The Borders Creative Ltd Board of Directors are all working creative professionals running successful businesses in the Scottish Borders. We cover a wide range of creative disciplines, including print and web design, branding, advertising, marketing, PR, event management, film and photography.
Giles Etherington – Chairman
Giles Etherington is Creative Director of Fruitful, an advertising, design and marketing agency based in Melrose.
Giles has over twenty years’ experience working for some of the best international agencies in London, San Francisco and Amsterdam, including JWT, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Euro RSCG, as well as regional agencies in Jersey, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Borders.
Giles has been fortunate enough to work on some of the best brands in the world, including Andrex, Barclays, BT, Elida Gibbs, Esso, Kellogg’s, Nestlé, Proctor & Gamble, TDK, and Volvo.
During his career, Giles has created many successful campaigns and won numerous creative and business awards.
Ian Burton – Treasurer, Secretary
Ian Burton is a professional problem-solver for business, specialising in computer systems and technology. His company, Aptek UK, is based in Kelso.
Alex Aikman Smith – Director
Alex Aikman Smith graduated in 1989 from Napier University, gaining a degree with distinction, and the top student award in Film and Photography. Following her graduation, she worked for Lamancha Film Productions, before joining the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as an assistant curator of Photography. From 1993 to 2005, Alex worked as an award-winning staff picture editor in newspaper publishing for titles including The Observer, The Scotsman, Scotland On Sunday and The Sunday Herald. Based in Melrose, she currently works as a creative director, photographer and picture editor for Scottish-based periodicals, newspapers, publishing groups, and agencies.
Suzanne Dawson – Director
Suzanne Dawson runs a marketing consultancy based in Peebles, Suzanne Dawson Marketing & Communications. She works with a number of leading corporate and public sector clients around Scotland, including Aberdeen Science Parks, Business Gateway and Careers Scotland. Suzanne is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing with ten years’ non-executive director experience, and is a former chair of Borders College Board of Management.
Deryck Henley – Director
Deryck is the creative half of Flights of Fancy, who design and manufacture gift products sold throughout the world. Deryck also started Borders Design in Selkirk offering design for print solutions.
Starting work in Fleet Street in the swinging 60s (it’s true you can’t remember it), specialising in typography in the days before letraset and computers using pen and ink. He spent a few years in agencies around London before moving to Warwickshire to run a creative studio specialising in textile design for the gift industry, this included working with international clients and designing exhibitions worldwide.
In 1989 Deryck started Flight of Fancy, creating gift products with a Nature and Nostalgic theme, the company moved to the beautiful Scottish Borders in 2008.
Jules Horne – Director
Jules runs Texthouse, a Jedburgh-based writing company that specialises in copywriting, web content and communications for businesses big and small. After a German degree at Oxford, she worked as a staff journalist and editor for BBC Radio and Swiss Radio International, and spent several years in Germany as a translator for the German government and various agencies. She also writes scripts for stage and BBC radio, and is the proud owner of two Scotsman Fringe First awards for her plays ALLOTMENT and THREAD, produced by Nutshell Theatre. Jules was born and raised in Hawick, and is a passionate believer in Borders products, talent, and creative collaboration.
Alan Mathieson – Director
Alan began work in the 1980s as a technician in theatre on many shows, including the original productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love, both on London’s West End, and on Broadway in New York. During the 1990s, Alan was commissioned to work in the corporate sector for some of the UK’s leading design and creative agencies, starting with Imagination, where he worked on the Ford account. Alan co-founded Vantage in the Borders in 2005, and has helped give birth to a son, a daughter, a tech start-up – tenthcloud – and, of course, Borders Creative.
Robert Sproul-Cran – Director
Northlight makes corporate video, DVDs, animation, web streaming – using the power of the moving image to get your message across. We produce anything from TV adverts to viral web clips, in-house communications, social action, safety, sales and marketing videos. Our track record stretches back twenty years, with a client list from blue-chip multinationals and national agencies to small up-and-coming companies and organisations. Our reputation is based on repeat business from satisfied clients – and a BAFTA and Royal Television Society awards. We work to broadcast standard, technically and editorially, but can produce stunning low-budget results when that’s more appropriate!
Tania Paterson – Director
Tania is one half of Cohorts by Design Limited, a web development and design company based in Galashiels. A highly motivated designer, Tania graduated from Cumbria College of Art & Design, and has had a wide variety of working experience over the years, ranging from the world-renowned advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather BV (Amsterdam), to other design consultancies in the Scottish Borders and Edinburgh, before starting her own design company, Brilliant White Design, in 1998. Having been brought up in the Borders since the age of two and leading a design consultancy in the Borders for over 13 years, Tania is well placed to understand the local economy and businesses, and sees Borders Creative as essential to promoting collaboration, networking and awareness of the creative industries in the Scottish Borders to local companies and those further afield.
Hugh Williams – Business Support
Hugh Williams provides business support to the Board as part of his involvement with the South of Scotland Creative Clusters Project. Hugh has worked as a business adviser in the Borders for ten years, and during that time has worked on a wide range of projects with local companies. His speciality is business planning, and in particular helping entrepreneurs to articulate their plans, and develop them into working documents and funding applications.
Before working as an adviser, Hugh was a partner in businesses in the designer textiles and retail sectors, so has a real understanding of the processes and pressures of self-employment in small businesses.
