Richard Tomkins is consumer industries editor of the FT, where he leads a team of journalists covering the consumer goods sector. On a day-to-day basis he writes mainly about advertising, marketing and brands, but he also specialises in feature-length articles that seek to understand and explain consumer trends, up to and including the point at which they merge with broader cultural shifts.

Before becoming consumer industries editor at the beginning of 2001, Richard had spent two years as the FT’s marketing correspondent and five years as a correspondent in the newspaper’s New York bureau. Earlier positions in London included a two-year spell as the FT’s transport correspondent and two years’ financial reporting.

Richard was born in Walsall, England, in 1952. His formal education ended when he left King Edward’s School, Birmingham, at the age of 17. Before becoming a journalist, he was (among other things) a factory worker, a truck driver, a restaurant cashier, a civil servant and an assistant private secretary to a government minister. He joined the FT in 1983 after a four-year apprenticeship with his local newspaper. He lives in the Barbican, London, with his wife Mariam and their three young children. His column appears on Tuesdays. - -

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