Sandstone Study: an energy retailer's data chief argues for help before debt

The home page opens in two unequal columns. The narrower one, on the left, holds Freya's portrait cropped into an arch, then her name in IBM Plex Serif, her role and market, what she is available for and a link to write to her. Beneath a hairline rule sits her philosophy, set in italic serif like a note pencilled beside a text: a household's meter data is its daily life written in intervals, and a retailer that reads it owes the household something in return.

For a chief data officer, whose title can mean platforms in one company and privacy in another, the margin settles what kind of data leader she is before the main column says a word.

The wider column starts beneath a double rule in the deep olive accent. A small eyebrow reads From the study, followed by the essay's subject, Hardship and customer data, its September 2026 date and an estimated reading time. Then comes the headline itself, Read the meter for hardship before you read it for debt, set very large above the standfirst. A bracketed [1] links to the full essay.

For Freya this is the right first impression. Her standing rests on a position many retailers would resist: that an early-support model should be walled off from collections, at a cost of about nine million dollars a year in recovery forgone. A visitor meets that argument, and its price, before meeting her career.

Under the heading On the reading table, her other essays appear as references [2] and [3], each with title, subject and date: one argues that a retailer should forecast its own customers' rooftops rather than buy a regional average, and the other that emissions figures need the controls applied to revenue. Three figures follow: 1.62 million customer accounts, 2,900 disconnections for non-payment in 2025–26, and midday forecast error of 4.1 per cent.

An About the author panel then quotes the first paragraph of her biography, a 2013 collections model at a Brisbane bank that ranked the wrong customers first. Her thesis, four proof points and current focus follow. The closing record lists her two boards and her degrees, then a quotation from Wirrandel's audit and risk committee chair and a contact panel in her own words.

Sandstone sets dark olive-brown text on a warm parchment ground, with slightly deeper sand panels and fine rules the colour of dry grass. The accent is a deep moss green, used sparingly for the double rules, the footnote numbers and links. The Study composition loads two typefaces: IBM Plex Serif for headlines, the margin note and the standfirst, and Jost, a geometric sans-serif, for navigation, captions and running text.

Freya's readers are nomination committees of utilities and insurers, financial counsellors and regulators' staff. They are used to annual reports and submissions, not campaigns. A palette with no electric blues or bright greens avoids the look of energy marketing, and the serif headline gives a 1,200-word argument about disconnections the seriousness of a published paper.

The career page carries her own heading, From the bidding desk to the meter: six appointments. Each role has a main column for scope, mandate, outcomes and narrative, beside a ruled annotation giving its note number, dates and employer, from NOTE 1 at Wirrandel to NOTE 6 at a Melbourne weather consultancy. Her ten-year detour through telecommunications and banking is visible at a glance.

The readiness page keeps her reasoning in the main column: what she would bring, three judgements and her first year. The margin holds the committees she would join, twenty-four available days and two current directorships. Exposure and governance learning sit beneath a double rule, like sources at the foot of a chapter.

The design suits leaders whose authority comes from a few positions argued at length: a water utility's customer director, a health insurer's privacy or actuarial head, or an ombudsman scheme's chief executive. It serves less well without essays, because the headline then falls back to the leadership headline and the reading table disappears.