From Blackpool - where the lights are already bright and the instinct to perform comes with the sea air - John Robb moved to Manchester with a head full of glam rock and arrived just in time for punk to make everything feel urgent.

He picked up a music magazine in 1976, read about the emerging punk scene, and immediately started a band. The Membranes, the post-punk group he has fronted as bassist and vocalist since the early 1980s, became one of the defining acts of the UK’s DIY underground. But Robb was never going to stay on one side of the fence. Working for Sounds, he became the first journalist in the world to interview Nirvana - sitting with Kurt Cobain at his mother’s house in 1988, long before the world had caught up. He also coined the word Britpop. Both facts tell you something about the kind of radar he has always operated.

His writing has done justice to the music he has lived inside for fifty years. Punk Rock: An Oral History, Stone Roses and the Resurrection of British Pop, Live Forever: The Story of Oasis and The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth are among the definitive accounts of their subjects. He runs Louder Than War - the website and magazine that has become the home of independent music journalism in the UK - and heads Louder Than Words, the UK’s biggest music and books festival, held in Manchester every November. In spring 2026, Manchester University Press published his memoir: Punk Rock Ruined My Life and Other Stories. The book tour alone says something about his standing: special guests include Dave Rowntree, Gaye Advert, the Hanley brothers, and Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai.

Why Blake Mill?

“I like the aesthetic, stitching, colours and ambition. I like their high end edginess in the mainstream - like an underground band having its first hits that still retains the energy and ideas that made them great.” From a man who has spent fifty years tracking exactly that quality in music - that’s not a compliment lightly given.

Find John

Instagram: @johnrobb77   ·   Facebook: @johnrobbofficial   ·   X: @johnrobb77   ·   louderthanwar.com

From the roar of London to the elemental
quiet of Kirkwall, Orkney - Julian Treasure has spent a career thinking carefully about what the world sounds like, and why almost nobody is truly listening to it.

He is TED's most-viewed and most prolific speaker: five main-stage talks, twelve TEDx appearances, 141 million views. His talk "How to Speak So That People Want to Listen" is the sixth most-watched TED Talk of all time. He uses that platform to make a point that is both urgent and quietly devastating: the world is losing its listening - and the cost to business alone exceeds $10 trillion a year.

A former indie musician who became the world's leading expert on conscious listening, powerful speaking and healthy, productive sound, Julian spent 20 years advising global brands on how sound shapes behaviour in spaces from shopping centres to airports. His three books - Sound Business, How to Be Heard, and Sound Affects - bring that expertise to anyone who wants to communicate with more intention. His mission today is to regenerate the world’s listening. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a recipient of Toastmasters International's prestigious Golden Gavel Award.

What inspires him? Sound, music, nature, books, TED and, most honestly, serendipity.

Why Blake Mill? "I love passion, quality and imagination. Blake Mill exemplifies all three." From a man who listens to the world for a living, that's a considered endorsement.

Get in touch with Julian jt@juliantreasure.com · +44 333 247 0408 LinkedIn · Instagram · YouTube

From Rochdale, ten miles north of Manchester, from a textile engineering family, Jonathan Schofield has spent three decades making sure the world's most interesting city gets the attention it deserves.

A Blue Badge Guide since 1996, Editor-at-Large of Manchester Confidential, and author of Manchester: The Complete Guide and Lost & Imagined Manchester, he did what most people only think about: he invented a job he actually wanted. "That was a beautiful stumble away from the security of regular employment," he says. "In effect my job is a hobby and I love it.”

The roster of people who've walked Manchester's streets with him tells its own story: Sir Alex Ferguson, Annie Lennox, Anish Kapoor, Anthony Gormley, Victoria Wood, Michel Roux, Michael Portillo. He has appeared in books by Tristram Hunt, Stuart Maconie, and Andy Spinoza - and in 2021 the University of Manchester awarded him their Medal of Honour for exceptional contribution to the city, the region, and the university itself.

He draws inspiration from words, and then more words, from the architecture and energy of the city and from the wild moorland he grew up beside and never quite left behind. "You get your stories through the soles of your feet," he says. Too much writing is done at a distance. His never is.

Why Blake Mill? "Be different, but intelligently so." From a man whose family has been in the textile trade for generations, and whose city is woven into everything Blake Mill does - that's not just a collaboration. It's a homecoming.

Get in touch with Jonathan event@jonathschofieldtours.com

X: @jonathschofield
Instagram: @jschotours

From Brooklyn, New York - Princeton undergraduate, Wharton MBA, and then a job at Blackwells bookshop that pulled him to Oxford in 1997 - Herb Kim arrived in the north of England by the most improbable sequence of detours. He stayed. And then he got to work.

The move to Newcastle in the early 2000s was the making of it. He co-founded Codeworks, planted himself in the region’s growing tech scene, and in 2008 launched the Thinking Digital Conference at Sage Gateshead. TEDxNewcastle, TEDxManchester and TEDxDurham followed. The videos from his events have since been viewed nearly 100 million times.

His real work happens before anyone sets foot on a stage. He researches, recruits, and coaches speakers - finding innovators with a story worth telling, then helping them discover exactly how to tell it. “My magic moments are in helping a speaker find new ways to tell their story - to communicate their insights in a way that helps them connect with an audience in a meaningful and impactful way.” In 2024, TEDxManchester earned TEDx Legacy status, placing it among the top twenty TEDx
events in the world. In 2025, it produced the No. 1 rated TED Talk of the year: Aime McNee’s “The Case for Making Art When the World is on Fire.” WIRED Magazine named him in its WIRED100. His Majesty the King awarded him an Honorary MBE for services to the technology sector in Northern England. The bookshop turned out to be the start of something.

Why Blake Mill?

“For me the Blake Mill brand is all about creativity, high production values and helping people communicate and connect in bold new ways. Put another way, if the TED Conference was a men’s shirt it would be Blake Mill.” From a man whose career is built around making ideas land - that’s a considered endorsement.

Get in touch with Herb

herb@tedxmanchester.com  linkedin.com/in/herbkim

From Moncton, New Brunswick, a small city on Canada's East Coast, to the film sets of Toronto and beyond, Randy Thomas has built a career on the ability to inhabit a room and make people believe.

A triple threat by any measure, Randy is an actor, screenwriter, and co-founder of Pinnacle Entertainment Group Films. He doesn't wait for the phone to ring - he builds the projects himself. His 2024 credit says a lot about where his career has arrived: in Ali Abbasi's critically acclaimed biopic The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, Randy plays the TV host at the grand opening of Trump Tower. It's a small role in a very large story, and he owns every second of it.

His recent work spans prestige film and
crowd-pleasing television in equal measure. He played the magnetic business magnate Barrington Knightly in Apple TV+'s Christmas with the Knightlys (2023), guest-starred in the Jane Mysteries franchise, and appeared in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair and Netflix's 21 Thunder. Before all of it, he was a competitive hockey player and semi-pro soccer player - someone who understands that performance, whether on a pitch or a set, is about preparation and presence.

What drives him, across all of it, is a belief that a life lived with courage and generosity is worth sharing. His own adventures - the roles taken, the risks backed, the failures absorbed and the wins celebrated - are fuel for encouraging others to be brave. He leads, as he puts it, with love.

Why Blake Mill?
The answer turns out to be almost fifty years old. Randy and Blake Mill's founder Ken Price won a soccer championship together as teenagers back in Moncton. Half a century on, the instinct is the same: back the people you believe in, and keep winning together. As for the shirts, "They're unique," he says. "Like me."

Get in touch with Randy
X: @RandyThomasFilm
Facebook: RandyThomasFilm

From touring pop musician to the UK's leading eyewear stylist, via a family opticians in Hereford and a personal styling course in London, Dan Scott's career has followed the logic of someone who keeps asking what more is possible.

Born into an opticians family, he spent his
twenties fronting Daniel and the Scandals, touring internationally before the band wound down and he came home to help his parents in their practice. What he found there changed everything. The experience of most glasses-wearers - a perfunctory eye test followed by an awkward shuffle in front of a wall of frames - struck him as a missed opportunity. "The current offering in opticians was just not enough," he says. He trained as a Personal Stylist in London, combined it with his dispensing optics expertise, and launched The Eyewear Stylist at MediaCityUK, Salford in 2021.

The press followed quickly: Financial Times,
Telegraph, BBC, ITV, HuffPost, Attitude Magazine. His clients include BBC Radio 1's Dean McCullough. He travels the international eyewear trade show circuit - Paris, Milan, Munich, New York. He runs a 12-session styling programme for optical professionals and hosts The Eyewear Stylist Podcast. In 2025, the industry named him Optician of the Year.

The partnership with Blake Mill is a natural one. Both believe that what you choose to put on your body is a statement made with intention. When Dan styles eyewear at Blake Mill events, he's working in precisely the same territory: helping people look as deliberate as they feel.

Find Dan
theeyewearstylist.co.uk
Instagram: @eyewear_stylist
X: @Eyewear_Stylist

From Heswall, Merseyside, via Dunoon on Scotland's west coast and fifteen years in the British Army, Steve Brooks came to DJing at fifty-eight. Most people his age are thinking about winding down. Steve was just getting started.

Before the decks, there was the Army. He joined at twenty-one, trained as a Bomb Disposal Officer in the Royal Engineers, and spent fifteen years finishing what others couldn't. The composure that job demands - focused, prepared, committed under pressure - turns out to be exactly what great DJing requires. The booth is calmer than it looks when you've defused bombs for a living.

The catalyst was a visit to Gary, an old friend who'd once played to American crowds in local venues, bravely facing a returning brain tumour and exhausted from fighting. Something in that visit unlocked what Steve had been carrying since the school discos and early club nights that first woke him up to music. He trained. He played. He found what he'd been looking for: the frisson - the goosebump moment when a room reacts together to exactly the right track.

Now based in Lancing, West Sussex, a short walk from the beach, Steve plays a sound shaped by Ibiza's small club scene and the sunset sessions of Greece: house, soul and dancefloor classics, with the occasional well-timed throwback. He holds a residency at Off The Beach Café in Hove, hosts The Builder's Breakfast on Codesouth Radio every Friday, and has played two stages at Glastonbury — with 2027 already confirmed. He's also the man who warmed up for Fatboy Slim at Hove Lagoon Festival. That's not an accident. That's a career.

Why Blake Mill?
For Steve, the look is part of the set. "Blake Mill provides me with a fabulous organic cotton garment that oozes quality and style. The louder the pattern the more I like it."

Find Steve
Instagram: @stevie_bee_dj
Facebook: DJ Stevie Bee
TikTok: DJ Stevie Bee
YouTube: ArchitectsOfSound