I build physical products.
I’ve spent most of my career designing, manufacturing, positioning and selling products – and living with the consequences when the decisions were right, and when they were wrong.
I don’t coach mindset.
I don’t sell motivation.
I help founders make fewer expensive decisions, with the same commercial judgement I’ve had to use in my own businesses.
I lost everything, and had to find another way.
For twelve years I built a business I was proud of. Twenty-eight people, seven of them salespeople, with offices in London, New York, Paris and China. A huge stand at every big exhibition, products in shops around the world. From the outside, it looked like I’d cracked it.
Then it all came crashing down.
I found out our finance controller had been embezzling funds while cooking the books. A lot of funds. A life-changing amount – almost half a million dollars – by someone I’d trusted and treated like family.
Life happens. But this isn’t a story about trust. It’s a story about necessity.
Because despite going into personal debt to try to save it, after twelve excruciating months I finally had to say goodbye. Left with over $300,000 of personal debt, no team, no budget, and the business I’d given my thirties to, gone – all with a mortgage, a wife and two kids at home.
But failure wasn’t an option. Nor were the sales teams, the expensive exhibitions, or the offices around the world.
And then there was Covid.
Building products was the only thing I knew, and the debt wasn’t going to service itself. There were no other options. So I got to work – on an alternative way to reach buyers, one I could run myself, for almost nothing.
In November 2020 I started. Five months later it had brought in dream accounts and real money. With it, I slowly rebuilt the product line, got it into more places, and slowly climbed out of the hole I was in.
Today I have less than a third of the people I had before. We don’t rely on exhibitions. And we’re three times more profitable.
Everything I teach now, I learnt the hard way – and it works. I’m the living proof.
Losing it all forced me to do things differently.
None of this was theory. It was the only way out – and it’s what I help founders do now.
Mustard is where most of my time goes.
It’s where products get tested in the real world - with buyers, customers, margins, logistics, and everything else that doesn’t show up in theory.
Over time, a pattern became hard to ignore. Most problems don’t come from a lack of effort, or a lack of ideas.
They come from not knowing which thing is actually holding you back, and spending money on the wrong one.
That’s usually when things get expensive.
Why Mustard?
It’s slang. If something’s mustard, it’s got bite. It stands out. You notice it.
I named my brand after it because that was the whole idea - make things people actually notice, in a market full of things they don’t.
Twenty years on, it’s still the only thing I care about.(Apart from my wife, my kids and our dog Milo.)
Twenty years. Thousands of products.
Over the past twenty years I’ve launched thousands of physical products, across multiple categories and markets.
Through Mustard I’ve worked with independent retailers through to major international chains - building ranges that had to work commercially, not just look good.
That means pricing that survives retail maths.
Packaging that survives scale.
Decisions that hold up once real money is on the line.
That’s the judgement everything here is built on.
Retailers I actually work with
I work where decisions get expensive.
Alongside building Mustard, I work with founders at the point where decisions start getting expensive to undo.
I’m not interested in hustle culture or hype. I’m interested in judgement - informed by what actually happens when products hit shelves, margins tighten, and buyers say no.