Wells International is a global leader in hospitality design, specializing in luxury resorts, spas and F&B projects across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe. The firm has recently welcomed Tarryn Droomer to its Dubai team as operations manager. Here, we get to know more about Droomer’s background and what led her to Wells International.
Tell us about your career so far…
I’m one of those people who decided to take a gap year, and just threw myself into work and then never left. I’ve done a lot of short courses, dabbled in social media for a bit, then I went into business admin.
Before joining Wells I was in an IT recruitment company very briefly, I was there for about six months, and prior to that I was with a company called 3Monkeys Creative Consulting, which is also in the creative space, and I was with them for five years.
Why do you enjoy working within creative industries more than the corporate world?
I’m an artist at home. I’m a self-taught artist, and that’s what I do in my free time, so I think I just feel at home around creative people.
What are you most excited about being in the interior design space?
I’m really excited to watch the visions of what everyone’s talking about, to watch the dream become a reality and to actually be able to see what it looks like at the end, what you physically can feel, see and touch.
I think it’s cool to get to know different types of people. That’ll be really exciting as well, and the thing that I’ve realized the most about a creative place is, because I’m quite organized and quite structured, there’s a lot that usually needs to be organized and structured, so it’s where my skills tend to be of most use.
What was it about Wells International that made you want to join the team?
I looked at the kind of things that they’d been working on, and I looked at Instagram and LinkedIn and read everything about the company, and it just seemed to align so much with what I was looking for. In the first interview with the founder Justin Wells, I spoke a lot about what my values are and they seemed to really align closely with the company, too. I like to work around people that are open-minded, creative, and humble, and Wells International and Justin seem to be all those things so far, so that really got me interested in working with them.
What do you bring to the table at Wells International?
Structure and efficiency. I’m very streamlined. It takes time obviously, because I need to wrap my head around the way everything works currently, and then establish how can I make it work better, faster, more efficiently, saving time. I think being here it will be really exciting and there’ll be lots of different areas to change and streamline as I find out more and more about the projects.
Tell us about any significant mentors in your career…
I’ve had a couple, but my biggest mentor, I’d say, would be Rudi Buchner, the co-founder and CTO at 3Monkeys Creative Consulting. He literally took me on as this unorganized, little artist showed me how to be more structured. He showed me how to manage my time better, how and what to focus on and why. I owe him a lot of my career. He’s been great to me.
What is the best piece of career advice you’ve been given?
It’s the actions I take or fail to take that will determine my results in this life, and that is the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given, because sometimes I can fall into that victim mentality, “Oh, why is this happening to me? Oh, so many deadlines, I’m stressed,” but I did that all to myself. If I chose to sit and look at Instagram for a little bit longer than I should have or decided to save that work for tomorrow, I’m doing those things to myself. I am the only person responsible for me, and if I take the correct actions I will have a good life, and it’s proven to be true since I got that advice.
What upcoming projects are you excited about working on?
I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about the projects I’m excited about. It’s got a code name and everything, but what I’ve seen so far, it looks beautiful and I’m really excited to see where that goes.