Who We Are
A small group of award-winning professionals, hell-bent on helping your business sell more online.
The Sonderlings
We're the geeks that don't actually sound like geeks. It's a strange disposition, but one that makes us quite a unique company. We do incredibly complex and technical jobs and make them sound like normal jobs.
We have over 30 years of experience in working with businesses and helping them achieve their goals online. We've won awards for our marketing innovation and our customer service.
Our team are fully remote across the UK - and even as far as Denmark! That gives us a fantastic advantage in that we can hire the top talent without worrying about location. It also means our service area is spread all the way across the UK; so we can take the time to actually meet our clients for a coffee and build a personal relationship.
Our Team Ethos
We know the internet and websites can be overly complex, and at times intimidating.
We want to make it simpler.
01 We’re geeks that don’t sound like geeks - we talk in normal lingo!
02 Our business success depends on your business succeeding
03 Building websites excites us
04 We love solving problems. We’re flexible, agile and adaptive
05 We’ve got strong opinions, but love to learn
06 We’re honest
Meet the Team
Just in case you haven't met up with us in person yet, here's our faces.
Rob Swan
Technical Director
Brad Ellis
Lead Developer
Benjamin Oldenborg
Developer
Rob Fellingham
Marketing Director
Katie Gillingham
Digital Marketing Exec
Jack Turner
Marketing Manager
Alex Rowe
Senior Account Manager
Lillie Filtness
Head of Social
Rob Larcombe
Head of Design
Steve Towells
Digital Marketing Exec
A Short History
Is Sonder a new company? Have they got enough experience? Do they actually know things about the inter-web? Join us for a trip back in time...
1999
The Beginning
More than 20 years ago - founding Director Rob Swan was commissioned to build his first commercial website, back when the web was for nerds, smartphones didn’t exist, and the hallways of domestic homes hummed with the beeps and clicks of dial-up modems. 👴
Since those early days we’ve watched the internet grow and develop to becoming the beating heart of business and commerce that it has become today.
2004
Fuelled on Coffee
In 2004 Rob Swan established a solid track record of writing trend-setting articles for web design magazines, gained experience of running a successful small agency (we were once called ‘Fuelled on Coffee’, we do sometimes wish we'd kept it with our weekly coffee spend), and spent several years gaining experience working for a range of web design agencies and clients as a PHP developer. ☕
2010
Training the Unemployed
Open Door Internet as were known back then, actually started with a staff of two to provide web design training and mentoring for the long term unemployed. The coffee-shop-based training scheme saw great success, and the web development arm of Open Door Internet continued to thrive – providing bespoke website and database solutions for customers. 🤗🫂
2013
A new platform
We restructured to develop the pay-monthly website platform which now serves as the cornerstone of our technical offering.
This progressive platform opened the door to far more cost-effective client relationships, where our own business success was far more closely linked to the ongoing success of our clients. All of a sudden clients could manage their own website, add their own pages and change content at the click of a button. ✅
2016
More Marketing Services
Rob Fellingham, our Marketing Director based in Seaton, joined the core team to drive the diversification of our online marketing offering. Rob saw that the company gained recognition as an official Google Partner and introduced a range of SEO and marketing offerings. 📈
During this period the Open Door Internet’s web and email servers moved from the USA to the UK, to ease the introduction of GDPR and future-proof our planned expansion. Always looking ahead... 🥸
2019
A Rapidly Growing Platform
Our eCommerce platform now processes hundreds of thousands of pounds of online orders for local businesses every year, and Open Door Internet manages 150+ websites on our pay monthly website platform 💸
It seems that a few of the big boys in the web industry stole our idea and grew faster than us. Boo you Wix and Squarespace - our platforms better! 😎
2020
The Strangest Of Years
The time was right to rebrand the company to Sonder Digital. Our fantastic admin area fondly became known as 'Envelope', and we launched our 'Canvas Mode', an intuitive website editor that lets you visually change your website as though it were a simple Word Document. ✒️
We also welcomed Steve Towells as our copywriter - a fantastic writer, he improves our offering across the board. Later in the year, we were joined by Jack Turner, a fantastic Marketeer to help keep our growing client list on track. 👪
We rounded off this strange year with some new awards 💥
Most Innovative Online Marketing Firm & DISTINCTION AWARD FOR CLIENT SERVICE EXCELLENCE
2021
Improving the Team
With Envelope growing and being used by hundreds of people every day, it became increasingly important to keep things at the cutting edge of technology. 🔪 Brad Ellis joined us as Lead Developer, and was shortly followed by Benjamin Oldenborg to take the dev team up to 3. This quite rapidly enabled us to make some fantastic improvements to the platform and give an even better service to clients. 💻
Alex Rowe joined as Senior Account Manager to ensure our biggest clients had the smoothest relationship possible, whilst Rob Larcombe came aboard the good ship Sonder as Head of Design. 🎨
Phew, what a year.
2023
Today...
And here we are 😅 We managed to snag Katie away from the clutches of freelance and convince to keep her wisdom exclusively for our clients. A few months later, she was followed by Lillie who heads up our social and paid ads offering - having worked for nationally renowned brands in her
previous role.
What a blimmin' team 🕺
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