From artistic dream to digital reality.

the detour

As a teenager I had three things on my list: sports academy, police, or art school. A torn cruciate ligament at fifteen crossed off sports and police. Art school? My mother thought of her father, an artist with an unstable income. She couldn't see the difference with graphic design. So it became sales.

I started out in client-facing sales and support roles: insurance, credit services, paper, office supplies. There I set up a ticket service desk, led a CRM implementation and rewrote work processes. Then came the premium gifts industry, with daily contact with production teams in China. That route led me into technical components: at Angst+Pfister I spent 6 years liaising between engineers and clients, at Comdes I was the first point of contact for clients in the electronic components industry, providing technical product advice and guiding the purchasing process. Every step brought me closer to the tech.

then I learned to code

Alongside all that client work I finally wanted to do something creative, and be mentally challenged. So I taught myself to code, through the big online learning platforms where the better universities of the world offer their degrees and courses. My first project was straight in at the deep end: a 3D solar system in JavaScript. From there to React, Next.js, Astro and Shopify.

Knowing the tech from the inside changes how you read a client conversation. After 20 years on the client side, I knew exactly how vague a brief can be, and what a developer needs to pick it up properly. Few people have both.