Simon Lidington

Over the last 35 years, Simon has worked across many sectors and built enduring relationships at senior levels with many blue chip clients including Audi, Regus, QVC, Volkswagen Group, Prodrive, B.A.R, Coca Cola, Vauxhall Motors, Barclays, VW Financial Services, NatWest, Alliance & Leicester, Nokia, the Office of Government Commerce, Business in the Community, Royal Mail Wholesale, Amex, Citroen UK and many others.

Simon set up Big Sofa in 2005 as a creative consultancy aimed at helping clients improve their staff and customer experience. Having worked extensively as a management consultant with CEOs, Boards and management teams - as well as serving as a CEO at Research International for 18 months - Simon could see the potential for a new kind of consultancy that harnessed conversation, collaboration and co-creation to build organizational strength and performance through people. He is regarded as a thought leader in the consumer intelligence industry.

Simon has an Honours BA in Sociology and a Masters in Interorganisational Relations both from Exeter University, and an Honorary Doctorate from Middlesex University. He is a Fellow of the Market Research Society, a Fellow of the RSA, and sat on the Advisory Council for the Economic & Social Research Council's 'Cultures of Consumption' Programme between 2003-8. He is married with 4 grown up children and is a West Ham supporter.

Matt Lynch

Matt heads up our client strategy, helping current and future clients to get maximum value from the application of our technology and thinking.

He began his career in marketing and category management, before broadening his experience in a range of research and consulting roles. After completing a Masters in Organisational Behaviour, Matt joined up with Simon to establish Big Sofa as a modern, agile insight business that balances humanity with automation.

Matt is experienced in leading projects for blue chip brands like Coca Cola, Unilever, BP and Barclays, working within and alongside global agencies, and collaborating with tech start-ups. He combines strategy, creativity and delivery in an informal approach that is commercially grounded and direct.

Marcus Jemmotte

Marcus is a Chartered Accountant and joined Big Sofa in late 2012. He brings a wealth of commercial and financial knowledge gained from working across a range of sectors mainly Marketing Services, Digital Media, E-Commerce, and Financial Services.

Marcus started his career with the Bank of Ireland where he honed his analytical and regulatory skills. He then moved onto roles with Smythson of Bond St., lastminute.com, and Acxiom, where he worked on a number of projects with Guardian News & Media, Virgin Media, Hearst Magazines, Sony Ericsson, British Telecom, and BAA Airports.

Marcus’s core skills lie in the construct of new and existing client arrangements and he excels in his ability to incorporate industry knowledge in customising commercial models.

Outside of work, Marcus can be found browsing East London’s food markets when he’s not ferrying his children to and from their activities.

Andrew Larssen

Andrew has over 20 years experience as a software developer, and has particular expertise in video management. He joined Big Sofa from a much larger company with a brief to build our digital development team. Always striving for excellence he ensures our technology is world class. When not at work Andrew spends most of his time with his young family or watching films.

Paul Roberts

Paul has a priceless ability to spot technology needs on the horizon. With over 30 years experience leading technology, operations and R&D in digital industries he keeps Big Sofa at the cutting edge of commercial digital innovation.

Sam Paice

Sam joined us in 2011, and since then he’s worked with all of our major insight clients across a broad range of industries, helping them think differently about how they collect, manage and use video, audio and images from multiple sources.

Creating deep, shared consumer understanding and better collaboration in increasingly 'noisy' digital organisations means using skills from a mix of disciplines: from insight and analysis through organisational understanding and consulting to client and business development. With the amount of new technologies competing for time and space in staff workflows, he's passionate about working with our team and our clients to keep Big Sofa ahead of the curve: a platform that earns its place in organisations by creating efficiencies, adding value and being genuinely helpful for the people who use it.

Sally Brogan

Sally leads Operations, Logistics and Project Management at Big Sofa. She also works with the Digital Team in the role of Product Owner, feeding into the development and innovation of our technology. She joined Big Sofa in July 2012 and as well as implementing new systems internally, has worked closely with clients across a range of sectors including Media, FMCG, Energy, Education, Automotive and Finance.

Lauren Docampo

Lauren's training and early experience was in Production Management. She joined Big Sofa in 2012 to assist on location during filming and then went on to use her expertise in a role which involved managing all aspects of production from pre to post for global client projects. Although these skills are still invaluable to Big Sofa, she has now taken on a new role in the Digital Team. This involves managing digital projects, helping facilitate the implementation of an agile framework and efficient development process and assisting with user testing.

Claire Fenton

Claire joined Big Sofa in 2013 as a PA and Project Manager. Her organisational skills, proactive attitude and pragmatic nature made her an invaluable member of the team. As well as continuing in her PA role, she now leads the Marketing strategy at Big Sofa and is working on improving brand presence, marketing materials and external communications. Her extensive knowledge of all aspects of the business, and close working relationship with colleagues, means she is ideally positioned to ensure the Big Sofa philosophy is effectively communicated to clients and partners.

Martin Chapman

Martin joined Big Sofa in 2011 as a freelance video editor to work on an early prototype of the application. As the Big Sofa grew Martin started taking an interest in back end development and as a result his role has changed drastically. He has spent the last year learning Ruby on Rails and has now been integrated into the digital team on a full time basis. As one of the longest serving members here, having worked on the 'Big Sofa' from its conception, he has a unique insight into the working of the application which he now puts into practise with his new skills. He also speaks fluent Italian and is a self confessed foodie.

Andreea Hrincu

Andreea has worked in the UX industry for 3 years. She has experience working in a range of companies, including one of Australia's largest banks, a telecommunications government department, and an optimisation agency. Her background is in Information Technology, but she completed an Honors degree to specialise in UX. Her skills range from conducting user testing to creating wireframes and facilitating workshops. They even include making a killer cup of frothy coffee. She's extremely passionate about what she does, and always strives to balance user needs with business requirements.

Aleksandar Dimov

Aleks joined Big Sofa in April 2016 as a developer. He started out developing in C# and accidently fell in love with Ruby On Rails when exploring the language through a project he was working on.

He has several years of development experience including work on software for the electrical manufacturing industry and a popular Social Networking site. He has worked with a range of technologies and languages from elastic search to Redis, MySQL, Javascript, PHP and many more.

In his spare time he likes theatre and since moving to the UK has taken a keen interest in how the drama differs from that in Europe. He admits he cannot cook at all and has no intention of learning!

Krzysztof Kaczmarczyk

Krzysztof specialises in Ruby and Ruby on Rails development and other surrounding technologies like JavaScript/CoffeScript, jQuery, Ember.js, Node.js and others. Besides the Ruby world he also has a keen interest in Java platform and is currently starting to learn Scala language which he finds very interesting. Krzys began contracting for Big Sofa in 2014, and has already proved himself an excellent asset to the team.