Templegate Retail Solutions is a retail consultancy which was founded by Simon Porter and Pepi Reeves.
They have known each other for 9 years working together at both Manor Concepts and Tesco before joining up to form Templegate.
Salih Fikri joined the business in 2016 having worked with Pepi and Simon on projects at Tesco for over 4 years.
Simon’s background in retail has spanned 27 years working for major retailers such as Somerfield and Tesco and for key suppliers to retail so has a good understanding of life on both sides of the retail world.
After graduating from university in Leicester, Simon joined the graduate retail scheme at Gateway(Somerfield) in his home city of Bristol. His first roles were in their flag ship stores in and around Bristol.
This gave him a good understanding of the disciplines required to work in the frenetic world of retail management. From there Simon progressed to a role in merchandising within the Somerfield head office.
In 1995 Simon joined Tesco in Cheshunt. Initially this was in the role of merchandising manager attached to the dairy and convenience team.
Various roles followed in Commercial, Operations, Support Office, Formats and Design. Alongside this were key project roles including Store Specific Planograms and the first environmental stores in the Tesco estate at Wick and Shrewsbury.
In 2007 Simon moved to Manor Concepts as Product Development Director. During his 3 years in the role refrigeration cabinets were developed that enable Manor Concepts to become Tesco’s sole supplier of Meat and Dairy display cabinets. Simon also developed a revolutionary refrigerated door that ensured Manor Concepts won a large contract to supply sliding doors into Tesco Express stores.
In 2010 Simon left Manor Concepts and began contracting with a number of major UK and European clients.
Pepi graduated from Northampton University in 1998.
He joined the Hussmann Refrigeration graduate scheme based in Milton Keynes. His first full time role upon completing the scheme was as a Sales Engineer for commercial refrigeration projects designing and installing cold storage rooms.
After this Pepi became key account manager for the symbol groups. This role lasted 3 years with successful sales of refrigerated display cabinets to Londis, Costcutter, Spar and Nisa.
In 2003 Pepi moved to Manor Concepts based in Bedfordshire. As Sales Director he was responsible for the key Tesco account focusing on the Express format. This coincided with a major period of growth for this format within the Tesco account and the development and launch of several groundbreaking products into the retailer. Pepi was also responsible for the project management of several multi million pound equipment roll-outs into the Tesco estate.
In 2011 Pepi felt that it was time to leave Manor Concepts and embark on the next phase of his professional career. This was as a free-lance project manager within Tesco.
During this time Pepi delivered several large-scale supply chain projects which drew upon his excellent collaborative approach to deliver truly cross functional results.
More recently his projects have focused on product development for various retail clients.
Salih graduated from Metropolitan University in 1995 with a degree in Information, Science and Technology.
After graduating, Salih started working for Telco Telecommunications Ltd, as a data analyst/developer moving on to become a senior analyst.
During his 9 year tenure, Salih helped to develop the IT infrastructure, software and systems for this startup company to end up billing nearly 250,000 customers a month, around land line, mobile and broadband services, working on a range of systems including billing, CRM, credit control and accounting.
After this time, Salih joined ThomsonReuters in Canary Wharf as a senior data analyst. Salih help co-ordinate the analysis, design, development and implementation of a SQL Server-based global news reporting system, focusing on terminal news readership by traders. Salih also worked on other systems involving video news footage consumption by global television media.
After 5 years, Salih joined Tesco as a senior analyst working within the Operational Replenishment Solutions team. During that time, Salih worked on key projects such as Frozen Food self facing equipment rollout, simpler for stores productivity model, retail ready packaging, as well as supply chain logistics and the new Tesco Community Food Connection waste donations to charities.