An in-house creative agency inside a car dealership

I ran the dealer group's entire in-house creative and print operation - five people, a full print house, three showroom facades - keeping everything in-house at a fraction of central-supplier cost.

Most car dealerships outsource their graphics. This one didn't - it ran its own creative and print operation, and I coordinated it. The group was really a small holding of businesses around a BMW, MINI and Motorrad dealership, and my department was its visual engine: I led a team of five - a pre-press designer, a printer operator, a large-format installer, a production worker and a sales rep - and we handled everything the group needed to look the part.

That meant the full range. Showroom facades and environmental branding across three dealer branches. The complete marketing toolkit - catalogues, newsletters, promotional campaigns, event materials - for BMW, MINI and Kawasaki. Vehicle and motorcycle wraps, including the transporters and bikes of the owner's own racing team (a Polish champion), plus support on events, promotional activations and sponsorship acquisition for the group's motorsport. We ran a real print house on an HP Indigo 3050 (LEP) and large-format kit, so the work went from design to finished, installed product without ever leaving the building.

The part I'm proudest of is unglamorous and it's the whole point: cost discipline. A central supplier wanted multiples of the price for things like showroom display stands, so we built them by hand in-house instead - same result, a fraction of the cost. That instinct - own the pipeline, keep it in-house, cut the cost and the errors - is the same one I've carried into every role since, and into the automation and AI work I do now.