Appointments: Sales director for Vision: Zeus & more
TEXTILE and office furniture supplier Vision Group has appointed Paula Lorimer as its group sales director.
She has joined the Blackburn business to drive sales and spearhead what Vision says will be even better service to its growing customer base.
Lorimer has more than 20 years of sales management experience across sectors including advertising, exhibitions and hospitality.
Vision supplies bedding and towels to hotel groups around the world and also has a public sector arm which deals with prisons and the health service. It also owns Irish linens business Liddell, which supplied the Titanic.
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INVESTMENT banking boutique Zeus Capital has made a trio of senior hires.
Nick How has arrived as corporate finance director. Most recently he was a partner at Oriel Securities and was head of UK corporate finance at Kaupthing and previously worked at Dresdner Kleinworth and Hoar Govett.
Hugo Chance has become director and head of Zeus’s family offices. He previously headed up the angel investor forum Angels and Equity under the Truestone Group.
Both Mr How and Mr Chance will be based at the London office.
Claire Frangou is now business development director at Zeus following a 16-year stay in Deloitte’s corporate finance team, and will work out of the Manchester office at King Street.
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MANCESTER-based Secure Bank Commercial Finance has started the year with four new appointments.
Stephen Goulden becomes regional sales director for the Midlands after 19 years’ experience in invoice finance, joining from GE Capital.
Craig Stritch has also joined as regional sales director in the South West and Wales and Lee Humble has assumed the same role for the North East and Cumbria.
Alex MacDonald has also strengthened the team in the north as regional sales manager.
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CONSUMER PR, social, events and marketing consultancy Down At The Social has recruited Alison Short as account director.
She brings 16 years’ consumer and B2B PR agency experience to the seven-strong team at MediaCity in Salford.
Short joins from Cube Creative in Manchester, where she set up and ran its PR division for four years.
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BLAZE Marketing has recruited a new graphic designer, Stephen Johnson, to join co-founders Daniel Bourmad and Kevin Whitter as they bid for continued growth in their first year.
Mr Johnson moved from Skills Network in Selby, North Yorkshire to work for Blaze.
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CONSUMER insight agency Join the Dots has appointed its first independent non-executive board director since its establishment in 1998.
The Manchester company says Alwin Thompson will give its board a new dimension as it bids to grow it share of the consumer insight market.
He will work alongside Quentin Ashby and Graeme Lawrence and co-founders Pete and Trish Comley.
Mr Thompson is best known for building up Blackburn-based food manufactuer InterLink Foods.
