A specialist manufacture of lighting products for the pet care industry Arcadia are a niche business, but with 2 million households keeping fish in the UK alone, it’s a sizeable niche.When I joined the company my first project was to develop a new range of aquarium lamps specifically for a large UK pet multiple. The concept that I created used a simplified product message aimed at their typical consumer, which secured the on-going business and increased like for like sales by 35%.More recently I developed and launched a new range of low energy, waterproof LED lamps. With increasing consumer interest in lower running costs, lower carbon emissions and the dramatically extended product life expectancy of LEDs, within a year of their introduction this range accounted for 10% of total turnover..

When I joined Condord:Marlin, they were undergoing a substantial reorganisation of the product marketing function and rationalising a number of products. Whilst there I developed a strategic plan for tackling the PFI healthcare market, assisted with the sourcing of a number of key light fittings for this sector that were missing from the range and produced a variety of training and support materials for the sales team.Other significant achievements included the re-pricing of a core ambient lighting line that had seen sales decline substantially as newer low cost products had entered the market. Setting a new competitive market price significantly increased turnover, but also resulted in increased margins as the sales mix became less concentrated on lower margin specification sales.

Appointed to a newly created role in this DIY products company I nwas responsible for ensuring new products were delivered to time and budget, holding suppliers to their agreed delivery dates and reducing overall costs. While at Earlex I established a gated product development process and project investment analysis and was responsible for restructuring the purchasing department.