This Opace company overview began in February 2012 as a few lines of text and an Issuu flipbook of our brochure. The flipbook has gone, so we’ve rebuilt the page around the brochure we’ve just ordered from the printers, and every page of it is playing below.
Editor's Note [06.11.26]: This article was originally published on 9th February 2012 as a short introduction to our company brochure, embedded from Issuu. That flipbook has since gone. In today's update on 6th November 2026, we've added our new brochure as an animated slideshow, told the story of how the company has changed since 2012 and kept the 2012 brochure as a PDF. The title has changed from "Opace Company Overview 2012" to "Opace Company Overview 2026: Our New Brochure", and the page has moved from /blog/opace-company-overview-2012/ to /blog/opace-company-overview-2026/.
The real thing is a square folder with five tabbed inserts in the pocket, and the deck above plays on its own, flipping each sheet to show its reverse. Hover over it to hold a page, or use the buttons, your arrow keys or a swipe.
Opace company overview: who we are in 2026
We’re a digital marketing agency working across the UK and internationally, from offices in Brindley Place in Birmingham and in Letchworth Garden City, and we’re part of Jakey Group, the family-owned group founded by Rory and Gemma Dear. Rory runs Opace as Managing Director. David Bryan, who founded the business, is Technical Director, and Sarah Sloan is Operations Director. Peter Towler looks after business development, Alan Horton runs SEO accounts, Adam Bullas leads social media, Mandip Purewal leads development and Casey Fitzgerald keeps projects and accounts moving, all of them in-house, which is the first thing the Who We Are insert wants you to know.
The numbers we’d put in front of anyone are more than 300 customers and over 500 projects since 2008, and the scores below, each one linked to the platform that holds it, come from those customers rather than from us.
Brilliant service from David. I'm not the most tech savvy so to have someone who was knowledgeable, could explain things simply and have patience whilst we went through the process was a big bonus.
The project was completed within budget and exceeded our expectations.
The team are really helpful and they always deliver.
Their speed of implementing agreed tasks has been refreshing.
…we have found them to be a straight talking, no nonsense agency to deal with… I find them accessible and their approach easy to work with.
Excellent at SEO, fantastic on all aspects of ecommerce from online advertising to web development. Great teachers in developing skills in house.
Scores checked at the start of November 2026. Reviews are quoted word for word from the platforms named, with "…" marking cuts.
We also don’t tie anyone to a fixed-length contract, which sounds like a nice line for a brochure until you realise it means a client can leave whenever we stop being useful to them. Plenty have stayed for more than five years anyway, and our 2012 customer survey shows how long we’ve been asking them what they think.
How a software engineer ended up running a digital agency
Opace didn’t start out as a marketing agency, and that still explains a lot about how we work. David studied Software Engineering at Aberystwyth, then spent years at Capgemini and CSC on multi-million pound IT projects for the NHS, HMRC, the Home Office and police bodies, before setting up Opace in 2008 as an open source technology consultancy. It became Opace Ltd in 2010. The open source part was a practical decision as much as a technical one, because clients on open platforms can take their website to another developer if they ever need to, and the 2012 brochure said so plainly: “You are not locked into any particular company or bespoke software package”.
Marketing came next, and by 2011 David was telling anyone who’d listen that small businesses were missing the point of the internet. In a business profile from April that year, he put it more bluntly than any brochure would:
“It is time for companies to stop bccing their entire database and connect with the real world.”
The same profile has him patiently explaining that Twitter was more than tweets about “someone reading a book or waiting for a train”, which tells you how far business social media had got by 2011, and how much of the job was simply persuading people to try it.
What the 2012 Opace brochure said
The brochure that used to sit on this page was a 12-page square booklet, and reading it now is a bit like finding an old school photo. It opened with “In a world of fast changing technology, Opace understands that what doesn’t change is the need for web solutions that deliver results”, which is the sort of line every agency was writing in 2012 and not one we’d write now, although the promise that followed it, “No jargon or IT speak”, has aged a lot better. It told readers to ring an 0845 number, or to “search: opaceweb” if they preferred, and it warned them that people judge a website in a twentieth of a second.
The client stories are what stand up. John Watton, Managing Director of Cosmetic Kingdom, wrote that the site had reached “position 1 in Google” for “Cosmetics”, ahead of Avon, House of Fraser, Selfridges and Mac Cosmetics. We wouldn’t report a single keyword as success today, and that Google is long gone, but we’d love to have seen the faces at Selfridges. Dawn Curnyn, then Marketing Manager at Acorns Children’s Hospice, told a quieter story about a new website launched on time against a very tight deadline. Acorns came back to us for a new site in 2015, and their logo is on the back of the 2026 folder, fourteen years after Dawn’s quote went to print.
| 2012 brochure | 2026 brochure | |
|---|---|---|
| Format | 12-page square booklet | Folder with five tabbed inserts |
| What we offer | Web design and marketing, SEO, e-commerce, social media | Build, Optimise, Grow and Innovate |
| Website | opace.co.uk | opace.agency |
| Phone | 0845 017 7661 | 0121 468 0600 |
| Leadership | David Bryan, Managing Director | Rory Dear, Managing Director, with David Bryan as Technical Director |
We’ve kept the original here for anyone curious, as a PDF, because Issuu’s copy is no longer online. Please treat its phone number and web addresses as history.
Download the 2012 Opace company overview (PDF)
Fourteen years between the two brochures
Most of what happened between those two brochures is on our accreditations timeline, but these are the dates we’d pick out:
- 2013: we renewed our certification with TrustMark+, as our SEO and content marketing really started to take off.
- 2015: we gained the UKITA Quality Mark and joined both The Drum Network and the Recommended Agencies Register.
- 2016: we rebuilt the website of Justice Upheld, an international human rights charity, moving them from Joomla to WordPress, one of four projects we wrote up that March.
- 2018: we listed the agency on Clutch, around the time we moved our attention to real, public customer reviews.
- 2022 and 2023: our team became qualified by Google across Ads and Analytics.
- 2026: our new brochure set the business out as four engines, with Innovate covering our AI work.
What the Opace brochure covers
The four engines run through the pack in a deliberate order, starting with the website and ending with the newest work we do, and every insert leans on a real project because we’d rather show you than tell you.
Build comes first because almost everything else depends on it. This is the work of our web design agency, and the screens on the back of the insert are real sites, including NatureSpot, which records the wildlife of Leicestershire and Rutland, and VersaLiner, a made-to-measure boot liner shop. It also takes in eCommerce development, web apps and the support that keeps a site running after launch.
Optimise is where our SEO services sit, and we used Corcoran’s Furniture & Carpets as the worked example because 906,890 users, a 38.02% goal conversion rate and more than 400 new page 1 rankings are hard to argue with. Getting cited in AI answers has become part of the same job, which is why our AI SEO agency work appears on this insert too.
Grow covers PPC management, social media and digital PR. The example here is Cozilogs, who saw a 5x increase in conversion rates once SEO and PPC were running together, and we like that one because neither channel could claim it alone.
Then there’s Innovate, the newest of the four, which opens with a line we’re rather pleased with: “If you can imagine it, we can build it. If you can’t, we’ll imagine it for you.” It covers AI web design services, projects such as the website for Answer Mate’s AI voice bots, and the plugins, browser extensions and Agent Skills we publish on our tools page.
If you want to see how we think about AI rather than how we sell it, our experiment into whether AI can invent is a good place to start, as it’s the kind of work that never makes it into a brochure. If you’d rather talk about your own business, the back of the Innovate insert offers a free Innovation Opportunity Review, where we look for three ways AI, automation or smarter technology could help you work faster, and you can ask our team for one.
