Inge Heide

The numbers come from seven years at Yuppiechef, South Africa's pioneering kitchen and homeware retailer, where she joined the team early, when the company was still small, and grew with it as the brand scaled into one of the country's most respected omnichannel retailers. She moved up into a management role across that time, where she ran the kind of daily operational analysis that paid media demands: spotting the anomaly in week-on-week numbers, finding the data point nobody else looked for, understanding why a metric is moving before the metric becomes a problem. She left in 2022, after Yuppiechef was acquired by Mr. Price Home and the culture of the brand she'd helped grow began to change.

The compositions come from her training as a fine artist. Inge holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhodes University and her portrait work has been selected for the Top 100 of the Sanlam Portrait Awards twice, in 2015 and 2023, placing her in the company of South Africa's most respected portrait painters. She also sells prints of her work independently. That artist's eye shows in how she reads creative: a campaign isn't just an ad set and a budget to her, it's an image, a frame, a composition that either holds the eye or doesn't.