Sergio Visinoni Chief Technology Officer, NA-KD

Company

NA-KD is the next generation of tech-enabled fashion brands. Combining an online shopping sanctuary for fashion addicts all over the world, with a unique merchant service that unleashes the ecommerce power of digital brands and social influencers, NA-KD is one of Europe’s hottest fashion ecommerce players.

Since being launched in early 2016, they have gone on a fantastic growth journey, breaking records every month and showcasing themselves as one of the world’s leaders in fashion and ecommerce, with a three million+ strong community to prove it. In recent years, NA-KD has enjoyed 90+ percent year-on-year growth, raised more than $100 million from international Tier 1 venture capital firms (including Partech, Northzone, and Quadrille Capital), and have expanded internationally through its brand and strategic mix of both online and offline strategies.

The Sweden-based fashion brand has been accelerating their commitment to making the disruptive changes needed to build sustainability and circularity deeply into their business model – to create greener and more sustainable ecommerce. NA-KD has rolled out a wide range of activities including a fully integrated secondhand marketplace, sustainable collections with influencers, improved recycled materials for packaging, and reduced freight forwarding.

NA-KD believe their customer is everything, and they push the envelope daily with their social media content and art direction. They’re dedicated to breaking the mould and showing their followers what it means to be unique and stand out from the crowd. They’re a young company with a start-up mentality and a hunger to be the best. They’re an organisation that’s filled with problem-solvers, disruptors, and early-adopters.

Search Background

NA-KD has impeccable fashion credentials and this has been achieved to-date by focussing on getting the physical product perfected. Now is the time to advance the digital product and, as such, they were looking for a leader to deliver the scale and strong voice for technology that is required today.

Reporting to the CEO, the CTO will lead technology and engineering at NA-KD as they embark on a journey to modernise the platform. The original monolithic tech stack, which has served well to prove the model, now needs to be re-architected for scale. NA-KD is currently working on breaking-up the monolith and transitioning to a microservices architecture, as well as developing a set of APIs and abstraction layers, to enable greater flexibility, pace in development, and wider integration. The CTO will be tasked with taking NA-KD on a journey with the target state being a full microservices architecture to enable quicker iteration and product evolution. Further, scaling the existing tech function is a significant task for the CTO, with a current heavy reliance contractors vs in-house tech talent.

Requirements

The engineering function at NA-KD had previously been largely reactive and ad hoc in its approach to-date. As such, they were seeking someone that would be proactive in driving the direction of what’s possible through tech and, as such, they were in need of a strategic tech lead. The next piece revolves around leadership. NA-KD are scaling quickly and, as such, they were in need of someone that is comfortable growing engineering teams in a short space of time and establishing the processes and structure for scale.

Technically speaking, NA-KD were in need of someone who can be execution and delivery focussed, as well as strategic. The ideal candidate would have some form of experience in transitioning a monolith platform to a microservices architecture, as well as experience of leading mobile development. The final piece of the puzzle centred around finding someone that would bring a modern understanding of technology and digital customer experience.

Result

After an extensive pan-European search, NA-KD appointed Sergio Visinoni who had been serving as VP Product and Engineering for Global Markets at Adevinta and CTO at Segundamano. Sergio is a senior strategic technology leader that brings a great deal of experience of serving in various product and technology leadership roles at leading online marketplaces, having spent the past 15 years or so building, running, and scaling businesses in this domain across multiple geographies (ITA, FRA, SWE, MEX, ESP). He is a well-regarded tech leader known for being strategic and innovative, and has a wealth of experience in scaling teams and modernising platforms.