From Letraset to AI: thirty years of putting businesses in front of customers
People ask what INKON actually is - an agency? A one-man band? The honest answer: it’s everything I’ve learned since 1993, finally pointed at the businesses I most enjoy working for. Here’s the long version.
The spraymount years
I just missed out on the grades I needed in English and Maths at GCSE, which closed the door on college and the design HND I wanted. So I taught myself - and the summer I left school, aged fifteen, I got my first job: laying out brochures and adverts with Letraset and spray mount, assembling layouts by hand to be photographed onto film and turned into printing plates. I was under strict instructions never to tell clients whose work it really was - nobody was supposed to know the fifteen-year-old was doing it. Get it wrong and you found out at the printers, in front of everyone. You learn to get it right.
At a golf book publisher in St Annes I met my first Apple Mac - an LC II - learned PageMaker, and was running the studio by nineteen. Then Blackpool Typesetters: handling files from the best designers in town, one floor above one of the biggest printers in Blackpool. I was a sponge - typesetting upstairs, print process downstairs, and every good designer’s work passing across my desk.
Peter’s rule
In 1998 I met Peter Toner, who ran Loudhailer - a design and marketing agency producing work for the CBI, the NHS, Angela Mortimer, BAKO Northwestern and Addison. Peter, who’s sadly no longer with us, was a marketing genius operating about a decade ahead of schedule, and he shaped everything I’ve done since. His brief never changed:
“Make it look beautiful, and make the offer visible - so it turns into new business.”
That’s it. That’s still it.
The internet was just taking shape, and we were early - about six months before Google reached the UK, we were building a search engine for British trades and businesses. When Google landed we pivoted, and ToffsWorld.com was born: a directory for the luxury market - yacht builders, bespoke watchmakers - designed like a magazine at a time when most of the web looked like a spreadsheet. Our publishing background made it look like nothing else online.
Harrods
In 2001 Harrods came knocking. Six months commuting from Fleetwood to Knightsbridge - working on the roof, just above the helipad - then a move to Oxfordshire to make the journey sane. I presented to the board every week, which either grows your confidence or finishes you off. We rebuilt the website around one idea: visiting it should feel like visiting the store, because the store was half the magic.
Then September 2001 happened. The store fell quiet, and a few months later the plug was pulled.
Home
I came back to Fleetwood with a plan and Peter as my first client - a stretch spent flying between Blackpool and Malaga, bringing luxury-grade design to the Costa del Sol. Glamorous on paper. In practice it was one-gigabyte files over dial-up and a lot of airport coffee.
Freebird: Harrods polish, local prices
In 2003 I sat on the edge of a bed at my mum’s house with Nigel - an old client from the typesetting days - and we built our first website for a local business. Nobody round here had seen local websites built to that standard before. Freebird grew from Nigel’s garage into our own offices in Fleetwood, and I’d found the work I loved: solicitors, window companies, builders, funeral directors - small businesses looking the part for the first time, with Peter’s rule applied to every page. They ranked, too. Good structure and a clear offer went a surprisingly long way.
We added a Printing.com franchise and a team of designers, writers and developers, and spread out to Manchester, Chester, Liverpool and Cumbria - bigger clients, e-commerce, university websites. I learned the hard lessons as well: running a business is hard, staff are harder, and the agency model eats itself - you need ever-bigger clients every month just to keep the doors open. The thing quietly missing from our toolkit was serious SEO. That gap got filled next, the hard way.
The trenches: Panda, Penguin and a Formula One car
In 2011 a celebratory pint turned into a job offer, and I joined a digital business in the voucher-code space as a designer - one of the most brutal corners of Google that exists. “Give it some Stez love” was the brief. Within a couple of months, Google’s Panda update hit and the site tanked. Total disaster.
So I did what any designer would do: became an SEO. I lived in forums and research for months. We stripped out hundreds of thousands of thin pages, and about six months later the recovery began. Then Penguin arrived and we cleaned house again. Along the way I picked up front-end development, how databases work, conversion, analytics - and technical SEO to a depth I still obsess over, because we needed every inch. The site became a Formula One car: every detail tuned, and new assets built because people genuinely wanted to link to them.
Here’s the part that matters: we were a small team competing with brands that had fifty times our staff. Fifteen years later, we’re still in the fight. Once you’ve held rankings in that vertical through every Google shake-up since 2011, a local search market holds no fear at all.
The second brain
Like everyone else, I met ChatGPT in 2023 and saw what was coming. Unlike most, I’d spent thirty years collecting things worth teaching it. So this year I built what I call my second brain: everything I know - how to compete, how to sell, what makes a page convert, the right mix of code and the behind-the-scenes signals Google reads, why reviews decide local rankings, how to diagnose a struggling site, which tools genuinely earn their keep on a small budget - written down, systematised, and working alongside me on every job. The repetitive work gets handled; the judgement gets more hours. That’s the whole trick.
Full circle
Everything since 1993 points at one job: making a local business look the part, then getting it found, chosen and recommended - the thing I loved most in the Freebird years, now done with the complete toolkit. Design that holds up against anyone’s. Search that’s been stress-tested in the hardest vertical there is. And enough hours in the week to give every site real attention.
That’s what every website we build carries - and it’s why the monthly plans work the way they do. Your site gets looked at properly, every month, by someone who’s been doing this for thirty years. It takes time. It’s supposed to.
And if you’d rather have the thirty years boiled down to one page, it’s this one: what makes us different. The short version? Show people the real you.