Jinny Coyle Behind the scenes of Enterprise by Design is the shy & retiring director of FLUX Design Studio based in Footscray just across the Maribyrnong river from Melbourne for almost 2 decades.

Jinny has totally lost count of the number of jobs & careers she has had but lists a few that have shaped Enterprise by Design.

  • mid 70’s: making & selling hand made jewellery in front of the St Kilda PO (yep, she was a busker!)PaddintonMkt
  • late 70’s: enrolled in RMIT fine arts degree (Melbourne)
  • early 80’s: first ever freelance logo designed for a wine bar in Homebush, Sydney (pen, letraset & whiteout)
  • commercial artist for a hardware wholesaler (hand drawing pots, pans, screws & pliers!) fell in love with her .25 rotring pen
  • regular market stall at Paddington market selling hand painted jewellery (you know those wee men you buy for miniature train sets – yep, that’s them!)
  • retail shop in Newtown (Sydney) selling giftware, jewellery & hand made clothing.

Come the mid 80’s Jinny slowed down a little to have gorgeous twin girls. Her marriage broke down soon after their birth & she began working multiple jobs … retail manager for a Sydney fashion designer, Avon lady (LOL) & receptionist.

Moving to back to Melbourne, Jinny worked in a funky boutique gift shop in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy while re-building her jewellery business on the side with the aim of running a home-based business when the girls started school.

After moving  out of the big smoke & into a tiny village in the middle of the Wombat State Forest, she fell  in love & married Brendan who became her new life & business partner. In the late 80’s, with Brendan’s amazing artistic & sculptural talents, the jewellery business progressed into the manufacture & wholesale of boutique resin giftware. While servicing 600 shops nationally, they opened a shop at the front of their home to sell seconds & also managed one of the first holiday accommodation agencies in the area.

Amongst this busy-ness, Jinny brought a third girl into the world!

Marketing the business was a cresin giftware by Absolute Fabricationsonstant challenge. Printing was expensive, especially for colour! Advertising in yellow pages, local papers, magazines & trade fairs were their main activities … all costly options for a small business!

That was until the very early 90’s & the internet when Jinny quickly saw the possibilities for niche marketing. To be able to show colour & images with unlimited text & no size limitations was a godsend! Pretty soon she had learned how to code HTML & had built 2 websites … one for the accommodation agency, the other for the wholesale business.

Of course the internet opened other markets & opportunities, particularly for mass marketing. Imports from China exploded & gift & homewares became cheap & disposable. In the mid ’90’s the pair closed the physical businesses.

Jinny started afresh as a web designer & returned to study. Again at RMIT, but this time to do a Graduate Diploma Internet & Web Technology. On completion of the course, Jinny was technically proficient but felt her websites lacked polish. She enrolled in a BA in Multimedia & became obsessed with pixels, bezier curves, design theory & typography.

At the end of her studies, she opened FLUX Design Studio specialising in visual marketing. She designed DVD’s, animations, websites & annual reports for  councils, NFPs & SMB’s. She also taught graphic & web design at a number of tertiary institutions. The businesses portfolio grew & expanded. Meanwhile she continued to invest in learning new skills.

Fast forward to 2015. Facebook has become a business resource where many start-ups ask for marketing & design advise only to be cut down by so called professionals for their “ignorance & lack of professionalism”. It’s after seeing this happen far too often that, with years of experience & a wealth of knowledge under her belt, Jinny has decided to take her teaching online, educating & empowering women entrepreneurs to take control of their visual identity & marketing. She has big plans for Enterprise by Design which will offer education & information in the form of blog articles, eBooks, resources, eCourses & a membership community (early 2020).

What more can we say but … watch this space!