Richard Bland

Richard wrote his first HTML and CSS at twelve and has not really stopped since. These days he is the founder of Marbl Codes and the person who leads every project that comes through the door, which means he is also the person you will actually be talking to.

He learned the trade from the inside. A run of agency roles, here and in London, took him through web design, development, email marketing, conversion and customer journey optimisation, and the unglamorous day-to-day of keeping other people’s websites alive. It is a useful mix. He can design a page, code it, host it, work out why it is not converting and fix the email that was supposed to follow it up, without handing you to four different people.

In 2014 he went out on his own as MEM Digital, and that became Marbl Codes. The thing he is proudest of from those years is not a particular build. It is that the clients he started with are, for the most part, still clients.

What he does now is wider than building websites. He looks after them: hosting, domains, email, updates, the change you need by Friday. He builds online shops, from a theme of our own on Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce through to a fully bespoke store with its own checkout. And more and more he builds the tools around a business, the automations and small applications that take a repetitive job off someone’s desk.

He is an entrepreneur by temperament, which is a polite way of saying he cannot leave a good idea alone. Marbl Sites, Marbl Racing and the workshops all started as “what if we just built it?”. The clearest example is Serene, the AI colleague who works alongside him every day. He did not buy her in. He built the way she works, trained her on how Marbl does things, and still reads what she writes before it reaches a client.

On a project, Richard is your one point of contact. He listens first, says plainly what he would and would not do, brings in the right people from the team when the job needs a brand, a film or a photograph, and stays with the site after it launches. No account managers, no handovers, no disappearing once the invoice is paid.

Away from the desk he races radio-controlled cars, seriously enough to have built a team around it. He lives and works in Wellingborough, with a family who are the reason the business is shaped the way it is.