The global marketing and brand strategy leader tells Tim Healey what it takes to grow a purpose-driven brand Gen Z genuinely loves.
You’ve worked across both agency and brand sides, from WPP and Qubit to scaling Deliveroo in its early days. Since 2021, you’ve taken on a range of roles at Depop, recently relocating to New York as US brand and marketing lead. Can you walk us through your career journey so far?
At the heart of my career is a simple obsession: what makes people tick, what people love, and why they love it. I began my career as an analyst at Kantar Futures, working on a number of insight-led projects for brands like Diageo, L’Oreal and Unilever.
It was essentially a crash course in cultural strategy and storytelling. One of my favorite tasks was digging through all of the qualitative research that we had accumulated, and then putting the findings together into mood films for client presentations. I learned that great marketing always begins with curiosity and ‘a story worth telling’.
After that, I jumped into strategy consulting roles, including time at Qubit and then a healthcare startup called Qured. I worked for two ex-bankers who basically had no money to hire someone qualified. So they took me on as their freelance consultant and it just gave me my first taste of startup life: wearing multiple hats, moving fast and not having a blueprint.
I joined Deliveroo in 2017 and that’s when I really cut my teeth into brand marketing. The business was only a few years old. It was scrappy, it was chaotic, and it was just so much fun. Without a doubt, it was the most formative chapter of my career to date.
Over four years, no day was the same. I worked on the first global above-the-line campaign: ‘Food Freedom’. I grew the UK restaurant visibility strategy and then scaled that to our other markets across the globe. I worked with some of our big restaurant brand partners: KFC, Five Guys and Wagamama. I built marketing programs which went from back-of-napkin ideas to multi-million pound projects. It was great fun. There was something about being in that building in those early days that felt really electric.
Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum
In 2021 I decided to take a leap of faith and move to Depop, it sounded like a really exciting opportunity. They were essentially wanting to go through the same growth journey that Deliveroo had been on.
Soon after joining Depop, they asked me to relocate me to the US to lead their marketing out there. I was really excited to work for a purpose-led brand and understand more about Gen Z youth culture.
In summary, across the different chapters so far in my career, I’ve worked in FMCG, startup scrappiness, and now I’m deep in Gen Z youth culture. I am still obsessed with the same question: how do you build brands that people genuinely love and want to tell others about? I find the answer is a mix of creativity, community and cultural insight.
Depop’s offices in London
What is the offer at Depop?
Depop is a fashion marketplace. You can buy and sell second-hand clothing. Our ambition goes far beyond transactions. We believe that we’re building a platform where sustainability, self-expression and community intersect to shape the future of fashion.
Depop is a space where people don’t just shop: they can also get inspired, explore trends, define styles, build businesses. What might begin in a bedroom can turn into a big empire. We’re seeing a really diverse audience engage with resale, many of whom are very new to this space.
Resale is rapidly evolving from a niche behavior into more of a long-standing lifestyle. Our goal is to make the transition for those who are new to the category to feel that it’s as accessible, inclusive and exciting as possible. Everybody is welcome.
Our environmental impact and business growth are fundamentally aligned. The more that we grow, the more people are saving their clothes and reducing their fashion waste. Depop exists to keep fashion in use for as long as possible, and for as many people as possible. So we believe that the future for fashion is more circular, creative and community powered. When I think about my mum, she’s never considered herself a resale person, but therein lies the opportunity ahead. Our mission is to change and influence that consumer mindset.
On Depop there are currently 49 million items on sale, 44 million registered users, and over $5bn of goods that have been sold since the site launched. What does the next year look like for you?
This year’s a big one. It’s really about doubling down on what sets us apart: community, culture and organic growth. We’ve always had a strong instinct for what’s next, and now we’re finding fresh ways to harness and amplify that. We’re building deeper local relevance especially in the US through initiatives that spark word of mouth and feel rooted in real life. We’ve got a lot of IRL activity coming up in New York this month, which is exciting. From physical activations to unexpected partnerships, we’re leaning into moments that connect. At the same time, we’re evolving Depop to make circular fashion more intuitive and inspiring by shifting resale from a niche activity to a broader lifestyle.
Depop’s homepage champion’s circular fashion.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps to make a great team?
The teams that thrive are the ones that feel connected to the work that they’re doing. I always make a conscious effort to give clarity and autonomy and make sure that they go hand in hand, so that teams are really clear on the direction that we’re moving in, what we’re trying to achieve, and then what success looks like.
Getting that balance of structure and freedom is really important. So is psychological safety. Teams must feel safe to be able to disagree, challenge ideas and also try things which might not necessarily work or involve a bit of a leap of faith. That’s where you get the best ideas.
Rather than always playing in the safe zone, great teams need to find some momentum and be part of a culture that favors progress over perfection. For me, that’s the kind of leadership which helps, especially for brands that are being disruptive or playing in disruptive places.
What’s your first memory of a marketing success where you felt this is the role for me?
At Deliveroo, the ‘paint the streets teal’ campaign was my baptism into brand marketing. Our competitor Just Eat had a huge head start because they were established before Deliveroo. Whenever Just Eat signed a new restaurant onto their platform, they’d send someone over to drill a metal plaque onto the front of the store. As the underdog, we had minimal visibility and we needed to change that fast.
We set the brief: to make Deliveroo unmissable on the streets and paint the towns teal as quickly as possible. It was a field marketing sprint with serious ambition. Working with the creative teams we created merchandise kits, packaged them up and then needed to get them to 20,000 restaurants.
Back in 2018, few restaurants were incentivised to promote Deliveroo. Some were worried that Deliveroo was stealing from their business: they would rather people dined in their restaurants. To overcome this, I worked closely with our commercial teams to negotiate better commission rates.
We tried all sorts of different things. I deployed a team on the ground who would go in and physically put the window stickers up and tick each restaurant off on a list to make sure that we were tracking which towns where we had coverage so we could track brand awareness levels in key regions across the UK.
When I go back to the UK and I see teal Deliveroo stickers still in windows now… there’s something quite special about seeing your physical branded assets still very much in play in restaurants across the UK.
Depop launches in New York.
A common issue among marketing leaders that I’ve spoken to is the specter of ‘silo mentality’ between teams. Do you have any advice as to how marketing leaders can best avoid it?
It is all about communication. Without it, teams may have a shared goal but be running in different directions. Our marketing director at Deliveroo would begin the week with ‘top fives’. The simple act of everyone sharing their priorities created opportunities for collaboration where people could then input or get involved. It also helped to ensure that people weren’t duplicating work.
I do the same now: circulating documents, having relatively regular catch ups and collaboration sessions, and just creating and building that sense of trust that we’re all we all have the same end goal, which is to grow the business, and we’re going to do that much faster if we pull together.
Could you tell us about customer research discovery you made that you found surprising?
At Deliveroo, we assumed that our biggest competitor was Uber Eats and Just Eat, but qualitative research revealed something else entirely. Our biggest competition was in fact people cooking their own pasta and tomato sauce at home.
That changed how we thought about value, convenience and even the emotional role that food played in people’s lives. We also confirmed that our biggest spenders were often students. The exercise, and the findings, were a really good reminder to always interrogate assumptions. There have been many times as a marketer when I’ve been set a task: each time the first thing you need to do is talk to the actual people that you’re trying to learn about.
How do you surf the tsunami of rapidly evolving marketing technology?
I’m trying to embrace it. Two of the community managers on my team are constantly experimenting with new tools. We’re using AI tools like Zapier and we’re doing our best to automate laborious tasks. The younger marketers are providing the most value here because they are not at all set in their ways and are so malleable still. They approach these problems with such a fresh perspective and such a willingness to embrace the technology.
Depop invite you to join the Depop community.
What advice do you have for senior marketers when they get pushback in the boardroom?
Don’t take it personally and don’t go on the defensive. Pushback is often a sign that people care. It can also be that you haven’t framed the problem in a way that the board understand. It is important to understand the language of the board. Are you speaking their language? Some of the most productive conversations or outcomes I’ve had in these environments have come from leaning into the tension and not being afraid to do so.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
I think that a lot of people think that we’re all ‘Don Drapers’ (the advertising genius from TV series ‘Mad Men’) character in disguise. Their concept of marketing is based on what they have seen on TV and in films.
Marketing is not all mood boards and slogans. Part of the job involves that but marketing is more about rigorous testing, iterating and understanding human behavior. It is creative but primarily it is deeply strategic.
The 2024 Depop Hypeflea event in Brooklyn, USA.
In Mad Men, Don Draper is slick and suave, but he frequently lives ‘by the seat of his pants’, chances it, blags it and makes something out of nothing. The show suggests that his life is spent in meeting rooms with clients.
Typically, the pitch meeting is not going well, and suddenly he turns the initial idea on its head, suggests the client hadn’t fully understood the potential of this new approach and the client (a major automobile manufacturer) goes: “Oh, yeah, amazing – you got the account.” That’s not something that I ever witnessed when I worked in advertising.
And also the four-hour lunches!
Well you say that but when I was working at a major networked agency in 2012, there were two creative directors who went to the pub opposite our offices every lunchtime. They would put the company credit card behind the bar and if you joined them they would buy you drink after drink. Three pints was getting off lightly in a one-hour lunch. And then we’d toddle back to the office and try and work… Different times!
What advice would you give to your younger self if you could go back in time?
Stay curious, keep experimenting, and don’t wait for permission. Something I feel strongly about that I manage to do these days is to protect one hour in your day that is just yours. Use that time to read, listen to a podcast, have an interesting chat with someone.
Do something in that hour that gets you energized. I just feel so much more balanced being able to do that. I never feel resentful working long hours, because I know I have at least one hour of me time as part of that mix.
Connecting with university campuses across the US: the welcome to Depop campaign.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer when I interview them?
What is your favorite ChatGPT prompt?
Your question from the last senior marketer is: when was the last time you took a marketing risk, and what did you learn from it?
I would probably say there was a risk in moving to New York because I didn’t know a single person when I moved here. I had no network, no connections, but I knew that we needed to start doing some on-the-ground activity and start to build the Depop community out here.
I basically pitched to the exec team that we needed to build a community student program. I had no students in my network, no access to anybody. I traveled to Los Angeles and spent some time on UCLA campus. I was DMing fashion clubs, sorority houses, professors, anyone I could get hold of.
When I managed to speak to them, I really wanted to understand, having gone to university in the UK, what was the lay of the land like in a US college setup? Because it is very different to my experience.
I wanted to be more ambitious with my student program than just handing out branded swag. I knew that students care about sustainability and circular fashion. I also knew that encouraging them to co-create would take time. So there was an element of risk.
But it has really paid off, because we’ve now managed to create a model which has scaled. We’re now at over 200 campuses across the US. And we have a really good mix of males and females promoting Depop. That balance was important to me.
Depop’s “I Got It On Depop” campaign.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing: it is…
There’s a certainty that many of the campaigns and initiatives that we do are going to fail. Marketing is about influencing human behavior. We overlay our human intuition over the data and research that is available and then create initiatives.
But because human behavior is so unpredictable, we can never be 100% sure of the outcome. A brand might really work in the US, for example, and might not work in Australia.
Going back to what I’ve learned from working with product orgs, having a methodical approach is key. The product team always openly celebrate failures. They say that 80% of the product features that they try and build don’t work. Marketing is about being comfortable with that feeling.
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.
Tim Healey listens, learns, and synthesizes real-world best practices from hundreds of marketing professionals and serves them up in his weekly interviews for The Drum.Tim’s Little Grey Cells Club is a trusted, no-sales, peer-driven network where senior-level marketing directors unite to exchange authentic insights, confront challenges, and drive leadership forward.