George begun his career with an AdSchool IPA internship in 2014 - getting to grips with the planning, creative and account management processes at Publicis, Mcgarrybowen and Ogilvy. After graduating in 2015, George began work at Protein, helping guide the likes of Converse, Nike, Doppler and more.
In 2016, George moved to Flamingo’s cultural insight unit, then Cultural Intelligence. Over 4 years, he represented Flamingo at the division’s re-launch as Cultural Futures, and played a significant role in helping reposition and relaunch Flamingo Futures and it’s subscription service, The Frame. He was a spokesperson-ambassador, speaking at the Barbican launch event and APG Noisy Thinking: How best to make sense of the world now?
At the same time, George converted his pop-psychologising into a formal and expansive consumer-led qualitative research practice. From Shanghai's Jing'an district, to Hamburg's St Pauli, he's immersed himself in the private and public spaces of scrappy entrepreneurial party-starters to skincare-obsessed mums, unpacking their wants and needs in the process. He's helped make sense of reams of running shoe review data, and informed its simplest visualisation with the data scientists who coded it into existence. And he's been fortunate enough to engage an enviable variety of expert and innovator perspectives; from Stanford social psychologists to alcohol-free beer-brewing pioneers.
George accumulated such rich and varied experience at pace, and in so doing, honed his sharp commercial acumen (developing multi-method research approaches, and securing project contracts); his tight project management (coordinating cross-departmental teams and networks of global experts and research partners from Paris to Sao Paolo); and his comfort in providing strategic counsel to his clients (spending a secondment inside one of the world’s largest fashion & sportswear businesses).
For that business, he designed and executed intensely time-pressured research studies from New York to Tokyo; the insight from which informed localised marketing with pointed cultural specificity. He has coordinated the distillation of research findings across advanced data science, cultural trends analysis and qualitative depth interviews taking place in Paris and Beijing. He has translated that same intelligence into stimulus for retail innovation workshops purposed to help reimagine Flagship stores - sessions he co-designed and co-led, and the success of which initiated new work-streams. Perhaps most memorably, he was tasked with persuading their executive brand strategy team how they might regain and sustain cultural relevance with a narrative built from 5 meticulously chosen consumer insight video clips.
In April 2020, George made the decision - fortunately, a self-directed one - to pursue freelance work. As an independent consultant, he has used his future-facing perspective to guide an automobile “mobility” business on entering new markets; to help a contemporary wellness brand identify how to authentically facilitate a sense of connection and belonging; and to advise an environmental charity on creating a campaign to communicate groundbreaking research into plastic pollution.
George continues to work as part of culturestudio, as an external collaborator with agencies like The Akin and Flamingo, and as a direct consultant.
Over the course of his career, George has supported the likes of Nike, adidas, William Grant & Sons, Heineken, Diageo, Estée Lauder Companies, L'Oréal, SONOS, Microsoft, Chanel, LICKD amongst others.
George holds a 1st class degree in History (BA Hons) from the University of Warwick. His passion for interdisciplinarism, and his obsession with the endurance and (re-)emergence of (new) norms, values, and attitudes, were fostered here. For his final year dissertation, he mapped the British press’ devastatingly classist portrayal of heroin addiction across the ‘60s, 70s & 80s Britain through historico- sociological and epidemiolgical lenses.
George is also a part-time editor, writer and DJ, based in London.