Manchester-rooted, textile-minded.
I'm Lou — a freelance SEO, content and analytics consultant based in Manchester, a city that once ran the world's cotton trade under the name Cottonopolis, with Macclesfield's silk mills not far down the road. That history runs through both sides of my own family too: my grandad sold textiles for a living, my gran was a machinist in a coat factory, and I grew up next door to a member of the Mackintosh factory family. The Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery are practically on my doorstep. Heritage and craft businesses aren't a niche I chose for positioning — they're where I'm from.
My career has taken that background into the industry properly: copywriting and social media at Jacques Vert, and time with John Lewis, Headen & Quarnby and Quba, working across premium fashion and outdoor clothing brands. I'm also a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters — the City of London livery company for the knitting trade — which is about as formal as a textiles credential gets.
That combination means I don't need a briefing document to understand why a mill's archive matters, or why a museum's collection copy needs to hold its accuracy under a search engine's expectations. I bring proper SEO discipline — audits, keyword strategy, reporting that stands up to a board — to organisations whose stories are usually the last thing digitised and the first thing under-resourced.
Currently working across multiple heritage, textile and independent brand clients.