.

The recently renovated Newport St Gallery in London opened its doors a little while ago to house exhibitions of work picked from Damian Hirst’s art collection. The first exhibition was a collection of works from the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland. Hoyland has now been replaced by Jeff Koons, showcasing works from 1979 to 2014.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Koons, it’s quite likely that you’ve seen his giant stainless steel balloon sculptures, one of which defies all sense of proportion in the second room of the gallery. The gallery website quotes Norman Rosenthal describing Koon’s work as “manifestations of a joyful acceptance of American culture” which rings true when perusing the otherwise seemingly unconnected objects on display, from vintage hoovers, a celebration of basketball (and balls) and a giant sculpture made from PlayDoh.

Jeff Koons' work will be on display at Newport St until 16 October, and admission is free. A perfect place to spend a rainy afternoon in London. Just be wary if you’re taking the kids, you might want to cover their eyes as things get a bit saucy in room 3.

A day in the lakes

As a practice for his full Ironman in August this year, our MD's son, Tom, took on the Half Ironman in Ullswater last weekend. Not for the faint-hearted, it involves a 2k swim, a hilly 48 mile cycle and a 13 mile fell run. An extra competitive edge was added by roping his brother Sam and other mates into entering the event as 2 relay teams.

Tom finished 36th out of 199 competitors, completing it in 5 hr 14m and shaving over 90 mins off his previous time when he competed in the same event 2 years ago. All the results can be found here: http://www.trihard.co.uk/results/a-day-in-the-lakes-results. So for now the training continues in preparation for the Ironman in Copenhagen - so double the distance plus a bit - a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile cycle and a marathon - back to back. This is all done in the memory of his brother Charlie and to continue supporting the amazing work of the RNLI. 

If you want to find out more about the event, his training or even want to join him on a weekend cycle, you can follow his blog at http://challengecharlieironman.tumblr.com and obviously we are still hoping to raise more money for the RNLI.  You can donate at uk.virginmoneygiving.com/SomeoneSpecial/teamhutton

w.w.we're nearly there!

For those of you who have got this far in our enews, we'd like to offer you a sneak peak of our new website here. We're really excited and almost ready to announce it to the world but with all the different browsers and versions out there we need a bit of time to test and ensure we're happy to shout about it next month... Or maybe earlier... We'd love to hear what you think, good or bad, and hope you enjoy what we've been crafting for our 25th year in business.