Twenty years, two cities

Paul Singleton

Paul is 42, based in North London, with a second base in Hong Kong — where he partly grew up. He is mixed race — half British, half Hong Kong Chinese — and works in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, reading and writing Chinese. Splitting a childhood between British and Asian business culture shaped everything since: how PIKOTW trades, how it builds relationships, and why two cities still share this site's masthead. Twenty years in code, web development, search and business management — long enough to have watched several waves of technology arrive as the answer to everything and then settle into being a tool.

That experience is the professional half of what PIKOTW does. Strategy, operations, automation, websites, search. It's unglamorous work and it's what we're actually best at. Most of our value to a client is knowing which problem to solve rather than knowing a particular piece of software.

The other half is travel, which is the genuine passion, and music, which is the side project. We're clear about that ordering because pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose the trust of anyone hiring us for either.

The Hong Kong connection isn't decoration. It's why the travel work doesn't look like the usual UK feed, why some of the music is in Cantonese, and why we can talk to a brand about a market most London operators have never worked in.

Where a brief needs lifestyle or couples content, we work with Paul's fiancée @fhyint, who is a creator in her own right.

Paul is also a father of twin daughters — which is why so much of the travel content is reviewed through a parent's eyes as well as a luxury lens: what genuinely works for families, not just what photographs well.