interview
Industr y Exper t Inter view with Adrian Cook by Barbara Chapman FBDS
To continue with my industry expert Q & A journey, this month we are looking at, and getting to know The Prop Maker. As visual merchandisers we have many weapons in our armoury which we can call upon to assist us in creating the most exciting and eye catching window, in-store and on line creative experiences. Amongst that armoury, surely one of the key players is a good prop maker. Somebody who takes your brief, fully understands it, runs with it and adds their own worth too with their knowledge of production and materials, and on top of that can always deliver on time and on budget. It’s a big ask sometimes when we are rolling out props to multi sites. Precision, consistency and organisation is key, and over the years I have been constantly in awe of big prop making companies who can juggle many manufacturing ‘plates’ in the air whilst still being able to deliver to many sites on time and to a high standard. One such company is Projectworks. Adrian Cook is The Head of Brand at Project Works and has worked there for many years and has some great stories to tell us about some of the exciting projects he’s worked on along the way. Today I’m going to ask him some questions to find out more about the life of a Prop Maker and how the industry has evolved over the last seven months. Q1. Tell us your about your career path into this industry and how you ended up at this point working at Project works? A. Following in my Father’s footsteps, I went straight from school into my fathers print group “Code Secure”, straight to the production floor. I went into the screen print department and learnt the ropes. I became a fully qualified machine minder, worked my way up to supervisor and eventually into client account management. I spent 18 years at Code Secure before my father sold the group. I then went into consultancy, managing the client base I had built. This was my career up until the launch of Projectworks. Q2. Can you tell us more about how Projectworks works and the types of projects it takes on? A. We are a boutique creative production studio based in Watford. Our core area of in-house manufacturing consists of: POS, bespoke packaging, VM/3D Event displays, BUT, what really makes us stand out from the crowd is what we can produce with sustainable materials, developing “life-like” products from recyclable materials, which would otherwise be deemed impossible to develop. This is our biggest USP!!
CREDIT: PROJECTWORKS FOR CHARLOTTE TILBURY
