Former Javelin co-founder Will Treasure joins Profound as Chairman

Will recently stepped down as Director, Javelin Group and Managing Director, Accenture after nearly 22 years, having jointly led Javelin Group from its early days to the successful transition to Accenture UK&I.

Profound is an award-winning digital experience transformation agency with a unique proposition – it delivers high value, customer focused projects at speed. It is also one of the few agencies in the UK pioneering truly headless estates and building digital experiences using API-first technologies. Partnering with leading software vendors they work with brands such as Interflora, Unilever, Planet Organic, ComputaCenter, LGC Genomics and the Micheldever Group.

“Profound is a really exciting outfit” Will Treasure comments. “It is doing things that would have been unimaginable a few years ago – last year it rebuilt a national grocery website in 90 days with a custom order management system and launched it on the day of the second lockdown smoothly. That’s just unheard of.

Profound focus on delivering value fast, using next-gen technologies to do so and that is really resonating with businesses. Boards want to see value for investment, marketing and IT teams want technology that works, and customers demand great experiences – it’s rare you get an organisation that can do all three.”

Profound is using next-gen technologies called micro-services. These are systems that perform a specific function (for example, a content repository) with a robust API to access that information. All these systems are brought together by a business through a piece of middleware that centralises all the information.  Different experiences, such as websites, kiosks or device applications (think Alexa or Apple Watch) can then call upon this middleware for information as needed. It allows businesses who have multiple experiences to centralise information, process, analyse it, and have complete freedom on the output for the customer. It brings other benefits likes speed, minimal need for ongoing system upgrades, the ability to add and remove vendors without replacing entire experiences. It also enables specialism within teams who manage specific business information.

Tim McMillen co-founder of Profound tells us, “These next-gen technologies really help us deliver value faster for our clients. Digital channels should be in a constant state of flux – continuously responding and adapting to the needs and expectations of the Customer, but you have to be able to react and build out quickly, especially in unpredictable times like we are in right now. The faster you can release something to customers, the sooner you can learn from it and make decisions on what to invest in next, and that’s where modern, cloud native, API first technologies and microservices really have the edge. We know there are very few agencies out there delivering these next-gen technologies well. There are even fewer agencies putting customer experience at the heart of any digital transformation. Will joining our team as Chairman is really exciting – his support and experience will be invaluable for us and our clients as we ambitiously embark on our next phase of growth together.”

In addition to Will’s appointment, Profound has also recently added a Digital Strategy Director to their team – Chris Dooley. Chris has moved to Profound from Shiseido, where he has spent nearly 4 years expanding the e-commerce footprint globally. Chris comes with a wealth of experience having previously worked at major eCommerce agencies and brands such as Waitrose & Partners and Accenture.