Chris Averill - Founder

My career spans over 25 years of experience leading innovative creative and strategic teams culminating in the sale of my international service design consultancy WAE to Globant in 2016. Growing my consultancy over 13 years in the UK, UAE and US taught me a great deal, selling the business and working through a very successful earn-out over two years taught me much more.

After graduating an industrial design degree specialising in 3D animation I led a design team in London, moving on to lead the 3D UI team in 1996 for the World's first commercial interactive TV service, HomeChoice. From there I joined BUPA to set up their first UK and international websites leading BUPA's charge as a digital service insurer, where I was also part of the BUPA strategic vision team working alongside the board.

Joining Arthur Andersen in 1999 to grow their digital creative agency, I was challenged to prove the business value of good customer first design. My role allowed my team to work globally and delivering work for interactive TV, banking, financial services, real estate and corporates.

In 2003 I set up WAE to put consumers at the heart of business strategy and design decisions, iterating our business services as we grew from accessibility to usability, UI to UX and finally service design to business change. I launched our UAE business in 2008 and expanded to New York in 2012 enabling astronomic growth and a much wider set of services to be delivered. 

With further global expansion in our plan, we joined forces with Globant in 2016, selling 100% of WAE to combine WAE's strategic consulting capability with Globant's creative and technology delivery teams.

Career highlights

• TfL - Leading the creation for TfL's journey planner that became the world's benchmark for city journey planning. 
• Met Police - 4 years working alongside the commissioner and board team to create, test and implement the Met's digital customer transformation, which has since become the digital platform for all UK Police forces.
• Citicards - Working alongside the head of digital for citicards to transform their business and become the leading customer first credit card provider. 

Investment advisory

Through Northford Capital I have a portfolio of angel investments some of which I provide smart money in the form of seed funding and advice. The companies I am currently active with are:

• Candy Mechanics - 3D chocolate printing
• MarcoPolo Learning - Preschool content production and apps
• BNN Technology - Chinese focused English language content and technology innovator
• AKL R&D - Developers of a breakthrough anti-inflammatory drug
• Plandek.com - A unique SaaS data science tool that dramatically increases agile team efficiency
•  zemedy.com  -  Cognitive behavioural  IBS treatment app.

Personal life

Born and brought up in Birmingham, I moved to London in 1994 and now live in West London with my wife, two daughters and dog. My second love is sailing where I can be found racing out of Lymington on a Thursday evening. I am fortunate to have sailed yachts from Australia to Thailand and Rio to Antigua, with a lot of racing in the Whitsunday islands. 

Cycling, climbing, diving and motorsports are all good distractions for me along with a little gardening and sharpening my culinary skills with my Thermomix .