FORGE - Key Persons
Anna is a quantitative insight specialist, with a breadth of experience interrogating complex data to help global brands understand their customers and inform their high-stake decisions.
Previously Senior Director, Insight & Strategy at Lifestream (previously Big Sofa), Charlotte pioneered projects that used video to better identify consumer experiences in home and in store.
She is passionate about understanding consumer behaviours, habits and routines, and the ‘say-do' gap, especially in areas such as health and sustainability. She's equally motivated to drive commercial success for clients, whether that's for a record-breaking creative campaign or category-challenging innovation platforms.
She holds an award-winning PhD in marketing from The University of Leeds, where her interests in ethnography and observation began.
Danielle is a quantitative insight specialist, with a wealth of experience and expertise advising global brands spanning technology and media, utilities, FMCG and finance.
Elspeth has worked in marketing and innovation for over 20 years for some of the world's leading brands and businesses. Her expertise lies in decoding challenges and driving insight-led innovation strategies, visions and pipelines that deliver commercial success.
Having spent time both agency and clientside, her pragmatism combined with her tenacious curiosity and creativity has seen her develop numerous innovations that have built commercial strength in diverse categories from beer, car care, electronics and botox through to sportswear and dairy.
Prior to joining The Forge, Elspeth has headed up a hotel marketing department, run her own consulting business alongside developing a cooking brand as well as spending time client side working for Arla at booth a local and global level.
Away from the office, Elspeth is likely to have a racquet in her hand, she plays Padel for Great Britain and competes at a national level in racketball. The rest of the time involves long dog walks in beautiful places, travelling and enjoying great food and wine with great people.
Jill has 20 years' experience in quantitative insight, working with leading brands in categories including retail, alcohol, FMCG and the charity sector.
She combines research rigour with a talent for cutting through the data clutter to land compelling, actionable insights across a wide variety of consumer challenges including driving loyalty, developing new products and optimising brand portfolios.
Before joining The Forge, Jill worked for her own consulting business, Kazu Insight, and held senior quantitative roles at Razor Research and Freshminds (now Decidedly). She started her insight career at Kantar.
Joe is a quantitative insight specialist, with 12 years' experience working with leading brands across a wealth of sectors, including FMCG, telecommunications, energy and personal finance.
Working agency side Joris has spent the last 20 years solving insight, brand and innovation challenges for some of the world's leading organisations in industries such as FMCG, finance, technology and non-governmental.
Drawing on his background in economic psychology and passion for tech, Joris connects the dots to unlock real human needs with relevant, viable, and feasible solutions and strategies. Joris has a track record for making things happen, helping organizations drive meaningful change.
Prior to joining the Forge Joris worked as an innovation expert at Accenture, an organisation he joined after they in 2019 acquired Happen -an insight driven innovation agency where he was leading the Amsterdam office. At Accenture Joris deployed his insight and innovation skills working on challenges in the energy transition and sustainability domain.
Karl has spent the last 20 years working with some of the world's leading brands helping to define robust strategies for growth.
Adept at deploying a wide range of insight approaches to brand challenges, his expertise lies in numbers and storytelling. Karl has a keen analytical eye enabling him to identify the pertinent points in any dataset before translating them into actionable and compelling frameworks and stories, that anyone can engage with.
It is this skillset and his belief in the power of simplicity, that has enabled him to successful partner with clients across categories as diverse as personal care, snacking & beverages, retail, consumer technology and financial services.
Prior to joining The Forge, Karl was European Board Director at Clear, one of the industry's leading brand and marketing consultancies, where he led the 20 strong European Insights team.
Kirsty has spent the last 16 years solving complex customer problems for some of the world's leading brands in industries as diverse as automotive, education, finance and FMCG.
The common thread running through her work is a passion for helping people to understand the world in all its messy, contradictory glory whilst remaining sympathetic to the unique challenges of the clients that she is advising.
She has a natural bias for interrogating a problem from multiple angles and uses bespoke frameworks and models to help her clients focus on the things that will deliver the best commercial results.
Her successes at The Forge include: helping to unlock the lunch occasion for PepsiCo leading to an award-winning creative campaign; creating a framework for the future growth of femcare for J&J; developing a trends and growth model for PepsiCo Europe.
Laura has 18 years' experience helping some of the world's leading brands grow, taking on categories from beer to beauty, and challenges from brand positioning to ‘future of' projects for tech, health and food companies.
She began her career as a Marketing grad trainee and brand manager at Unilever, before making the move to insight and brand strategy. In 2009 she joined the boutique agency Big Green Door, before moving to Asia in 2013, where she led APAC wide projects for six years as Director at Flamingo Singapore. Over the past 5 years she has worked as an independent consultant, with a particular focus on developing marketing excellence for SMEs.
Laura loves uncovering ways to help brands resonate with consumers. Her global experience makes her especially attuned to identifying how ideas, products and solutions can resonate in specific cultures and contexts, whilst her hybrid background gives her powerful insight into how to embed thinking in a client's business.
With an MA in English Literature and Language, Laura is a proud word nerd. Her love for etymology, Oscar Wilde and Nora Ephron make her a fearsome pub quiz competitor (but only for very specific rounds).
Lee has 24 years' experience as an insight professional across both developed and developing markets.
Previously Head of Qual and on the Business Management Team at Added Value, she has worked across geographies as diverse as Taiwan, Russia and El Salvador, and categories as diverse as retail, alcohol, financial services, FMCG and utilities.
She specialises in helping clients understand how to grow categories, leverage their portfolios, and unlock cultural nuance to better respond to specific market needs. Lee is passionate about understanding consumer motivations and behaviours however she firmly believes that insight only matters if a business can use it to realise a commercial impact.
Lee started life as an Archaeologist and was fascinated by how humans evolved. Working with scientists at Duke, Johns Hopkins, the Smithsonian, WITS and the University of Cape Town, and using fragments of the fossil record to piece together a story of behaviour, she pioneered new approaches to human dietary and evolutionary understanding.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Senior Brand Strategist
Shanna is a senior brand strategist with a specialism in quantitative insights. She has helped some of the world's leading brands as well as start-up businesses grow through insight-driven, commercially viable and sustainable growth strategies. Her industry experience spans FMCG, consumer health, technology and financial services.
Simon leapt over the client desk to become a consultant almost 15 years ago, following a thorough grounding at Diageo, GSK & Nestle in marketing and innovation roles.
That experience of the practicalities of client-side businesses - and the hard work that goes on once the consultants leave the room - ensures he brings a deeply commercial and pragmatic approach (as well as boundless energy) to his projects and recommendations.
These include: creating a strategy for a major apparel company to win in natural and sustainable materials; developing an approach to innovation strategy and concept pipeline development that has led to norm-busting results and been adopted as global best practice in one of the world's largest consumer healthcare companies; and helping unleash the lunch occasion for PepsiCo, leading to a ground-breaking campaign.
Prior to founding The Forge, Simon was MD at a consultancy in the US and has worked across pretty much every category you can think of (except cars, Simon doesn't understand cars). He also has a degree in Theology.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Director
- Business Leader
Steven is an entrepreneurial business leader with 25 years of experience of bringing strategy, creativity, and a range of insight approaches to brand challenges.