Senior in-house, agency and consulting roles: brand strategy at Taylor & Grace, growth consulting at Optimizely across the UK and Benelux, digital strategy at Booking.com across EMEA, campaign operations at Colenso BBDO and Carat, event technology delivered across 16 cities worldwide. The pattern held everywhere: strategy earns its keep only when someone can build it.
About · The person holding the pen
Sam Hill.Lead Advisor · Alchemy Hill Advisory
An operator-consultant: someone who has run the growth engine, built the systems and shipped the products, and now diagnoses other people’s. The judgement you hire is the judgement that shows up, on every engagement.
The short version
The work this practice advises on, done first-hand.
Advice weighs more when the advisor has carried it.
Antimony Studio, founded 2018. A strategic, creative and growth studio working with founders and leadership teams across fashion, e-commerce, property, hospitality, health & wellness, food, SaaS and AI. Fifty-plus brand partnerships, certified partner status across Google, Meta, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Webflow and more.
Three AI products in market, built and operated as a founder rather than observed as an advisor: an AI-native growth-intelligence platform for e-commerce brands, a compliance and intelligence operating system for Australian real estate, and the data intelligence layer that connects them. When the practice advises on AI, the advice comes from production.
New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Europe and the Pacific, first-hand. Sales cycles run in EMEA, delivery teams run across continents, and a cacao brand guided from the Solomon Islands to shelf as investor, board advisor and creative director. Cross-border work here is lived experience rather than a slide.
The practice model
A practice with a bench.
Alchemy Hill is built as a practice rather than a personal-brand act. Sam holds every engagement as Lead Advisor, and a bench of trusted specialists sits behind the practice for the work that needs more hands.
The senior seat
The diagnosis, the strategy and the recommendation carry one signature. The senior thinking is never delegated down to a junior team under a senior pitch.
The Antimony seam
Antimony Studio is the execution engine behind the practice: a full-stack creative and marketing team in the same building that can create and execute what the advisory decides. The advisory does the thinking; the studio does the making; each sharpens the other.
Mutual elevation
Running products in market keeps the advice honest, and advising keeps the products commercial. Each side of the practice raises the standard of the other, and clients get the compound of both.
Who the practice works with
The people in the room.
Growth-stage businesses across fashion, e-commerce, property, hospitality, health & wellness, food, SaaS and AI. Inside them, four kinds of people pick up the phone.
Founders and CEOs
Owner-operators of growth-stage businesses who know the product is strong and can feel the brand and growth engine lagging behind it.
Marketing and growth leaders
CMOs and heads of growth who need a senior outside diagnosis before they commit budget, headcount or a re-platform.
Leaders getting serious about AI
Operators who want AI in the business as working systems rather than pilots, judged by someone who has shipped products of his own.
Boards and investors
Directors and backers who want an independent read on brand, go-to-market and technology before the next phase of investment.
Credentials
The paper, briefly.
Education
- Design Strategy, Design & Visual CommunicationsUniversity of Sydney · 2020
- Postgraduate Diploma, Innovation & EntrepreneurshipUniversity of Auckland · 2012
- Bachelor of Commerce, Marketing & CommunicationsUniversity of Otago · 2009
Selected certifications
- Google Certified Agency Partner
- Meta Agency Partner
- HubSpot Agency Partner
- Klaviyo Partner
- Webflow Certified Partner
- Optimizely Platform Certification
Methods
Diagnose. Transform. Deliver.
Every engagement runs the same rhythm: diagnose what is blocking growth, transform it into a named strategy, deliver a costed roadmap. These are the methods underneath.
The Karpathy loop
Three files: the asset, the instructions, the scoring. Generate variants, score them, keep what wins, revert what loses. Evolutionary optimisation applied to copy, pages and prompts.
The 80/20 rule
Find the fifth of the work that carries most of the result, and do that first. Every audit ranks findings by return, not by how interesting they are to fix.
Sprint cycles
Short, fixed windows with one named outcome each. A decision a week beats a plan a quarter, and nothing runs long enough to go stale.
Agentic design patterns
AI systems built on named, tested patterns: prompt chaining, routing, reflection, multi-agent orchestration and human-in-the-loop. The judgement stays human; the pattern does the plumbing.
Human-centred design
Design for the person’s actual context and state: the tired scroller on a phone at night, the buyer between meetings. Meet the emotional starting point, choose clarity over cleverness, and treat confusion as an objective fault, never a taste question.
Atomic design
Brad Frost’s hierarchy: atoms to molecules to organisms to templates to pages. We build systems, never one-off pages; our design tokens and component library follow it, so every screen inherits the same tested parts.
The introduction is an Audit.
The fastest way to meet the practice is to put it to work: a named diagnosis of your brand, growth engine or AI readiness, from $5,000, inside two weeks.