STRATEGIST
LONDON, UK
DEPOP / TURNING COMMUNITY INTO CONTENT
BUILDING A STORYTELLING MODEL WHERE USERS BECAME THE VOICE OF THE BRAND
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/ HIGHLIGHTS
BUYER AND SELLER TESTIMONIALS AS PRIMARY CONTENT
LIVE SELLER EVENTS FILMED AND DISTRIBUTED ACROSS CHANNELS
REACTIVE TREND CONTENT BASED ON ACTUAL PLATFORM BEHAVIOUR
EARLY AR TRY-ON EXPERIMENTS (DEPOP X VANS COLLAB)
/ THE CHALLENGE
Depop had pioneered Gen Z resale but faced a critical inflection point. As Instagram and TikTok accelerated, traditional brand marketing was rapidly losing trust with young audiences. Gen Z wasn't responding to polished content - they trusted peer recommendations over brand messaging.
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The risk: if Depop couldn't authentically join youth culture (rather than just talk about it), emerging competitors could steal mindshare and market share. Sellers were already driving trends, building followings and shaping youth style from their bedrooms, yet the brand voice sat one step removed from that energy.
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Context: Hyper-growth phase, 2019-2021. Competing with Vinted, Poshmark, and growing interest from Facebook Marketplace in secondhand fashion.
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/ THE PROBLEM
As social media grew louder, young audiences stopped trusting brands.
Polished campaigns felt inauthentic. Gen Z could spot "marketing" instantly and rejected anything that felt manufactured. Meanwhile, Depop's sellers were organically creating the kind of content Gen Z actually wanted - raw, real, stylish, and social-first.
/ THE INSIGHT
Depop's users were already acting like cultural editors - curating, styling and shaping trends in real time.
They didn't need Depop to tell them what was cool. They needed Depop to give them a platform to show each other. The brand's role wasn't to create culture, but to amplify it.
/ THE STRATEGY
Let buyers and sellers shape Depop’s voice, building cultural credibility from the inside out.
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Rather than impose a brand narrative, we turned the community into both the creative engine and the distribution channel. This wasn't just UGC as content - it was a fundamental repositioning of what the brand was for.
Strategic Framework: Community as Content System
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Users as storytellers – Turned sellers and buyers into the primary content creators, with Depop as the curator and amplifier. Every campaign, every social post, every piece of messaging featured real community members, not models or influencers.
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Fast cultural response – Built systems to spot micro-movements early (emerging trends, styling techniques, niche communities) and create reactive content within days, not months. This kept Depop feeling current and plugged-in.
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Events as content engines – Ran seller meetups, styling workshops and IRL activations that generated both community value and earned reach. These weren't marketing stunts - they were genuine cultural moments that happened to be shareable.
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Platform-first experimentation – Used emerging platforms (especially TikTok in 2020) as attention strategy, meeting Gen Z where they already were. Tested formats early, failed fast, scaled what worked.
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UGC as strategic infrastructure – Developed early UGC and creator-led systems that fed social, performance, email and even product development. Community insight became the strategic input for everything.
/ MY ROLE
Led digital and content strategy in UK and US markets during Depop's hyper-growth phase. Developed the strategic shift from brand-led marketing to community-powered content, building early social commerce systems and UGC frameworks that informed platform-wide communications architecture. Worked closely with partnerships, product and community teams to pioneer new formats on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
/ THE RESULTS
+100%
gross merchandise sales
+++
growth in active buyers & sellers
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pioneered social commerce formats
