In this episode, Charlotte Stewart sits down with Sarah Briggs, International Head of Strategic Marketing at Phillips Auction House, for a conversation that begins exactly where Sarah’s career began, in the V&A café, back inside the building where she once sat behind a till asking visitors for a voluntary £3 donation.

What follows is not a polished success story, but something far rarer in the art world, an honest, unguarded account of how a serious career in culture is actually built. Sarah traces her path from a non art world upbringing in Devon, through formative early encounters with exhibitions and audiences, and into a professional life that has moved through some of the most influential institutions of the last thirty years, the V&A, the Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain during the launch era of Tate Modern, then into the commercial centre of gravity at Christie’s, Hauser & Wirth, and now Phillips.

Throughout, Sarah remains disarmingly humble, funny, and candid, with none of the mythology the industry so often attaches to progression. Instead, the thread is curiosity, about people, about behaviour, about why audiences gather, what makes them look, and what makes culture feel alive.

The episode explores the realities behind institutional life and market life, the difference between public engagement and commercial leverage, the politics of catalogues and clients, and the subtle power of a single image to shape attention. It also goes where it needs to, into class and access, into motherhood and invisible trade offs, and into what leadership looks like when it is grounded in relationships rather than ego.

At its core, this is a conversation about marketing not as promotion, but as the discipline of understanding human behaviour. Because even as the industry becomes more automated, more data driven, more shaped by AI, the central question has not moved.