I get asked this every time someone reads my CV. India to Italy is a long way. Industrial design to digital marketing is a long way too. Doing both at once looks, on paper, like a person who can't make up his mind.
It isn't. Both moves are the same move.
The unfinished argument
Industrial design taught me that objects carry meaning. Marketing taught me that meaning carries markets. The pivot from one to the other was less a career change than the discovery that I'd been studying half a discipline. The half I was missing — distribution, audience, language, attention — happens to be the half that the rest of the world calls "marketing."
The reason I'm doing this in Italy specifically is not nostalgia. It's that Italy is one of the few countries on earth where the integration between design culture and commercial identity is treated as a national competence. You cannot understand Ferrari, Olivetti, Brionvega, Alessi, Vespa, Illy, or Brunello Cucinelli without understanding both axes simultaneously. The brand is the design. The design is the brand. Most marketing departments in the world treat these as adjacent. Italy treats them as the same thing.
What I'm doing here
I'm at Bologna Business School, in the Master in Digital Marketing & Communication programme. The choice of Bologna over Milan was deliberate. Milan is where the campaigns happen. Bologna is where the thinking that produces good campaigns happens — it's a smaller, denser, more academic city, with a more honest relationship to craft. The food argument is real but secondary.
The programme covers the standard stack — paid media, content, analytics, campaign architecture, marketing technology — but the texture of how it's taught is different. There is a constant, low-grade insistence on history, taste, and the durability of brand decisions. That's the Italian inheritance, and it's exactly what most digital marketing ecosystems are missing.
What I'm looking for
A full-time role in Italy, starting after the programme wraps. Marketing or brand strategy. Ideally somewhere that doesn't treat content, paid media, brand and product as four separate departments speaking four separate languages. The work I'm best at sits at the joint between them.
I'm fluent in English, conversational in Italian, working hard on the latter. I have a portfolio of physical product and brand work, three years of marketing operating experience including a multi-month Meta Ads programme, and a deep allergy to slop. I prefer small teams, hard problems, and decisions made on the basis of looking at the actual thing rather than the deck about the thing.
The bigger reason
Honest answer: I think Italy is undervalued. The country exports brand culture better than any other in Europe and gets relatively little of the Anglophone marketing-tech industry's attention or budget. That's an arbitrage. There's a generation of operators here who can think both axes — design and distribution — and the international market is hungry for exactly that combination. I want to spend the next decade being one of them.
If you're hiring for that kind of seat, or know someone who is, my email is in the footer.