B yourself II by petros vaxevanakis

B. Yourself II

A Creative CV

Second issue and still rolling with excitement, a big smile and loads of international experience. In this issue I am travelling outside of Greece with my work. Munich, Romania, London, California, amongst others, meeting amazing people, working with international brands, learning a lot next to my mentors, opening new horizons and new possibilities. In the first issue my motto was that ‘THE ONLY LIMITS ARE THE ONES WE IMPOSE ON OURSELVES’ Anything is possible if you commit to it. In this issue and after confirming the above, I will be embracing ‘CONSCIOUS CHOICES’ I guess after travelling you stop thinking about what is possible and start worrying more about what you actually prefer and choose to be doing. The goal of this issue is to help me continue my journey in new markets, new destinations and new outlooks. Creative, Marketing, Brand strategy & authenticity has been my strength along my career and knowing what I like, I seek for opportunity to work with exciting teams, brilliant ideas and knowledgeable people. I hope to see you featuring on my next issue.

Contents Working & Learning 08. 10. 14. 18.

Romanian waterfalls in a concrete jungle with a mixed economy. Sanuk - London to Cali & everything in between. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill - British coasts, London fashion & Santa Cruz heritage. Musto - Sail around the world.

Personal Projects 21. Bamboo Bicycles Club - Start ups, excitement, motivation. 22. The NutZine- Greek Waves of Change. 23. Shredding Tree & Get Lost. 24. About me.

Art direction, content & design: Petros Vaxevanakis Inside cover Photo: Alex Grymanis

2012-2015

Working &

& Learning

Working & Learning

La Plaja Marketing & Creative consultant

Romanian waterfalls in a concrete jungle with a mixed economy A liquid playground within a concrete jungle. A fresh project in Bucharest, a city that is thirsty for new ideas. La Plaja is the first part of the biggest theme park in South East Europe. I spent six months as the marketing and creative manager from the time that the project was still in initial phase of construction until we did the first soft opening, the first big launch and the first fully booked day with more than 2000 customers enjoying our park. Apart from part of the PR, all marketing operations were handled internally. La Plaja was my first challenging project. Having to deal with a completely different culture, an overload of work, the management of a big team, the owners of a family business, and too many toys 8to choose to play with.

The things that I enjoyed the most while there, was the trust built within the team due to the challenging conditions, the immediate feedback of our promotional activities through our campaigns and partnerships but most of all the joy of seeing our targeted audience revisiting Divertiland. The experience of living, learning and having an impact in a completely different country was a feeling that made me understand that I want to continue travelling with my work in new places, meeting new cultures and working with fresh teams.

Press to watch

Crowd Management

Content

Product Mix

Content was the most important tool from the very beginning. Our content strategy was based on shareable content with numerous, short edits and teasing photos that would delight the viewer and would implicitly showcase the numerous activities. Our colour gradient and style was always consistent claiming ownership as our competition tried to take advantage of the hype that was starting to built.

Enriching the product mix was crucial as changing our pricing policy would affect our efforts for our positioning. Despite the initial hype, the park would only be full during the weekends. Two weeks after our official opening, we trialed corporate events, celebration days, workshops, sport activity days and mini championships. The next product we started developing was school days on educational programs with a gamification expert.

In order to initiate shareability one of our activations was to invite, before the official opening day, our first 300 social media followers to participate in the content production process, while being the first to have fun in the park. No phones were allowed in the park and once we released the content, all of the edits and photos used in the campaign got instantly viral within Bucharest.

The total increase on our weekdays was beyond our initial expectations. At the same time the organic reach that we gained from these customers increased the overall engagement and created targeted, loyal customers.

Working & having fun Having fun when the job is nonstop is necessary. Sharing the fun with your team is crucial!

Refusing access to visitors because of full capacity on the first three hours of our second weekend was an indicator of our success and our failure. Apart from the fact that we struggled to manage efficiently the crowds, we obviously had to restructure our strategy for a better filtering and a smoother distribution of people across the week. Turning down people and excited kids at the door, who want to buy your product and to have fun, had to be handled delicately and was definitely the hardest thing I had to personally do, while at the same time managing my team. From this experience we created the strategy for our loyalty programs in order to favour our engaged customers and phase the crowd throughout the week.

Positioning I had the luck to be in the park from the very beginning. At that stage none of the partnerships or marketing vendors were chosen. This created the opportunity to initiate our positioning from the very basics, by creating a very organic word of mouth through communities which would help to build anticipation before the opening. Our marketing and sales campaigns along with our pricing was just the other half. La Plaja was the first part and 1/3 of Divertiland, and the success & positioning would affect the future of the rest of the investment.

Cultural Differences One of the biggest challenges was the fact that both the company owners and I were not from Romania. Listening and understanding is a virtue, as perspective and sometimes normality is relative. Adaptation is key but the future comes with change. We managed to succeed both!

Working & Learning

Sanuk Marketing Coordinator EMEA

London to Cali and everything in between Smile..Pass it on! Working for a brand where the promise is my personal promise as well, was a natural. Working for a Californian sunny brand, in the European offices of Deckers, right on Regent street in the heart of London was definitely an interesting challenge though.

enjoyed travelling a lot in the EMEA and the US.

Gaining the trust of a few distributors from the very beggining gave me the chance to run case studies before creating EMEA procedures. Having some managerial responsibility for the UK market gave me a good sense of the I had a great mentor as my line manager, local market which was necessary for along with a good team and a friendly my next endeavour. working environment which made my first big inhouse corporate experience Sanuk was even new to Deckers. Our pleasant and inspiring. strategy was designed “inside out”. The goal was to delight and excite firstly the As the EMEA marketing coordinator organisation in order to gain trust, bigger under the brand manager I learned about budgets and additional internal support complicated business infrastructures, and resources. The rest was niche international distributors and the “thin” communities, guerilla activations and lines between subsidiaries. I experienced sharing the smile as much as possible. the difficulties of positioning accordingly and succesfully a US hype brand in a market where the mentality and cultural elements are different and I definitely Press to watch 10

Content Strategy Creating content for Sanuk was one of the most exciting parts of the role. The access on ambassadors along with the look and feel of the brand is a winner combination for low cost, fun and sharable content. Initially we started creating content to excite Deckers internally. Our next step was to leverage our global ambassadors with productions in targeted EMEA locations in order to motivate and help our distributors while getting noticed from the core regional and international media which would pick up the content and spread the smile.

Last step was to create a video brand bible in order for our distributors to create local content, consistent to the brand, using their regional ambassadors. Creating the series Behind The Scenes with Donavon Frankenreiter, during his European tour, gave us access in targeted music and surf media and a direct link with his European fans. We followed him around, filming gigs and lifestyle around London and Amsterdam while doing retail visits to excite the local stores together. Sanuk was presenting Donny in Europe and even our distributors were asking us to visit their hot locations!

Utilising ambasadors as we did with Donavon, in surf, music and street art, gave us access and validation in our core, niche markets in order to gain the trust, allow us persmission and generate the hype that would launch Sanuk officially in the EMEA. Creating local, bespoke content, for media leaders in our core market, while using well known athletes gave us targeted reach. During that day, where Andrew Cotton skated the palace dressed as a guard also got us nearly arrested. It took as a bit more time to engage the Queen. Albee Layer in Portugal - â&#x20AC;&#x153;the caveâ&#x20AC;?, filming for Attractive Distructions and Sanuk. The film would be voted a few months after as 2nd best surf film of the year. Apart from the distribution and communication of the content, the creative strategy, art direction and production of the EMEA content was all done by myself and the brand manager.

Working & Learning

Customer Service & Marketing

Trade Marketing With the official launch of the Sanuk Flagship store in Santa Monica and the positive feedback that our distributors shared with us, we engaged to create the necessary physical, consistent presence of the brand in the EMEA. With the flagship store as our inspiration, we firstly created similar concept showrooms in London, Amsterdam and Paris. Along, we created a step by step easy guide for our distributors to replicate with the minimum possible cost. Our next step was building a generic low cost SIS with the same style. We experimented in a promising market with the permission and help of one of our distributors. After the succesfull feedback we launched a SIS guide for the rest to follow. Sanuk was earning retail space around the EMEA while the sales were gradually increasing, giving us the necessary trust from Deckers to invest more and allow us a bigger budget for the following season.

Deckers was officialy representing Sanuk in EMEA. In order to create the needed brand consistency we had to educate the new distributors while monitoring the older ones. Until that time, they were distributing straight from the US without any brand guidelines. All the corporate documents were redesigned strategically, educating our partners about the way that the brand was communicated. A brand book was created at the same time with valuable instructions and tips for the correct use of all the marketing assets which were distributed for the seasonal communication twice a year. Our constant communication and collaborative attitude lead to succesfully train and excite the distributors instead of controlling and dictating their work.

Locality Claim A European spin, in all the US marketing tools which were produced, was needed in order to meet the cultural diferences, the EMEA calendar and the local trends. Workbooks, newsletters, ads, SM posts, press releases and ofcourse the marketing heroes in terms of product were either edited or created from scratch. The goal was through the constant communication and our regional feedback, to align more with the US team in hope of a more generic content, reflecting the consistency of a global brand while embracing the local variety and beauty of our worldwide points of distribution. Diferent locations, one smile!

The brand manager, James Petrie said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Petros joined Sanuk in March 2013 and throughout his short tenure completely fulfilled the remit of his role and continually demonstrated the ability and drive to become a senior marketing professional. His attention to detail and ability to think on his feet meant that though he often worked under short deadlines and incomplete briefs he was always able to deliver complete marketing activations and quality content on time for the brand. Petrosâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; professionalism, personal code of ethics and positive mentality meant that he remains a firm favourite of all who worked with and around him at Sanuk and Deckers.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Working & Learning

Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill Marketing manager UK & Ireland

Cornish coasts, London fashion & Santa Cruz heritage

A brand with an amazing heritage, a real story and a surprisingly big awareness in the UK market for which I was responsible as the marketing manager. Awareness is always a good thing, even if the brand promise has faded a bit after time.Freshening up and repositioning, is tangible with well thought and well executed strategy. Once the brand commits to a fresh, dynamic relaunch, the anticipation created can be an amazing opportunity for driving business again. This was my goal in the UK market, exciting new and older retailers by retargeting an audience which could relate both with the sports side of the brand and the fashion side too. A location able to create global PR stories and content, helping the brand in a holistic, global exposure while driving sales locally. The most interesting observation was the diferent reaction in brand memories,

between the target groups within the sports side,mainly in the coastline and the fashion side, in locations like London and Bristol. Along the journey I managed to learn a lot about retail tiers, by working closely with our sales team, experience the advantages and disadvantages of managing a marketing department away from the central offices, understanding the UK market while comparing it with the rest of our international markets and experiment with new possible ways of business development during my effort to freshen up the consumers perspective about the brand. My biggest challenge was keeping a consistent brand message while supporting our sales efforts, to increase business across multiple tiers.

Press to watch

Repositioning & Refreshing In our effort to remind and reposition O’Neill in the UK and Ireland we designed experiential activations. The strategy was to retarget physical the desirable core audience and follow up digitally, by creating sharable content, through experiences in which they would have been involved. Our core audience are considered influencers which would validate the brand while creating a buzz. Our biggest competition at the time had taken a big hit and the market was wide open for O’Neill to lead in core while creating prosperous ground for a wider audience in the rest of the tiers that the product was relevant. Our mission was to engage local communities,support the local retailers, excite the local youth, while maintaining our brand promise into the surf, snow, music, arts and travelling with the best product in the market.

together these experiences. www.littlewhitelies.co.uk curated a short film festival for our roadtrip with some classic movies while helping with the communication through their media channels.

Activations Sports & lifestyle The O’Neill bus was the best escape vehicle in the UK. Built 100% with upcycled materials, equipped with the latest equipment from the top surf brands to demo, carrying the most creative talent in surf, music & arts. The roadtrip lasted for 3 months visiting surfhubs, festivals, retailers, fundraising days, sharing daily the O’Neill “lifetyle”.

We made sure to create a chilled out environment, under the starry summer nights. The projection of the films was on the side of the bus and the fans were enjoying comfortably the movies on beanbags made out of upcycled wetsuit neoprene. Similar partnerships for local activations along the roadtrip, defined our positioning and helped us with the communication prior, during and after our three months journey.

Partnerships

In order to leverage our activations and position O’Neill according to our strategy, we selected the right brands to collaborate and facilitate

Working & Learning

Global Campaigns

Building Communities Along with the bus roadtrip, we launched the High Tide Acoustic Sessions. Once the tide was high and more people would gather on the top of the beach, instead of being spread out, we would hold a small gig outside the bus. The bands were local, emerging talent and apart from the opportunity to perform on our little stage, we would also film an acoustic song and a short interview in the bus. This video would live on an O’Neill youtube playlist and the bands could share the branded content in their communication channels as well. Unknown bands, to really well known guests, joined our sessions, shared a surf, spent a few hours or in some cases even a few days on the bus and generated unique content. A great community, by giving an opportunity, was being built along the areas that we were driving by.

Getting Involved Interaction is crucial when it comes to experiential activations, while building trust and gaining permission with your targeted audience. We engaged our fans in the locations we visited with workshops relevant to our brand values. Our goal was to share our knowledge, through our wide range of ambassadors, by creating workshops and talks for small groups. Underwater photography, board shaping, how to be a pro rider or an artist and many more interesting subjects created great content, loyal fans and nurtured future talent. In our effort to extend the life of the activation beyond the summer roatrip while having an impact in big cities as well, we linked the workshops with a project created in collaboration with www. huckmagazine.com. Huck is a well established media platform in actions sports and radical culture, which validated the project and helped with its communication. The working artisans is a series of short films around creative artisans, activated on a physical level with workshops in big cities, such as London and Munich, and concluded always with a great gallery exhibition with bespoke art from the artisans.

O’Neill is a brand with global exposure. It was necessary to keep consistency in our local activations according to our brand values, promise and identity but it was also needed to leverage the global campaigns locally too, showing that it is one global brand. Apart from distributing the global content accordingly in our market, we activated well known global ambassadors, locally, during the campaigns, creating the necessary excitement and delighting our fans with physical events. The three major campaigns that I got involved with were #todayisperfect, which we integrated in the O’Neill roadtrip, #jjhigher, for which we held the biggest snowboarding movie premier in the UK for 2014 and we supported the #unreasonable campaign by choosing one british director while building anticipation with the local media.

The Jeremy Jones premier was the biggest snowboard premier in the UK for 2014. With nearly 1000 people, we held a spectacular show in a gothic 19th century chapel. A live QnA session with Jeremy, which was supported live on twitter with more than 500 questions coming online, and an instagram competition during the event which made all participants to wear the new O’Neill outfit.

Our biggest online retailer was there as well since the audience could order the new outfit exclusively during the event via i-pads. The impressions out of the communication before, while and after were over 100k. Not bad for a movie premier!

New Tiers & The High Street During our effort to establish O’Neill in higher tiers, we designed a strategy which was initiated by collaborations with well esteemed brands, followed by careful PR and last but not least, bespoke support for the selected retailers. Global worthy PR content was picked up from the leading, streetwear communication channels and the product managed to be placed in key tradeshows and boutique stores. A great step for the repositioning of O’Neill and the potentials for new business development in higher tiers. An interesting fact was the reaction and excitement that was created out of this decision, from our core accounts. The collaborations were only stocked in selected retailers and were not offered to our core accounts but the hype which was created, helped on additional sales in higher priced pieces from them who did not consider until then.

The CMO, Doug Perkul said about me: “I have had the good fortune of supervising Petros over the past thirteen months and he has proven himself to be a talented marketing professional with a positive attitude and the ability to roll up his sleeves and execute without fail. I will greatly miss working with Petros and his willingness and desire to advance our company, products and overall mission. I endorse Petros 100% without any reservations and know that we can expect to see great things from him in the near future.”

The Country manager, James Simons said about me: “During my time working with Petros I found him knowledgeable, passionate & solutions orientated. He always injected new ideas & positive energy into any discussion whilst showing a real understanding for the market dynamics.”

Working & Learning

Musto International Mareting Manager

A British brand, sailing around the world. Musto is one of the most well established Sailing apparel brands in the world.

of excitement during the sales meeting with our international distributors.

I spent 4 months, on a short contract with a heritage British brand with global distribution, as the international marketing manager, earning experience in a new market.

Musto is probably the most product oriented company I have worked for with impressive product design and new product development. It has a great story and a loyal audience.

While my short stay I managed to meet and work with some inspiring product designers and a great team of young marketeers. I exchanged a lot of ideas for the expansion of the brand in new segments based on a new product line, produced some unique content and created a lot

The goal is to showcase its wealthy heritage, the influence that it has generated in the world of sailing along with its great product knowledge, in a wider audience accordingly. The marketing team is already doing a fantastic job on this.

Content

Production

Musto is all about the outdoors, the elements of nature and being out there no matter how cold, how windy and how uncomfortable it may be. Content is always much easier whenever the brand has so many influences.

Playing in the studio or doing a location shoot has always been one of my favourites. Even when you need to shoot in a day all your marketing heroes, while missing half of the samples which never made it from the factory on time, and your creative brief makes no sense any more, the amount of creativity in these productions can really fulfil you, despite the stress. At the very end and most oftenly, out of these stresfull situations, its when the content finally turns out to be even better than your initial plan.

The SS16 seasonal concept was Lightness. I was inspired from natural phenomenas and weather patterns, such as the sea breeze, the clouds formation during the water cycle and the water spray from the burst of waves. I translated all these into content for our SS16 collection, after choosing our marketing heroes.

highlighting the utility of the products on relavent communities and last but not least targeting new frontiers and creating a movement by defining an alternative contemporary lifestyle of “travel living”.

Video is essential

Creative direction Learning is a big passion and a constant endeavour of mine. This is why I love creative direction and copywriting so much. The amount of information you learn while researching stimulates my brain, my imagination and creates all those links to the brand goals.

Video content is something I know and understand very well. Writing guidelines for the Musto brand book on creative direction, look and feel and global brand consistency was a great process. Including some insights on SEO optimisation and video platforms was a great learning as well.

Ambassadors strategy Musto has entered the outdoors market off the water as well. The Evolution line is designed with the sailing product expertise but its intended for a more generic use in fitness and the outdoors. My approach and suggestions to an ambassadors strategy had 4 dimensions. Dominating on sailing fitness by using the already existing network and heroes from performance sailing, leveraging on fun, sun, short escapes and weekend warriors,

Repackaging Telling “stories” is what I enjoy the most. I was given a repackaging project and my goals would be to educate about the product and the brand, increase sales, create freshness while matching the compatibility requirements of the Musto retail concept and the new wholesale display units. Repackaging and all sorts of branding projects excites me a lot since it includes a lot of research, competition analysis and the coordination of information from all the relevant departments in an effort to create a succesful, on brand story.

Personal Projects Inspiration, Innovation, Collaboration

Sometimes projects keep us united with people we love, friends we do not have in our close proximity, and brings us closer to environments that we can derive inspiration from.

Sometimes it’s for fun, sometimes it’s intuitive and sometimes it’s inevitable. Watching the sparkle in the eyes of someone who believes and commits in an idea is really motivating.

In this section you may see some of the personal projects in which I am involved on my free time, with friends, family and motivated people.

Getting involved with various projects makes me learn about new markets, new communities, new perspectives and inspire my work.

Bamboo bicycle club Bamboo bicycles started as a hobby of two British engineers in Canada, who liked to improve constantly their bicycles while experimenting with new materials and apparently a few beers as well. Their passion was to constantly build better bicycles and once they discovered the qualities of bamboo, their mission became to build better bicycles out of the best alternative material in the current market. After a few years, a few more beers, a lot of interest from those who came across their projects and a lot of commitment, building the best custom bikes out of bamboo became a daily routine in their creative workshop in Hackney Wick, in London. Bamboo Bicycles Club is a social experience, a brand & a movement. I am there to help them with stories, values, promises, visions and excitement.

My goal is to support them define and position the brand while visualising an attainable mission according to their current business model. Bamboo Bicycles Club has already gained trust amongst its already developing community. My mission is to help them earn permission to retarget this audience by introducing their amazing product mix. This expands from building your own unique bamboo bicycle in a two days workshop, in your house on your own pace, to helping primary school students understanding about materials, design, collaboration, experimentation and craftsmanship. At the same time I am designing and testing a specific bamboo product that can broaden the brands product mix while entering specific niche communities and markets.

Personal projects

The NutZine The NutZine is an experimentation in communities, contemporary design, photography and new business models away from typical advertisement. TheNutzine focuses on the Greek action sport scene, mostly in white and blue backgrounds, in a casual way. There is no documentation purpose but rather a visual expression of passions, low exposed locations and interesting people.

Press to watch

The NutZine currently lives online as a Zine, on instagram as a daily feed and soon in a more holistic experience based on physical display, artisans, ideas, and a broader yet niche audience. The NutZine also operates as a creative agency producing authentic, diverse content, working on bespoke concept creation and implementation in Greece.

Shredding Tree During my committed snowboarding times, I wrote this project in my effort to travel more in the mountains, while helping young kids, local communities and snow resorts. My project was awarded from www.munich.ispo.com which gave me the opportunity to exhibit the project during the tradeshow in an global audience.

the amazing http://www.klein.gr the project was illustrated and printed in a large format book in order to create a visual presentation which would resemble a kids book. Our invitations to the potential sponsors was made out of plantable paper as they had to visit us and â&#x20AC;&#x153;plant their seedâ&#x20AC;? in our booth.

Experiential, professional orientation is something that has been in my mind since I was in high school and the Shredding Tree was my first approach that I managed to put in paper. With the help of

Experiential, professional orientation is something that I keep researching and I am interested in developing further.

Press to watch

Get Lost Travelling is a personal value of mine. Travelling meaningfully and responsibly is another one which I am trying to introduce to others as well. Get Lost is a project that reflects these values of mine while keeping me connected with my origins.

and tradition with a modern, authentic manner. My involvement has been mainly in creative strategy, content direction and in the process of brainstorming for the development of the product mix for future business development.

Get Lost is an inspiring brand which is changing the common perspective about quality, transparent and meaningful travelling by exploring myths, lost civilisations and educating about locality, culture

The next project that I will be helping them with will be in building a loyal and engaged community while earning permission to target them with the Get Lost products.

Press to watch

Travels & Photos

About me. The things that inspire me and make me feel like home are traveling, photography, waves, escape vehicles, food & friends.

Ireland surf trip December 2014

Weekend van escapes