The Blackdown team.

The through-line of Rhianne’s career is stewardship - of the arts, culture and the natural world - be that by philanthropic foundation or profit-making enterprise.

Starting her career in helicopters over the Great Barrier Reef had a profound impact on this creative entrepreneur. Seeing one of nature’s great marvels with her own eyes - and learning about its fragility - left a lasting impression on Rhianne. It led her to chart a course in her own career focused on nature and conservation.

After a stint working for a family office she moved to The Edward James Foundation, a charitable enterprise specialising in arts and conservation. Both roles were located on rural estates, the landscapes providing the inspiration for Rhianne to establish her first design studio.

Having secured space in which her own ideas could be brought to life, Rhianne’s productivity blossomed. From leather and textile products to tablewares she built up a high cadence of New Product Development (NPD), prototyping in-house for her own ventures (and for clients), she soon built up a network of suppliers, partners and collaborators.

This creative experimentation brought with it real exposure to an unusually diverse portfolio of businesses. Verifiable sustainability became a feature of Rhianne’s commercial endeavours at this time. Working with suppliers as diverse as Sussex sawmills and Indian cotton growers she traced supply chains right back to raw material inputs.

Her clients in the conservation sector have included rewilding pioneers the Knepp Estate, ecological and engineering consultancies offering Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) services, farming and wildlife advisory groups, habitat creation specialists and protected species surveyors - to name but a few.

Rhianne has designed logos, brand identities, leaflets, posters and packaging. She’s also built and re-built websites single-handedly as well as running a broad range of search, content, social media and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) campaigns. Her professionalisation of companies’ outward facing communications and collateral has directly supported clients in winning large tenders with prestigious customers, expanding across the Atlantic and attracting interest from investors with shared values.

When not in her design studio in the South Downs Rhianne can often be found rifling through Japanese papers or Indian inks, ferreting around the back of a stationery shop or on the beach sketching out her latest ideas as she soaks up some sunshine.

From Foreign Office to family office Charles’ career started at a digital agency and has encompassed several ventures of his own.

Charles cut his teeth running 20+ pay-per-click accounts simultaneously for blue-chip clients at digital agency Spannerworks back in 2006. That rocket ship of a start to his career soon exposed him to delivery of content and social media strategy for clients like Bank of America, Barclays and Porsche. After the agency was acquired by US parent iCrossing (having grown from 30 to 700+ staff in under three years) he booked a one way ticket to Kathmandu to recuperate in the Himalayas!

He never made it home from that trip, hopping trains from Hong Kong all the way to Helsinki, finally settling in Denmark after securing a position at the British Embassy in Copenhagen. He started working for the UK Foreign Office just ahead of the COP15 UNFCCC climate conference. Export promotion work saw him run trade missions and plan Ambassadorial dinners, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) projects focused on bringing renewable energy supply chain companies from the Nordics to the UK.

From helping build out the offshore wind supply chain to connecting pension funds to infrastructure opportunities, the experience and exposure were invaluable. Briefing Ministers and Ambassadors, speaking at events large and small and interacting at C-level forced him to hone his communications skills to a fine art.

It was projects connecting Nordic and Baltic tech startups to UK venture capital that would really capture Charles’ imagination however, lighting the fires of his own entrepreneurial ambition. Building things would drive the next decade of his career.

Work as a venture scout sourcing startups for investors funded a diverse range of his own ventures - from a low sugar tonic water to a hyperlocal news service.

An unexpected meeting in a country pub led to Charles joining a family office, setting up an ambitious new aviation venture on the Goodwood Estate in his native West Sussex. It was here that he met Blackdown co-founder Rhianne.

Charles’ half of the Blackdown studio is filled with an unusual mix of fountain pens, writing pads, soldering irons and Single Board Computers (SBCs). When not reading books, writing copy or code he’s usually found hacking together some sort of drone, camera trap or acoustic recorder prototype.