#BWSMAGAZINE
BWS in conversation with….
Jessica Butcher
FROM SCATTERGUN KNOWLEDGE
TO TECH TRAILBLAZER
Jessica Butcher is the co-founder of Blippar and
the keynote speaker at this year’s BWS/WES
Awards. With an array of awards already to her
name and playing a key role in a rapidly growing
technology business, Jessica carries the mantle
of successful female entrepreneur comfortably
as she talks about the importance of networks,
flexibility, accessibility and ‘the ladder.’
It’s hard to believe that the co-founder of
a company using such highly advanced
technology as Blippar would be a self-confessed
“non-techy person.” However, this very lack of a
technical background was critical to the business
in the early days, as Butcher describes “taking
nerdy tech and de-teching it. Everything is
marketing and I came into the business to make
the technology accessible, to craft the language
which brings it to life and show what it means and
what it can do. How it gets done is for the techy
people to focus on. I believe that technology is
more accessible when there’s more women in it.”
Western Africa whilst also being sustainable.
Integritour has proved to be an ‘MBA in kind’, an
enormously useful and rewarding learning curve
and a business which provides brings much
needed revenue and sustainable tourism to an
incredibly poor area of the continent.”
She actually studied Ancient History at Oxford
and what followed throughout twenties and
early thirties was a succession of jobs, mainly in
sales, marketing or business development. “My
CV could best be described as ‘scrappy.’ We’re
encouraged from an early age to identify our
dream career for life, as if you’ll start on a road
and stick with it until you retire. Today’s jobs
market simply doesn’t work that way. I used to
regard my CV as a bit of an issue, it screamed
“get bored easily” as I moved every two or
three years to a new role, usually in start-ups or
disruptive technologies. In hindsight, this paid
dividends as I developed an enormous network
of contacts and a ‘scattergun knowledge’ about
a lot of industries.”
On her return, fortune collided with opportunity
when she met the three technical and creative
people who were looking for a commercial
marketing and branding expert to take their
visual discovery app, using augmented reality,
to market. And so Blippar was born. Jessica
describes the five-year journey as “incredible”,
with the business undergoing robust growth into
a network of international offices, hundreds of
staff and clients such as PepsiCo, Heinz, Coca
Cola, Nestle, L’Oreal and Conde Nast. Blippar has
recently been ranked in the top 10 on CNBC’s
Top Disruptor List and was also named on
Bloomberg’s list of top UK Business Innovators.
Butcher’s journey took a new path in her early
thirties, when she met her future husband
Graham and decided to leave a job she didn’t
enjoy to go to Africa for a year. “We started up a
business whilst we were there, a social enterprise
tour company. The idea was to build a business
model that would provide access to a part of
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