From launching Armani’s first website to leading brand at Europe’s biggest pre-loved platform, Andrew Smith tells Tim Healey how Vinted is scaling with clarity, creativity and commercial focus.
You’ve held senior roles across major agencies and brands – from Accenture and Razorfish to Saatchi & Saatchi, Booking.com, VanMoof and now Vinted. Could you walk us through the key moments in your career journey?
With a very general degree in economics, I had infinite ambition, but didn’t know exactly what I wanted for a career. After a two-year adventure as an English teacher in Japan, I landed in a large consulting firm. I was trained well, but the job track felt a bit conventional and I realized that I wanted to do something a bit different.
This was the internet 1.0 era, and by chance I joined this little startup called Razorfish who were doing some pioneering work in what we called at the time ‘interactive media’. My experience at Razorfish was nothing besides extraordinary. A fascinating era of technology, creativity and innovation. I worked with some of the most talented people at a company and industry that grew at a mind-blowing pace.
As we all know, the internet 1.0 bubble burst. I moved on, did my MBA and worked at a variety of agencies in digital and brand marketing. I later moved to Europe to work at 180 Amsterdam, where I worked with a number of global clients until I made the big switch over to the client side at Booking.com. It was a fairly easy transition as my role as the lead brand communications, but it’s a big adjustment shifting to the other side as a whole new set of marketing skills are required, the scale and scope of work is hard to compare, and the complexity of management is another world.
At Booking.com, I think I truly realized my passion for brand building as I was able to take more ownership of it and focus on elements that went beyond advertising. Booking was a very successful performance marketing company that had yet to harness the power of brand strategy and communications. It had become a huge brand by having a great product and the best performance capability in the world, but there was lots of opportunity to be had in building a brand narrative, story and distinct identity. We launched the Booking brand across the globe through ‘upper funnel’ communications, created lots of interesting social engagements, and even pioneered building an in-house team that eventually did the vast majority of creative work for the brand.
Over time, this in-house agency became quite robust, doing everything from research and insight development, media planning, campaign execution and analytics, including testing and measurement. Next I moved to VanMoof, the design-forward electric bicycle company. As the business was in scale-up mode, my CMO role had a broad perspective. I looked after brand, advertising, media, content creation and PR. We also developed an in-house team, working with agencies only for production.
After VanMoof, I did some advisory work as an interim CMO and then I met Vinted. It was great timing as I had been thinking a lot about my passion for brand development but also wanted to be back in a tech environment. I also wanted to put my energy into a brand that could make a positive contribution to the world in terms of sustainability.
Vinted ticked so many boxes for me: it’s a fast-growing scale-up company, a popular product that is “of the moment”, and it has a beautiful, sustainable purpose that’s at the core of its brand.
Vinted provides a platform where buyers and sellers can extract value so that goods don’t go to waste.
Looking at your financial reporting, the Vinted group posted €596.3m in revenue: an increase of 61% and you outpaced your planned growth during that year. What does 2025 look like for you?
The company is performing really well overall. We create a lot of value for our community – buyers find great prices with ease and sellers keep all the earnings from their sales. It’s a product that works because there are so many “things” that exist in the world that are either no longer wanted or no longer serve a purpose for an individual, but these things still have value. To someone. Somewhere. Our ‘New Again’ brand idea explores just that – the joy that Vinted members get from purchasing items that are secondhand but which still feel new to them.
We’ve created a platform where buyers and sellers can extract value and these goods don’t go to waste. A seller either gets money for things that they no longer want, and a buyer gets a great price for something that they’re seeking. These are simple, fundamental economic forces that drive Vinted’s popularity. Why let things of value go to waste? It’s against our nature to do so, but we have to create a system that makes the reuse valuable and easy to do. Bear in mind, we’re not critical of anybody purchasing first-hand items, we just want the world to make the most of what it already has. Our platform gives people an option to shop in a new way, or supplement the way that they consume with more secondhand trading.
Vinted is also an extremely disciplined organization in terms of how we work, how we spend our time, how we invest our human and our financial capital. This ensures that our value proposition remains very competitive. We don’t charge fees to sellers, which has fuelled our popularity, but it’s also something we work to maintain through our own efficiency and management.
Our rapid growth is enabling us to scale further. We’ve extended our value proposition in fashion to designer items, which has unlocked opportunities for us to create new services around item verification, so that buyers can be confident buying a premium products. Now we are applying our model to new categories. Recently, we’ve introduced electronics to our platform. We also see our community using our platform to trade in other types of goods, which gives us additional insight into other categories we might consider exploring.
Vinted’s offices in Amsterdam, Netherlands
How is your team structured?
Our marketing team is divided into brand, growth, member engagement, program management and analytics. On the growth side, we have our team that focuses on the paid channels of media, from offline to online, from brand to performance. My team, the brand team, is split into functions: primarily strategy, creative and operations. Our strategy team does brand strategy, planning and product marketing. Our creative team is effectively an in-house agency: a studio that’s made up of writers and art directors, marketing copy and designers. This is flanked by producers and an operations team that focuses on production, project management and reporting.
What’s your first memory of a marketing success that you were part of, where you felt: this is the role for me?
I would go back to the Razorfish days. I was still trying to figure out what the internet was and how it worked. We were all figuring it out as we were doing it. And I remember landing a project with Giorgio Armani to create its first website. It was a great business and creative opportunity for us. We wanted to explore all the ways we could use this new media channel – the internet – to help the brand. We were limited by HTML and Flash, but within those constraints we pushed ourselves with the available technology to find ways in which we could celebrate how beautiful the clothing and products were, and do justice online to such an iconic brand.
The execution we chose involved moving images – very rare in a dial-up modem situation. It was a super challenging project, but I remember thinking at the time that we had literally brought a brand to life in a way that no one had seen before. It was exciting and rewarding to feel like you’ve set a new benchmark in a fast-moving industry.
More recently, at Vinted, we have been rethinking the brand positioning strategy and how it comes to life. We’re a commercially successful company that has a beautiful purpose at its core – to make secondhand first choice worldwide. We’ve been tasked with coming up with a way of thinking about what the brand means, how we should express it, and how we create the foundation for brand growth.
How do we bring our brand to life in a way that connects with our community at an emotional level – builds the relationship from being about a product they love to one that also connects with a bigger purpose and societal benefit? All told, it’s a wonderful assignment. And I’m really proud about where we’ve landed and what we are creating to bring this brand concept to the world.
Alongside clothes, Vinted also allow many other categories of secondhand products to be traded – including electronics
What’s the value of creativity in great brand advertising?
Creativity is essential. Creativity is also problem-solving. The starting point of a brief is always: what is the job that needs to be done? What needs to be understood, believed, felt or done? Only then can we understand how to apply creativity in search of an idea and solution.
Creativity is a process of making something that connects with people, so it has to feel intimate and familiar, but at the same time, it has to be something we’ve never seen before. That’s a big ask. In brand advertising, it’s essential to connect with undercurrents in culture that are not always obvious to observe, but when revealed they resonate strongly. It takes creativity to find the ideas and executions that can achieve this.
How do you rate the value of having emotional connection with marketing campaigns?
Emotional connection is one of the things that will sustain a lasting relationship with a customer and reinforce their affinity to the brand. We’re acutely aware of this at Vinted. In a world where products become so functionally undistinguished, one thing that creates a competitive advantage is the emotional connection that you have with your customer or your community. It provides a non-rational motivation to commit to a brand.
Brands have to work very hard to establish it and be very careful that you don’t lose it by not nurturing it in the right way. Every campaign has a job to do. Some of those jobs require less emotion to be done… but, even if a campaign is more functional, we know from our own data that emotional reaction is key to memorability, likability, and association. So, emotion is always important.
“When the world says new, we say New Again”: Vinted’s ‘New Again’ campaign has tapped into all of the net positives that selling and buying used products can bring
As a brand specialist, what advice do you have for senior marketers who are struggling to balance the long and the short: the need for brand and performance marketing?
Know that both are important, but the challenge is finding the right balance. Have an open mind – if you are a performance marketer, embrace brand… and vice versa. Always look at the data and understand the forces that drive growth for your company. There’s plenty of empirical data that frames the case for balancing brand and more activation-oriented campaigns, but you have to discover where that balance lies for your brand, category and markets.
And this becomes quite nuanced for each brand. When I started at Booking, it had over a decade in the performance business, which had driven significant growth and customer trust. But the brand itself was not well known even to people who used the product. So there was a huge opportunity for brand development as a way to find new customers and foster loyalty in their existing community.
As marketers, we need to remember that ‘the long and the short’ work together but perhaps impact different timescales. The challenge is figuring out what the right balance is for your company or brand. You need a lot of testing and experimentation. Data is ultimately your best friend – it will help you uncover the truth.
Of what initiative delivered on your watch are you the most proud?
At Vinted right now, I am very proud of our work. We launched a campaign in 2024 called ‘Too many.’ It got a lot of traction in the UK and a number of other markets. It was a simple visual execution showing people wearing multiple hats, multiple cloaks or multiple scarves. Without having to explain the message… you got the message: if you actually put on everything that you don’t wear how ridiculous does your personal consumption look? It was such a simple and powerful idea that communicated clearly exactly what our brand represents.
But, most recently, I am also extremely proud of our new brand platform ‘New Again,’ which we’ve just started to roll-out. With ‘New Again,’ we’re shining a light on our members’ experiences and turning them into stories. It’s a celebration of community and continuity, championing the ‘new to you’ feeling that comes with buying secondhand items, no matter if an item is literally new or not. Because with Vinted, everything can be New Again for someone. It’s a hopeful concept that will shape our brand’s creative journey for years to come.
Our first campaign under the New Again idea taps into the mini-stories of people using Vinted to earn, save, and find joy – again and again. The campaign will air on TV and across various online and social media channels in multiple European countries. It will kick off in the UK and France in February, followed by Spain, Italy and Poland in the coming months.
The First Vinted ‘New Again’ campaign film for 2025.
What do you think about the impact of AI on marketing: what might be some of the pros and what might be some of the cons?
AI will be an incredibly powerful force in many industries and especially in marketing. And I believe it will be a positive force: just as the internet did, AI is going to unlock ways of communicating and creating that we have yet to see or even imagine.
AI will unlock efficiency changes and impact the way we work: what do we want to create versus what do we want to automate and why? There will be a ton of practical strategic and soul-searching questions for the industry.
Undoubtedly some changes will feel good and others more awkward. But we must embrace this technology because it’s here, it’s going to evolve, and it will have a huge impact. At Vinted, we’re a tech company, so we will be using the technology to supercharge our strengths and our abilities to create the volumes of content that we might need faster, more efficiently and with greater innovation.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
The myth I would most like to bust is this: John Wanamaker said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” I don’t know to what degree that is still held as a truth or as a myth but when you work in a tech and in a marketplace company, everything that you do is measurable. There are great data scientists out there and if you establish some good methodologies, you can completely understand where your marketing money is being well invested.
What advice might you give your younger self if you could go back in time?
Keep your work and personal life in balance. In some agencies, there’s a contagious environment of working to extremes: it can even be seen as fun when you’re in that world and when you’re young. However, I don’t think it’s always necessary. When I look back on all of the late nights when I was in a studio, I am not even sure I can remember why I was there.
Be choosy with your career, but don’t overlook valuable growth opportunities. Ultimately, what will propel you in your career is not just what you have done, but who you’ve surrounded yourself with alongside the quality of growth opportunities you receive from the challenges you take on. Being very selective about what companies you join and the types of clients that you want to work on can really bring the best out of you. Which cultural environments are right for your personality and your capabilities? What opportunity will help you growth in a healthy way?
Managed correctly, each opportunity will serve as stepping stones for your bright future. It isn’t always about the money – or even the responsibility: an attractive offer may disguise a particularly gruelling environment or barriers to real growth..
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
What is an example of something that you would have done differently, given the benefit of hindsight and what you know now from the outcome?
Your question from a senior marketer is: tell us about a mistake you made in marketing or your career and how you learned from it.
OK. Leaving the details out to protect the innocent! It was a scale-up environment, and I was too passive in my approach. I was hoping and too trusting that things would work out, that problems were going to solve themselves somehow. I didn’t lean in enough. I’m not saying that my ‘leaning in’ would have solved everything, but my learning from this whole experience was this: if you see something, say something. And if you need to say something, you should probably be doing something. Problems don’t typically solve themselves, and if you don’t address them, then as a leader, you will ultimately pay for your inaction.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…
Marketing is a beautiful blend of mathematics, science, creativity and design and it is always evolving. Marketing is never the same thing year after year. As somebody who studied economics and who enjoys the theory of how systems work in the social sciences, and as someone with a deep passion for creativity, marketing brings together the head and the heart, using science to understand audiences, creativity to connect with them, and technology to craft with innovation.
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
