Alex Willcock

Alex Willcock is a British designer and businessman, the founder and former CEO of Imagini,[1][2][3][4][5] the owner of VisualDNA[6] technology.[7]

Career

Educated at Eton College, from 1984 he ran his own furniture, interior design and manufacturing businesses, which enabled him to live and work in Australia for two years.

In 1990, an Australian fashion retailer, Country Road, approached him to help set up and develop a range of home stores called Country Road Homeware. Within two months of joining, he became General Manager of the Home division with vertical responsibility from concept to customer.

In 1995, Sir Terence Conran asked Willcock to take up the dual role as Buying and Marketing Director for the shop group and to head a new initiative to be called Conran Collection.[8] He later went on to become Creative Director for The Conran Group, and spearheaded corporate social responsibility projects such as ethical sourcing of products.[9]

Willcock founded Nest in 1999 as a one-stop-shop creative communication agency, with the aim of bringing together three conventionally incongruous elements; creativity, commercial understanding and a commitment to positive change and ethical business.[10]

In 2006 Willcock co-founded London-based software firm Imagini, that uses images instead of questions to do marketing tasks such as psychographic marketing research[11] and social networking.[12] In 2009, Willcock was granted a patent for Imagini's Method and system for computerized searching and matching multimedia objects using emotional preference.[13] In 2018 Willcock launched the website for Maker&Son, a new furniture venture with son and co-founder Felix Conran, after 2 years of developing their products.[14]

Personal life

Willcock's first marriage was to Sophie Conran with whom he has two children, Felix and Coco. His is presently married to Charlie Kinsman with whom he has three children, Song, Otter and Hero.

gollark: They say 5 days or so with good software.
gollark: It's not much costlier than a normal watch, and is cooler.
gollark: Plus, inevitably, shipping and whatnot. I'm in the UK, so getting hold of much of this sort of thing seems quite hard.
gollark: Apparently.
gollark: A Pi is surely much better than what they have in calculators in basically everything but power use.

References
  1. Victor Keegan: Looking at a new way to make friends | Technology, The Guardian, 9 August 2007.
  2. The Accelerator Group (TAG), January 2007.
  3. Picture this: Customer feedback without a word being said.
  4. Extendance: High-Tech Business Experts Blog Archived 2008-12-17 at the Wayback Machine.
  5. "Alex Willcock | CrunchBase Profile". Crunchbase.com. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
  6. VisualDNA.com.
  7. Director Magazine Profile | Alex Willcock, March 2009.
  8. The man from Liberty, he say Yes!, The Independent.
  9. "Bringing grassroots change to Child Labour in India". YouTube. 2009-07-07. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
  10. Fashion makes way for function, UK.
  11. LEILA ABBOUD (23 January 2007). "Picturing Web Shoppers: Start-Up Taps 'Visual DNA' to Gather Data". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 12 July 2012.
  12. Peter Sayer, IDG News (22 January 2007). "'Visual DNA' Aids Surveys: Imagini's algorithms use image responses to guide shoppers, pair potential pals". PC World. Retrieved 7 July 2012.
  13. "United States Patent: 7610255". Patft.uspto.gov. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
  14. Kingdom, Maker&Son-United. "Who we are". Maker&Son - United Kingdom. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
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