Started in music journalism. Ended up writing for Bulgari before I could legally rent a car.

I started writing because I couldn't not. Music reviews for magazines nobody read, pitching features about bands who'd peaked five years prior. It turns out that training ground, learning to make something feel worth reading when the subject is deeply niche, is one of the most transferable skills in copywriting.

From there: a magazine internship that put my name next to Bulgari's 140th anniversary. A phone-hold script company where I wrote eight scripts a day for brands across Asia-Pacific. A philanthropic foundation, a food startup, a distillery, AI companies, adult content creators, and a wine brand with a very particular sense of humour. The through-line is voice. Knowing how to find it, hold it, and make it land.

The foundation was editorial. Writing music reviews, pitching features, editing copy for publications that were beloved by hundreds of very committed readers. It built habits that stayed: writing to a deadline, writing for an audience who didn't owe you their attention, and learning that a good opening line is the difference between someone reading and someone clicking away.

In 2014, an internship at Box Magazine produced 14+ print articles for some of the most recognisable luxury brands in the world. Writing for luxury requires a specific register: authoritative without being cold, aspirational without being inaccessible. You're not selling. You're establishing the premise that this is already worth desiring.

The brief ranged from Bulgari's 140th anniversary retrospective to Salvatore Ferragamo's Brisbane boutique launch. Jaguar pouncing back into relevance. David Bowie's collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Swarovski's latest collective. Rimba by Ayana Bali. Articles that had to sit alongside the photos and not embarrass them.

The Pedestrian Group editorial universe is an entirely different discipline from luxury print. The reader is younger, more sceptical, and has an extremely accurate radar for anything that sounds like a press release in disguise. The job is to write with enough cultural fluency and personality that the content actually belongs in the feed it's appearing in.

That skill, writing for an audience who's already decided they don't want to be marketed to, is arguably the most useful one in any contemporary content role.

In 2017, I joined Cue Audio, the largest audio-marketing company in Asia-Pacific, as their youngest-ever copywriter. Not the youngest at the time. The youngest in the company's history.

The work was deceptively simple: write phone hold scripts for brands. The reality was eight scripts a day, across wildly different registers. A luxury house next to a Mazda dealership. A global bank beside a local hotel chain. Switching registers at that volume, without slipping, is the skill that actually stuck.

I also voiced the scripts I wrote, which added a constraint most copy doesn't have: if you can't read it in one natural breath, it isn't done yet.

The later phase of the career arc moved from pure writing into writing with strategic intent: copy that's optimised, positioned, or attached to a communications objective. Different muscle, same foundation.

The freelance thread running through all of this covers an intentionally wide spread. Balenciaga-level copy and a small wine brand run by someone who named their product after a situation. Hilton Hotels and an independent artist with a big vision and a small budget. Rolls Royce and Illegal Tender Distilling Co., which is the most fun brand name in the southern hemisphere.

The range is the point. A writer who can only work in one register has a ceiling. The ability to find the right voice for the brief, and hold it without slipping, is what makes the work worth commissioning.