Background
Chris decided in his early teens, the army was the place to obtain the best skills and type of education he wanted, he was 14. He had to wait until his 16th birthday and then started a journey with just one or two hiccups along the way. Serving until he was 29, he realised on leaving, he was ill-equipped to join civvy street. Following a complete re-train in reprographics, he created and co-ran a traditional (Printing) repro company in Hastings.
Reprographics
Working with many London based design companies, producing traditional reprographics, taking artwork boards and markup to produce the film for adverts and plates for print runs.
Hugely time- consuming, hand-worked jobs.
"At the same time, we were planning digital services and were the first company in the UK to own an A2 imagesetter for producing film direct from digital files"
Some of his clients included: Christie's, Southerby's, Saatchi & Saatchi.
Graphic Artist
Chris relocated to Basingstoke (met Gill) to work with a video production company followed by a design company whose clients were many blue-chip brands with head offices in and around Hampshire. Around this time an invite from Adobe arrived to join their beta test programme (an area he has continued to work with) that saw "bleeding edge" testing for Photoshop and Illustrator which then led onto new areas in ......
Digital Photography
A local photographic studio was looking to heavily invest in digital photography and invited Chris to provide technical support for their new venture. PixFX Ltd was born. Working with top clients included Motorola with some huge photo shoots using the new equipment made a link with their marketing department and came with the resulting challenge to reduce Motorola's mountain of out of date print.
Clients include: De La Rue, Motorola, Motorola Telco, Panasonic, Sony Broadcast.
Technology Integration
Working on Motorola's print issue drives PixFX and led to winning a (BT's) British Telecom award for innovation. Chris invented the print on demand system that eventually turns into the system now used by Moonpig and many other on-demand companies.
Full Design House
PixFX has now moved to new offices in Basingstoke town centre. The company goes from strength to strength. Janis Crickett joins as creative director before the move and many blue chips come along for the ride. We now have 5 divisions of De La Rue, Motorola 2 way and Telco, Pharmacia Upjohn, The Royal Mint and the AT&T subsidiary Lucent Technology. PixFX was sold having received an offer the company could not turn down.
Brand Management and Marketing
Together we have successfully helped raise the profile of relatively unknown brands to become household names, some who have a large market share elsewhere in the world but struggling to break the UK market.
Whether we are delivering full brand launches or producing a leaflet or advert, no job is too small or too large. We market new products, services, and companies in different sectors. We help you the business owner take your company to the next level or invest in a different way of marketing to include areas you cannot or do not wish to cover.
Included in our portfolio are also charities with full web and mobile sites, brochures and annual reports, workshops and social media marketing,