The Unbranded Me: Chapter Two
I did not grow up in a family of world travellers. Most of my childhood holidays were spent camping in Devon, Cornwall or Scotland, which felt like an adventure at the time but were really just the places my parents could get to without needing an airport. Flying somewhere for fun was not normal in the seventies or eighties. People stayed local. The world felt further away.
My first flight was not even a family trip. It was a solo journey to Germany to visit my penpal. His dad was in the army, they moved abroad and suddenly our friendship became a line of handwriting on envelopes. So my parents handed me over to airport staff and I boarded a plane with a group of other unaccompanied kids like some strange youth delegation. Looking back, it was probably the moment that rewired something in me. Not dramatically, but enough to make the world feel slightly less intimidating.
School ski trips came next. This was back when schools still flew to the Alps before the long overnight coach journeys became the default. My brother was eighteen months older than me, so when he signed up for the trip, I found a way to tag along too. The mountains were unlike anything I had seen. Bigger, brighter, more alive. I remember buying a Coke and a Mars bar at a tiny shop in the Alps, and those two things became my personal shortcut back to the snow. On cold days in England, that same combination took me right back to the mountains. It is ridiculous how a flavour can become a memory, but it did. Those ski trips planted the first seed of wanting to live somewhere other than the place I grew up.
In 1991 I swapped skis for a snowboard and everything changed. Snowboarding felt like a different world entirely. The culture, the people, the music, the sense of belonging. I spent my free time at the local dry ski slope, which is something only British people understand. Imagine a steep carpet made of plastic pretending to be snow. Now imagine enjoying it. That was my training ground, and I genuinely loved it.
The winter of 1994 to 1995 was my first season abroad. I lived in Val Cenis in France working nights as a plongeur and riding as much as possible during the day. It was not glamorous, but it felt like freedom. It was the moment travel shifted from something that happened occasionally to something I actively built my life around. For the next decade I worked as a designer, saved everything I could and travelled with friends to snowboard anywhere we could get to. Andorra, France, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, America and eventually Canada. When I was not travelling, I was teaching snowboarding, helping build freestyle features at the dry slope and being part of a scene that was creative without ever calling itself creative.
When my grandmother passed away, I inherited some money. Rather than do anything sensible with it, my wife and I went travelling for nine months. Hong Kong, New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal. My grandmother spent years travelling on cruise ships after my grandfather died, so using her inheritance to see the world felt right. Those nine months expanded my view of what life could look like. Not dramatically. Not overnight. Just enough to know I wanted more than the life I had in the UK.
When we came back, I knew I could not stay. Travelling had stretched something in me that was not going back to its original shape. So at the end of 2007 I moved to Canada. I didn’t return to the UK for ten years. Not because I was escaping anything. Because I had found somewhere that finally felt like mine.
What I understand now is that travel shaped me long before I knew it was happening. Snowboarding taught me community. That first trip to Germany taught me independence. The Alps taught me I needed mountains. The dry slope taught me dedication. The world trip taught me possibility. Every place left something with me, even if I did not realise it at the time.
I always travelled with a camera, noticing details most people walked past. Colours, textures, typography, patterns, faces. I was collecting design references without ever calling them that. Inspiration was not something I searched for. It simply appeared because I put myself somewhere unfamiliar.
Moving to Canada was not the end of that story. It was the start of a new one. A deeper one. A bigger one. One that would eventually reshape my life again in ways I could never have predicted back then.
But that belongs to the next chapter.