Meet The Team: Chris Robson

Our favourite Fusion Geordie tells us about how a rugby injury led to discovering cycling and how he ‘makes work, work for him’ by pulling together his passion for process with his experience in luxury retail and enjoyment of bike-packing.

How did you end up here? 

I’ve been in London about 10 years now and Manchester for 3 before that after having left Newcastle (my hometown) ‘cos a couldn’t find a job’ as the folk song goes.
I was a rugby player through school and University and on to a reasonable level, when one injury (shattered and rebuilt left hand) meant months with no real way of exercising. My uncle gave me an old road bike and a set of rollers and I’d sit on that for hours with my hand in the cast propped on the kitchen bench. Once I was healed up a bit I still couldn’t do much so started going out with him and my cousin on their cafe rides and just got into riding from there.

On the work side I was in fashion and/or luxury retail for over 15 years, culminating in a GM role at Rapha when I first moved to London. I got off the shopfloor and into roles that really fired my love of problem solving, process management, team building and so on through a variety of gigs in the tech startup world, eventually circling back to combine many of the things I enjoy doing most for my role here.

Why Fusion Media? 

For me it’s the variety, of clients, of areas we work in, of people you meet…of challenges we face! It’s a cliché but every day is different because the work we’re required to do is different from day to day.

Being in Projects I get the best of both, I get to indulge my planning and process brain on longtail pieces of work and also dive in on day to day executions with the PR team. We have a pretty flat hierarchy too which is great for being able to really own and run your own shit stuff.

What aspects of your role at Fusion excite you the most?

Possibility…we come up with some amazing ideas and concepts for our clients and even just the possibility of executing them gets me excited!
Can I say trust? I love the trust we get from our clients to do good work (and have earned through our history) and I like that we’re kind of custodians of that and that each project adds to it in some way. From the team too, we genuinely have each other’s back and are accountable to each other. That’s a kind of buzz-phrase in a lot of places, but we genuinely have it here I think. We don’t want to let each other or the project/client down and there’s a buzz to that.

Any trends you think will dominate in the coming year? What should we be watching out for?

It’s nothing new because it’s been growing for years, but UK gravel. I feel Covid put the brakes on it just as it was about to really take off and it’s ready to blow again now! I think the continued rise of eCycles, particularly eCargo bikes have the potential to change our cities (for the better) too.

There’s no getting away from the fact it’s going to be another difficult year for the cycling industry but I think within that we will see opportunities for the brand and businesses that ‘do it best’ to rise above…assisted by great agencies like Fusion, of course!! 

What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?

“Make work, work for you” - I don’t know if it’s a generational/age thing or a UK cultural thing but there’s often this attitude that if you like what you do it’s somehow ‘not a real job.’ We spend entirely too much of our lives at work or ‘doing work stuff’ to not get things from it beyond a paycheck. So I always want to try and curate my role and my experience in it to fulfill areas of interest for me.

How do you like to unwind outside of work? 

Cycling, particularly gravel touring/bikepacking in recent years, slow exploration has been great for me. I have a puppy I’m obsessed with (8 months old at the time of writing) so big walks with her, training and mental agility stuff is a lot of fun and good to get you out of your own head.

I’ve also been a videogame nerd for as long as video game consoles have been a thing so I will happily lose myself in a good game for hours and I took up Muay Thai about a year ago and really enjoy the challenge of being very very bad at it but trying to get a tiny bit better each time…and of course, my first, last, deep and enduring love of Newcastle United Football Club…although it’s rarely relaxing being a fan of them!

Finally, if you could have a coffee and a chat with anyone who would it be and why?

We can learn from everyone. The guys at Wizard Works (of my South London parish) do a thing called #coffeeoutside where they just set a time and place, say 7-9am on a given day at a specific point of the Thames path, and people drop by with a flask or a camping stove and a filter mug and just make connections and community over a brew - it’s a beautiful thing. I’d love to see more of this so might set up one of my own!