Agency Work at King James Group
Major brands needed polished digital experiences - websites, campaign pages, blogs, store catalogs - delivered on tight timelines with pixel-perfect execution.
Full delivery cycle
Scoping, quoting, building, deploying - not just writing code.
Notable clients
Nike, Engen, TimeBank among others across various industries.
Internal leadership
Ran upskilling sessions, team building, and built internal tools.
Approach
Worked across the full delivery cycle - scoping with clients, quoting with PMs, building and deploying web projects, and running internal sessions to upskill the team.
Outcome
Shipped work for Nike, Engen, TimeBank and others. Left when headhunted by Crypto Banter - about four years ago now, so these sites may have evolved since.
The agency years
I joined King James Group - one of South Africa's leading independent creative agencies - right before they were acquired by Accenture and became Accenture Song. It was a formative chapter - fast-paced, demanding, and deeply collaborative.
The work spanned everything agencies do - building new website designs from designer handoffs, campaign pages for product launches, managing blog systems, maintaining store catalogs. Nike, Engen, and TimeBank were the most notable clients, but there were plenty more.
Beyond just building
On the projects I ran, I handled the majority of the work myself - mostly backend, with frontend devs stepping in to help on the UI side when needed. I was involved in scoping projects with clients, working with project managers on quotes and timelines, handling deployments, and debugging across browsers and devices.
I also ran internal sessions to upskill the team, contributed to team building, and built internal tools to make our workflows smoother. It was a full-stack role in every sense.
What I took from it
Agency life teaches you to ship. Deadlines are real, clients are watching, and there's no hiding behind 'it's not ready yet.' You learn to balance craft with pragmatism - pixel-perfect execution when it matters, good-enough when it doesn't.
Working across so many different projects also gave me range. Every client had different systems, different constraints, different expectations. Adapting quickly became second nature.
Moving on
I left King James when I was headhunted by Crypto Banter - about four years ago now. The sites I worked on have likely changed significantly since then; agencies iterate constantly, and clients move on to new campaigns.
But the foundations stuck - how to deliver under pressure, how to collaborate across disciplines, and how to build things that work in the real world. Those lessons shaped everything that came after.