Julian Deverell

Julian is the owner of the Regency Chess Company. He set the business up originally in 2005 when he started selling traditional toys and games on eBay. He was one of the very early adopters of online selling and jumped onto the bandwagon when it was just taking off. He got the idea from working in an import / export company for a year and realised the potential for bringing goods into the UK and selling them online. He used his contacts in the far east to help get the business started and was initially selling fairly low budget Chinese imports. In 2008 he’d had enough of the low quality products so set about trying to source top quality items from producers in Europe and India. He worked closely with a talented creative to set up the Regency Chess brand and made a fresh start. The rest as they say, is history.

Julian still maintains a day to day presence in the business and is active in selecting new product lines, developing new ideas and implementing systems to make the business more efficient and successful. It is sometimes hard to believe that it’s been a whole decade since the creation of this great little business.

His work history is very varied. He began working in the late 1990s for a rapidly expanding publishing company. He managed to bag a job by simply turning up to a meeting they were having, looking like he was interested and nodding his head at the right times. The director of the business asked ‘do you know anything about photography’ to which he replied ‘yes’ so was employed as a pack shot photographer who’s first task was to set up an in house studio. The fact that he barely knew which end of a camera to use was covered up for long enough while he employed a photographer friend to rapidly train him.

Two years later he made the switch to a new business selling Apple computers, it was in the days before the iPod and well before the iPhone. He remained there for almost three years and become conversant with most things technical. He still uses Apple products today and refuses to allow Microsoft Windows in the building.

It was then onto the import export business with a brief year spent in the motor trade where he learned, among other things, not to work in the motor trade. It was in the summer of 2005 that he randomly decided to take up parachuting as a hobby that things began to become interesting. He worked tirelessly every weekend to qualify as a licensed skydiver and by the autumn of that year had achieved it. It did something to rewire his brain a bit, in a positive way, and allowed him to make the leap away from full time salaried employment and into the relative 'free fall' of self employment.

In 2011 he met his wife for the first time, upon hearing what he did for a living she looked puzzled and asked ‘does that actually make you any money’? He’s been married since 2013 and lives in his home town of Bath, Somerset with his miniature Dachshund Toby and two very wild cats. He loves animals, music, guitars, German cars and hot weather.