Former Big Al’s Creative Emporium Co-Founder Stef Jones joins The emPOWER Breakfast on 9th September for the second emPOWERMENt of 2026

What happens when the career you have spent decades building no longer feels like the right fit?

On 9th September, The emPOWER Breakfast welcomes Stef Jones, former Co-Founder and Creative Partner of Big Al’s Creative Emporium and Founder of Onwards & Upwards (O&U), for the second instalment of its 2026 men's series, emPOWERMENt.

The talk titled ‘Onwards & Upwards: Purpose, Reinvention & The XO Revolution’, will explore a remarkable personal and professional reinvention that took Stef from London's advertising industry into prisons, and ultimately towards creating businesses designed to give people leaving them a genuine second chance.

Stef began his career as a copywriter before co-founding Big Al's Creative Emporium, building a reputation for creative work with bite, humanity and cultural punch. But after years of building brands and businesses, something shifted.

What followed wasn't a conventional career change. It was a period of deep personal questioning, as Stef began reassessing success, identity and what he wanted his life and work to mean. His search for greater purpose led him towards faith, service, volunteering and, somewhat unexpectedly, into a prison. What he encountered there changed the direction of his life.

The environment was confronting, but so too was the reality of what happened when people left it. Stef saw people expected to rebuild their lives while facing enormous barriers to employment, stability, acceptance and opportunity.

It prompted a deceptively simple question: how can we expect people not to reoffend if we don't give them a meaningful alternative?

That question eventually became Onwards & Upwards, a charity using enterprise and employment to create real pathways for people leaving prison. Rather than simply talking about rehabilitation, Stef decided to build it.

The first venture, XO Bikes, trains and employs people with convictions as bike mechanics, providing skills, income, routine, community and a route towards a different future.

The model works.

XO Barbers followed, creating another route into training and employment, with XO Clobber now set to extend the ecosystem further.

There is something distinctly creative-industry about Stef's approach. Identify a problem. Question the accepted solution. Find a different way in. Build something. Test it. Learn. Adapt. Scale.

Except this time the outcome isn't a campaign. It's a life.

Stef describes Onwards & Upwards as a new kind of creative brief and the most meaningful work he has ever done.

The emPOWERMENt conversation will also explore the part of reinvention we hear considerably less about: what happens personally when you change direction so profoundly.

Stef's transformation required more than leaving one career and starting another. It meant renegotiating relationships with family, friends and former colleagues, confronting his own identity and reconsidering many of the markers by which he had previously measured success.

That makes his story particularly interesting within the context of the men's series. We still tend to describe male success through accumulation - career, money, status, influence, achievement. But what happens when those things stop being enough?

Stef's story doesn't offer a polished reinvention. It encompasses uncertainty, spirituality, creativity, entrepreneurship, family, friendship, masculinity, service and the uncomfortable business of changing your mind about what matters.

It is also a story about being given a chance. Being given your humanity and above all being supported within a community who really cares about not giving up on you.

And on the 9th September, emPOWER can't wait to sit down with Stef and dig deep into this transformation. We also can't wait to see you there.

Stef's session forms part of the 2026 emPOWERMENt series from The emPOWER Breakfast, created to make room for candid conversations around male lived experience, identity, vulnerability, ambition, belonging and change.

‘Onwards & Upwards: Purpose, Reinvention & The XO Revolution’Wednesday 9th September 2026FramestoreArrival: 9.45am | Talk: 10.15am

Tickets are available through the emPOWER App or linked in the invite if you are on the Allies mailing list.