Grace Blue Partnership Leadership team (left to right): Ian Priest, Juliet Timms, David Nobbs, Sarah Skinner, Jay Haines
Grace Blue Partnership, has appointed David Nobbs as Partner and Head of Consumer as we build out our consumer brands practice across EMEA. The appointment follows rapid growth of Grace Blue’s brand-side leadership briefs for clients including Aldi, Amazon, Colgate, Spotify and V&A. David will report to Grace Blue Founder, Juliet Timms, and in partnership with our leadership teams in the US and APAC to respond to global client requirements, alongside his leadership of the EMEA consumer brands business.
David and his teams will partner with consumer brands on a wide range of senior executive roles and support clients with driving transformation and putting the consumer at the heart of their business. This will extend Grace Blue’s services beyond marketing and commercial functions into leadership roles where there is a requirement for broader skillsets and outside category experience.
Juliet Timms, Founder, said: “Consumer brands are looking for leadership talent that can capitalise on the strength of their brand, their content and their connection with their customer. David’s appointment builds on the broad, varied work we have been engaged in helping business in all sectors meet the new dynamic demands being placed on leadership teams. We know leadership teams with the greatest diversity of career experience can be the most successful.”
David Nobbs, Partner, Grace Blue Partnership, said: “I’m delighted to join the Grace Blue business and their world-class team of executive search and selection specialists. We are perfectly positioned to help businesses which are dealing with tremendous change – technological, political and societal – to create leadership teams that put the customer at the heart of all activity.”
David has almost 15 years’ experience in Executive Search and Research, predominantly working with clients across consumer industries. This has included Retail, Financial Services, FMCG, Travel, Leisure, Technology, Media, Entertainment and Telecoms across multiple geographies including UK and Ireland, Europe, USA and Australia.
Most recently, he was a Managing Partner at Fortune Hill, an international boutique search firm partnering with a portfolio of FTSE/Aim listed, PE & VC backed and privately-owned consumer businesses to support start-up, new market entry, growth, transformation and turnaround activities. During his career, David has also gained FTSE100 client-side experience with Lloyds Banking Group where he led Talent Research and Executive recruitment across the group supporting senior hiring, talent pipelining and diversity projects.
The migration of talent across categories was first identified by Grace Blue in our 2017 Migration Report analysing data of the UK’s top 100 advertisers which showed close to 40% of those advertisers had senior-level marketing talent with an agency background.
Earlier this year, Grace Blue APAC released its own Migration Report for the APAC market, investigating how the migration of agency talent has expedited over the last three years, making informed recruitment strategies more important than ever. The report which explores how leaders can better understand, prevent and lead during these times of change is available to download here.
For more on Grace Blue Partnership’s leadership and talent expertise, read our Inspirational Leaders series here.