I’m Paul Verhulst,
a digital designer based in Amsterdam.

The past

For the twelve years I have been working at and with several companies. Early in my career I started as a junior all round designer at Code d’Azur, a creative agency where I learned to combine marketing, communication strategies and creative concepts, to create kick ass designs. I’ve got the chance to work with big brand like as KLM, MSC Cruises, Ikea and Microsoft.

After three years of working at Code d’Azur, I continued full time freelancing instead of on part time (Which I was doing on the side). I used this period to instead of only design, also expand my projects with front end development.

I was working for a lot of small/medium small clients and companies, and I really enjoyed sparring with them, helping them out, and the variety of work which came up. But on the other side, I started to miss working close with colleagues and working on a bigger project, especially in a multidisciplinairy team.

And so I joined TravelBird. Starting at the CRM team, designing for different stages of the customer lifecycle, followed by joining the product team and marketing team my participation in the whole company became bigger and bigger. In the three years I worked here I’ve developed myself as the go to person for design in the company. This because I was working 50/50 in the product team, but also as the only designer in the marketing/communication team, which had a lot of visibility. Next to designing I also was responsible for all internal and external photography, videography, many legendary office parties, and helped creating creative marketing concepts.

But as everything has an end, after three years working at TravelBird, I decided to continue my path.

I started as a senior product designer at Impraise (2018), a tool which enabled employees to give feedback to each other, and where HR could set up feedback cycles. This was a big step for me, as from now on I was only focussing on product design, something where I was most passionate about. Unfortunately Impraise went into a pivot, and unless I really liked the company and the people, I decided to choose for myself and leave the company.

My next adventure was Otrium (2019), a fashion outlet platform, and one of the most fast growing startups of Amsterdam. I started as the only designer in the company, and still focussed mostly on the product side. In the three years I worked here I’ve been solving a lot of product related issues, worked to get the best customer experience possible, took the platform from being an old fashioned tool to a fashionable platform, defined the brand and marketing expression, hired designers, built the multi disciplinary design team, and created strategies and roadmaps.