INKON is run by John Stirzaker - Fleetwood born, now just down the road in Thornton-Cleveleys. He started as a graphic designer at fifteen, entirely self-taught - Letraset, spray mount and printing plates - and was running a publisher's studio by nineteen. Three decades on, the toolkit covers the full spectrum: print, design, web, marketing - traditional and digital - and the deep technical SEO that decides who gets found. Most agencies buy those skills in separately. Here, they're one person.
"Make it look beautiful, and make the offer visible - so it turns into new business."
Peter Toner's rule, learned in 1998. Every INKON build still follows it.
He's been early to every shift since: building a search engine for UK trades six months before Google reached the UK, running Harrods' website from a rooftop office in Knightsbridge, then co-founding Freebird - the Fleetwood agency that spent a decade giving local solicitors, builders and funeral directors websites good enough for a luxury department store.
Since 2011 he's fought in the voucher-code space - one of the most cut-throat corners of Google that exists. When Google changed the rules and wiped out half the internet's rankings, twice, he rebuilt them both times - the kind of technical SEO you only learn when survival depends on it. Fifteen years on, that site is still beating brands fifty times its size.
That matters for one reason: the techniques that win in brutal, national-scale search are mostly absent from local business marketing. Bringing them to businesses across the North West is an unfair advantage - yours, not your competitors'.
The name is literal, by the way. Ink is where the career started - and it never left: alongside the studio, John runs his own print-on-demand brands, GYMHOOD®, a fitness apparel label, and the INKON Print Store.
And when you email INKON, John answers. No account managers, no handovers - the person you talk to is the person doing the work.
The long version - Letraset to AI, told properly - is on the blog: thirty years of putting businesses in front of customers.