Head of Marketing and brand at Smartmile

Re-branding Smartmile attracting bigger investment

Smartmile offered an incredible product with innovative technology, a great team, and a drive to improve the world. Yet their position focussed on parcel exchange and their commercial model was asset heavy. As a result got perceived as a logistics company with prospects seeing them as a competitor instead of partner and clients were not willing to pay enough for the service.

I re-positioned Smartmile, shifting away from “loving all parcels” to “connecting delivery ecosystems”. Introducing the new mission and vision: building technology driven delivery ecosystems worldwide, with proud partners, incredible technology, and a CO2 negative footprint in the long run. Opening doors to a sustainable world, one delivery at a time. The result attracted Series A-level investments.

We had no commercial team, all design, strategy, communications and marketing got designed by me.

The Brand Guidelines, mission, vision & values

Examples of the resulting designs and artwork

Working directly on investor materials

Throughout negotiations with various investors, I got tasked with developing the Business Case and pricing. In the Business Case, we plotted last year’s historical data and projected the whole company group for a future period of five years. Besides co-developing the company sheets, I developed an automated excel model, including a dashboard for department budget allocation linked directly to each country-level overview sheet. By making this in a dashboard style, you could experiment with the entire Business Case by changing only a few core values.

I also worked directly on pitching materials for investment negotiations. I pitched part of day-long presentations and negotiation sessions with these investors, presenting the new brand of Smartmile and all the in-depth calculations, and even building a German entry excel calculative sheet within a lunch break on the spot.

I got invited to negotiation meetings in both Stockholm and Hungary.

I also developed video and profile materials for a million-euro crowdfunding campaign.

Examples of the videography and animations

A new commercial model for Smartmile

Together with our head of Business Development, we re-shaped the total pricing of the Smartmile service. With the leadership team we also introduced new asset light, SaaS routed models of service.

More detail cannot be shared on this topic at this moment in time because it is still to be released publicly.

Impact campaigns for Smartmile

I developed three impact initiatives for Smartmile.

The first is our #DuurzameDeurtjes. dedicated compartments across Smartmile machines to reforestation; for every parcel that passed through these machines, we would plant a tree, and we tracked the interactions by monitoring the activity of the doors.

Through the campaign, we raised awareness for the footprint of delivery and the impact of events such as Black Friday.We launched a fully dedicated machine as part of Lidl’s CO2-neutral store, and we continued the campaign across trade shows, installing machines on sight with doors that would light up green and play music connected to a tree counter.

We planted over 30 000 trees.
Organic reach increased by 65%,
including promoted videos by 175%.
Engagement and clicks increased by 136%.
On Instagram, content exposure shot even up to 823%.
The campaign got picked up by the press four times without official distribution.

Currently developing the expansion of the campaign to #WeOpenToChange: dedicating multiple doors to different social and sustainable impact initiatives and building a loyalty programme running through a gamified app. To be released.

We stand for peace campaign

We offered one door on machines across Den Hague and Amsterdam to consumers to donate products to Ukraine for free. All they had to do was follow a few simple steps. Check the tutorial video on the right. We collaborated with StoreShippers (bike couriers), Emergency appeal, and the Polish library to arrange the logistics to Ukraine,

I got invited on local radio, and got picked up by news outlets, including AD and NU.nl. Combined media value of at least 2M views with a 0 EUR budget. Launched in under two weeks of conceiving the idea.

Gamification and events

For Smartmile I developed two Trade Show areas both with a different feel but also both true to the brand, one 20 m2 at Slush 2021, managing a budget of 50K+, and one 15 m2 area at Last Mile City Logistics in Berlin, managing a budget of 20K+.

For the events, I co-developed a dashboard that turned the explanation of Smartmile into a game that triggered the feeling of controlling an airplane.

In true startup fashion, At #LMCL I build the booth on site together with two colleagues, the next day, I pitched the Smartmile solution for 20 min on stage.