News
Andy Hill Creator of Patently Obvious and Pro Snowboarder!
Posted on April 24, 2008 9:43 AM
The Times recently reported on Patently Obvious creator Andy Hill, did you know he used to be a pro snowboarder and his favourite hobby is growing trees!
Andy Hill was born in June 1968, the son of two organic chemists, a profession from which he would take inspiration from later in life.
During the early nineties Andy took to the French Alps and embarked on a professional snowboarding career, representing the UK on the European leg of the World Cup Circuit. His first foray into the commercial world was setting up a snowboard hire business in Val d'Isere, offering other boarders advice on kit and equipment, including one to one tutorials. It was this budding entrepreneurialism that caught the eye of Will King, founder of The King of Shaves Company (KMI), as the pair first met while Andy was 'flogging Will a lesson!'
Andy was to encounter Will King again in 1994, while on the hunt for sponsors. Will at the time was launching surf-clothing range Body Glove, which Andy was happy to endorse despite only being supplied with XL sizes and not being the biggest of chaps.
A severe back injury led to Andy's early retirement from professional snowboarding at the age of 27. Hungry to get back into work and inspired by the success of the fledgling King of Shaves brand, Andy called up Will King with the bold declaration "you're the ideas guy who needs a doing guy like me!". Will took Andy at his word and offered him a job in his sales team.
Before long, Andy was heading up KMI's operations alongside managing the production, new product development and customer care divisions within the company.
His dynamic nature for launching new products led to a passion in developing new product ranges which delivered not just on a performance level but also on an environmental level. Andy puts his interest in the environment, well before most people had become aware of the issue, down to a childhood spent on his parents' allotment, a genuine love for the outdoors and "an absolute hatred of waste". Andy quickly began to question the use of excessive packaging in the grooming market, especially bulky canisters for male grooming products.
By 2004, Andy had become a KMI board director and continued striving to develop exceptional products that were kinder to the environment, driven be a belief that product formulations, manufacture and packaging could be done better. "I'm very passionate about protecting the environment and minimising the impact our products have," he says, "but at the same time I don't want to make any compromise on the performance of our products for our customers. That's the challenge that drives me on."
In 2005, now Managing Director of KMI, Andy began researching ingredients for a new personal cleansing range, to solve an obvious problem of a product which would be kind to the environment, with no compromise on its cleaning effectiveness. Three years on, Patently Obvious is being launched to the UK market.
Andy continues his passion for environmental issues by communicating to consumers through his green blog as well the pursuing his childhood hobby of growing trees from seeds, nurturing them to sapling stage and then re-planting them. As Andy proudly proclaims, in a sentence that sums up his attitude to the environment, "I just love trees!".