Summary
Vlad Tarcan is a brand strategist with over a decade spent turning corporate strategy into stories that stick.
He descends from two lines that rarely meet: artists on one side, including the composer Béla Bartók, and mechanics on the other. Growing up in an Eastern Orthodox culture, Vlad was fascinated by the beautiful iconography in churches and the worship rituals people engaged in. When he saw people camped in tents, waiting for the newest iPhone, it reminded him of the pilgrimages he used to see every year back home. Something clicked and it became his branding practice: devotion engineering.
At 23, he became the youngest manager in Renault Group's history. He went on to shape brands used by millions. Today he leads global brand creative at Endava and runs his own brand strategy practice. His work has reached more than 200 million people globally. He also creates content about brand strategy, at the intersection of marketing, psychology, and culture. Vlad is guided by Dostoevsky's line that beauty will save the world. His mission is simply to create beauty, inside and out.
My story
I was born into a contradiction.
My mother's side were artists. Composers, painters, people who built their lives around beauty and feeling. Among them, Béla Bartók, my great-great-grandfather. I grew up under that moon.
My father's side were engineers and mechanics. People who built their lives around iron and sparks, fixing locomotives and heavy machinery, with grease and the smell of hot metal. They taught me the other half.
As a kid, I drew constantly. Then I got a computer at eight, and the internet took over. Gaming, hacking, MMORPGs. I was designing artwork for them by ten, had my first paying clients at fourteen. At eighteen I left home to study in Denmark, the Scandinavian Mecca of design.
A few years later, I came back to Romania and joined an automotive corporation. I became the youngest manager in the company's history at 23, leading business automation & optimization, and at 25, their youngest executive committee member ever. The suit fit well, but my heart was craving creativity. I went back to design, this time in tech. Tens of millions of people use some of the products I shaped, every month.
Now I run Studio VT, a branding studio where I work with a small number of clients on design, technology, and the stories that hold them together. I also teach branding and design, occasionally.
Outside the work, I walk quieter paths. I'm an introvert. I live mostly in my inner world. I spend a lot of time with spiritual philosophy, psychology and behavioral science. I'm passionate of the stories we tell ourselves, and the invisible ropes that move us.
Beauty, as Dostoevsky said, will save the world.
And my life's mission is to create beauty. Insider and outside.