Fifteen years building brands that show up consistently — from billboard to bicep curl.
I'm Ryk. I head brand and content at Urban Gym Group — TrainMore, Clubsportive, Gymbox, and the rest of the family. My job is to make sure each brand stands for something distinct and shows up consistently across every customer touchpoint, from cinema spots and OOH down to club signage and the email signature your trainer sends you.
I came up through fashion e-commerce in Cape Town, design leadership at Treatwell in Amsterdam, and brand work for a multi-label e-commerce group before fitness. Adobe Summit speaker, Adobe MAX executive attendee, and once-and-current festival-circuit guitarist with kidofdoom.
Dutch and South African dual citizen. Based in Utrecht, working out of Amsterdam, with a foot still on a stage in South Africa whenever I can manage it.
Brand positioning, campaign creative, content strategy and creative leadership across the holding group's family of brands. Built the in-house creative and social team from scratch; introduced workflow tooling and agile methods to handle the asset volume four-plus brands demand. Worked with founder on innovations like TrainMore's women-only strength training space. Brokered and led campaign partnerships with Nike Strength, Björn Borg, XXL Nutrition and Boldking. TrainMore is now the largest gym chain in Amsterdam, with 60+ locations across the Netherlands.
Built and ran the brand for a four-label e-commerce group: Smartphonehoesjes plus the private labels Selencia, Accezz and iMoshion. Sold via own platform plus Bol.com, MediaMarkt and Amazon Pan-European. Led a team of five brand designers, two social media specialists and a video producer. Rebranded iMoshion as a family/fun product line — packaging, logo, photography. Re-tooled the design workflow for high-velocity content production.
Led a team of seven designers running campaigns, social, CRM and brand integrity across twelve markets in Europe. Set quarterly KPIs, ran 360° campaign delivery from concept to outdoor takeover, and held the highest team Peakon score in the Amsterdam office for the duration. See the work →
South Africa's leading online fashion retailer, e-commerce flagship of Media24. Built and managed the in-house design team. Set the photography style guide. Signed off on every front-end, marketing and multimedia output. Rebranded the company CI into a more modern system. Got invited to speak at Adobe Summit on the back of the production-tooling work. Spree merged with Superbalist in 2018. See the work →
Led visual direction for the digital editions of YOU and HUISGENOOT on iOS and Android tablets. Pioneering work in mobile publishing — the team got flown to Brazil with the CEO of Media24 and Naspers to teach the equivalent at Abril. Notable projects: the Nelson Mandela tribute app, biographies of Kurt Darren and Joost van der Westhuizen, and the Donkerland TV series for KykNET. Also did duty as Digital Creative Designer at Touchlab.
Quarterly kids' magazine, top-to-bottom — content, design, advertorial. Grew circulation from 100,000 to 250,000 copies a month over my time in the role.
Instrumental band. Two albums. SAMA nomination for our second record, My Faith In War. Most major South African festivals over a decade — Oppikoppi, Ramfest, Vortex, Woodstock, Splashy Fen, Earthdance. All visual identity, posters, T-shirts and album art self-made by the band. See the work →