James Peach

Why organisations work with James Peach

• Twenty years of senior in-house brand work at Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including running a 120-person team across 18 countries through Vinted’s first profit milestone. He speaks from the operator’s seat, not the consultant’s chair.
• The Growth Project, his own framework, replaces the generic growth-mindset language most leadership programmes default to with a behavioural model built around how teams actually break and recover.
• A solo unsupported world cycle of 41,000km across 38 countries gives him a working laboratory for sustained performance under pressure that most performance speakers do not have. The expedition material is evidence, not metaphor.
• Active ambassadorship for CALM and visible mental health advocacy mean he can speak honestly about burnout and recovery without slipping into the wellness-industry register that senior audiences reject.
• Equally credible on brand and marketing strategy when the brief calls for it, drawing on direct accountability for some of the most-watched consumer brands of the last two decades.

Biography highlights

• Former Global Brand Director, Vinted, leading a team of 120 across 18 countries during the platform’s path to first profit
• Former Head of Brand & Campaigns UKI, Uber, and former UK Senior Brand Manager, Innocent Drinks
• Career experience also includes Coca-Cola, alongside founder mentoring from seed to scale-up
• Founder of The Growth Project, a proprietary framework on resilience, performance and team growth
• Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Ambassador for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably
• Cycled 41,000km solo and unsupported around the world over two years, across 38 countries; completed the UK’s first full-country triathlon spanning its length, width and height

Biography

Most senior teams are not short of strategy. They are short of the human bandwidth to execute it after three years of restructure, cost programmes and AI-driven redesign. Resilience, in that context, is not a wellness benefit. It is whether your leadership bench can still make sharp decisions on a Friday afternoon in month thirty of permanent change.

That is the working problem James Peach addresses. Twenty years inside Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including a Global Brand Director role at Vinted leading 120 people across 18 countries through the platform’s first profit milestone, gave him a direct view of how brand-led businesses hold together when growth flattens and pressure builds. The Growth Project, his own framework, sits on that experience.

The expedition record is the second source. Two years cycling 41,000km solo and unsupported across 38 countries, hikes across South and Central America and Scandinavia, and the first full-length, full-width, full-height triathlon of the United Kingdom are not anecdotes in his talks. They are case material on sustained performance, recovery cycles, and decision quality when conditions degrade. His Royal Geographical Society fellowship sits behind that work.

The third strand is his ambassadorship for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It lets him speak about burnout, recovery and mental health in operator language, with the credibility of someone who has done the corporate hours and the physical extremes, and stayed honest about both.

Key speaking topics

• Resilience and performance under sustained pressure
• Team and culture leadership through change
• Brand-led business growth and reinvention
• Mental health, burnout and recovery in senior leadership
• Lessons from extreme endurance applied to commercial teams
• High-performance team behaviours
• Building cultures that compound growth

Ideal for

• CHROs, transformation leads and senior HR teams running multi-year change programmes
• CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing functions for relevance and growth
• Executive teams entering a profitability or efficiency phase after a long growth cycle
• Leadership offsites and senior all-hands focused on team performance and wellbeing

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of resilience that holds up in operating reviews, not only in HR comms
• A concrete read on what changes inside a high-performing team when pressure becomes constant
• Specific behaviours leaders can name and reinforce to stop quiet attrition and burnout in senior layers
• Honest language for talking about mental health with senior people without defaulting to wellness cliches
• A renewed argument for why brand and culture are operating assets, drawn from inside Innocent, Uber and Vinted