Meet George, our Head of Marketing

Our Marketing team is at the heart of helping Tide grow. Voice of Tide to our members – this team includes performance and product marketing, Community and Partnerships. We’d love for you to meet the people behind the Marketing team – so first up, here’s our Head of Marketing, George Schmidt.

👋 Hey George! Introduce yourself in a sentence.
Well hello there. My name is George and I do “marketing” at Tide. If you’re reading this and you don’t have a Tide account yet, please head over here and sign up instead of reading about me.

What’s your background?
Before Tide, I worked with a lot of fun consumer brands – in fashion, cosmetics and start-ups. I like to think that I was one of the early explorers of social media marketing – which involved a lot of time on Facebook and choosing the right photos of lingerie or just the right number of soaps in a gift box. At the beginning, it took time to convince those working around me that this was a proper job.

Eventually I spent more and more time consulting, helping brands with digital marketing transformation. Which is also how I got started with Tide.

What made you want to join Tide?
That’s a great story. The office location was convenient.

Even more importantly, I’m deeply passionate about entrepreneurship, which Tide is revolutionising day after day – enabling people to pursue their dreams, be it starting their own agency, opening a shop, starting to freelance, do consulting or a million other things. (By the way, again, instead of reading more about me you should definitely head over to our blog and check our recent post on things to consider when starting your business).

Full-time jobs are clearly not what they used to be. It’s increasingly true that running your own business can give people more control, satisfaction and long-term success. And as I’m personally a massive fan of people quitting boring full-time jobs to start their own businesses, helping to further this mission with Tide is definitely the place I wanted to be.

But also, the office location thing.

What’s your typical working day?
A typical day for me starts at around 7:30am, when I check my emails and to-do list and get a headstart on things that I can do quicker at home than at the office.

After successfully choosing one of my two favourite jackets for the day, I turn up at the office just before 10am with the confidence of someone arriving just before 9am. And then disappear again to hunt for a triple shot soy flat white.

The rest of the day is filled with working with the amazing teams around me. Working with our member community, our marketing channels, product and brand projects. Step by step, figuring out how to provide a better experience for our existing members, and how to get the word out about Tide, to grow from 40,000 members to, erm, 5 million or so.

What are you most excited for this year at Tide?
Introducing Tide to a lot more small business owners and growing our member community.

What do you consider to be the marketing team’s biggest achievements so far?
Too many to list – highlights would be production of new member spotlights, launching our new website, new brand, new acquisition channels, reaching a record number of partnerships – just to name a few. But our team is famously humble so let’s leave it there.

Biggest priority in 2018 (work-related or otherwise):
Personally, to exercise more. Really.

What’s your hidden talent?
Web development. Keeping it very well-hidden nowadays.

Favourite desk snack?
We call them Panic Snickers. Snickers bars, for panic situations. Hence the name.

If you had to choose one of Tide’s values that best defines you, which one would it be?
“Action-oriented”. At least I like to think that.

When you’re not at Tide, what’s your favourite thing to do?
Think about small businesses.
Although I’m also rewatching the TV series Lost, which is about a group of people who get stranded on an island just 3 years pre-everyone-owning-an-iPhone.