With a background in chemistry, retail and merchandising, Daphne Lopes has always wanted to learn new things, to discover, to push the limits and be at the forefront of innovation.
Daphne started her career studying chemistry in her native Sao Paulo, Brazil. After that, she worked alone in a white coat in a water purification lab. But after six months, it was clear that this wasn’t what she wanted to do. After deciding she was also too young to go back into academia, she packed her bags and went travelling instead.
“I packed my bags and I travelled. I came to Europe.”
After a lot of meeting people, discovering and eating, Daphne got a part-time job in retail to stay in Dublin. Instead of the brain-dead, humdrum job she imagined, she met a lot of interesting people while working on the shop floor instead. One of these people then hired her to run the merchandising for Ted Baker, on the basis of her mathematical expertise.
And basically, after about a year, I had my entire job automated.
After working on a range of interesting special projects, and gaining valuable experience, Daphne was ultimately frustrated with silo corporate communication and technological limitations. She decided she wanted something else. The turning point came, (just like it did for our CEO Claire Burge), when Daphne got back from a holiday to find an inbox with more emails than she could get through.
I had something like 1000 emails after I came back from my holiday and I just wanted to cry. I thought, this is not life.
So she started researching how to reduce email, how to send and receive less email, and other productivity related topics. And that’s how she stumbled on an article Claire wrote about her #noemail experiment for 99u.
I decided I had to meet this woman. So I sent her a cheeky LinkedIn message: “Claire. I love what you do. I think it’s amazing. I think I can add value. We need to meet”.
A day or two later she replied and said to come and meet her. They met, nerded out on science and technology, and two weeks later it was her and Claire in an office, with Daphne in the role of business development for our company’s former business, Get Organised, which was focused on productivity consulting and improving the way people work with technology.
Today, Daphne works as the Partnership Manager for WNDYR, managing partner relationships and making sure we are laser focused on meeting targets and living out our ultimate vision: to own the world of work.
Interested in finding out more about our Premium Customer Success offering, and how we can help you shape your business for the future of work? Contact Daphne to find out more about how we can work together.
What excites me about TiP is the big vision, it was always the big vision. Claire’s ambition is what attracted me to this business, that we’re doing something bigger, that we’re changing something.