Meet some of our Creative Minds

Andy Brandon

Founding partner, Andy Brandon has 12 years industry experience working in web design and web development. Prior to setting up Stepto & Son, Andy was Design Director at Espotting, a search marketing company that pioneered pay per click advertising in 2000. Espotting powered search engine giants Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo with pay per click advertising and was acquired in 2004 by FindWhat.com for $186m. Andy and his team rebranded both companies to MIVA, in a 4 month marketing campaign with a budget of $250k, controlling the corporate site, the online marketing and the client user interface. MIVA operated in 8 territories and at it's peak employed over 500 staff and served 23,000 clients.

After the launch, Andy became Director of Consumer Entertainment, where he lead the team that designed and built Spill.com a Movie Review community with over 200,000 pages and 27,000 active members, controlling business development for both the site and its content syndication. Andy has designed and built many sites, both for corporate and private clients across many different industries. His specialties lie in designing great looking, accessible and fully optimised websites that are tailored to connect with their target audience.

Vanessa Brandon

Founding partner, Vanessa Brandon has 10 years industry experience in graphic design and branding. Vanessa was co-founder and Creative Director of her own brand of men’s skincare products called Pur:phuel for 8 years prior to setting up Stepto & Son. The company started with a brand name on a piece of paper, some packaging design ideas and a business plan. Over the course of 7 years, Vanessa and her small team built a successful beauty brand that was featured regularly in the press, was a celebrity favourite and was selling across the UK, Europe and also the US.

Vanessa designed the product packaging, wrote all copy for the product line, as well as designing and creating regular product marketing campaigns. She worked with smaller high-end retailers such as Liberty, Harrods, Colette in Paris and Fred Segal in LA as well as working with much larger chains such as Boots in the UK & Sephora in France. Vanessa’s expertise covers all areas of graphic design, however her speciality lies in creating and developing brand identities.

Leslie Mello

Leslie Mello is a designer and art director with over 15 years experience, based in Rome, New York and London. Having specialised in creating and implementing brands at Wolff Olins, Leslie has also developed a wide skill set designing for demanding clients including Donna Karan, Vanity Fair, and the notorious Tibor Kalman and Oliviero Toscani at Colors Magazine.

Amanda Howe

Amanda Howe is a communications specialist with over 13 years experience creating the right solutions for clients including Gap, Tesco, BMW, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and The Economist. Working across all media including print, radio, television and web, Amanda's skills creating conversation between clients and their customers have been recognised with industry awards and excellent credentials.