Astound Commerce has announced the appointment of three new members to its global leadership team: Thomas Spellios as Chief Financial Officer, Matthew Barker as Chief People Officer, and Maria (Maru) Velandia as Global Employer Brand Manager. This significant investment in Astound’s leadership team across the dimensions of finance, talent, and employer branding dramatically accelerates the company’s progress toward its North Star goals of building out its capabilities and network, expanding into new commercial markets, and ultimately becoming the global market leader in digital commerce and transformation. 

As CFO, Thomas Spellios will define and drive the financial and operational management of the company globally. He has taken on the challenge of raising Astound’s prowess and performance while advancing the company’s North Star goals. Thomas, who will be based in the US, has an expansive 25-plus-year history working at consultancies (Booz Allen & Hamilton, Deloitte, and Accenture) and technology companies (TTEC, Logica, Ericsson, and Teradata), as well as a number of private equity firms. He is a University of Massachusetts and University of Maryland graduate, with an MBA in international finance. 

Based in London and responsible for leading Astound’s global people operations efforts for the ongoing evolution of the business, Matthew Barker will spearhead strategies to attract, retain, develop, and inspire top talent around the globe and create a world-class employee culture and environment. Matthew is a seasoned people operations executive with deep international, technology, and organizational transformation experience for companies including Asurion, Bwin.party Entertainment, British Telecom, Cisco Systems, and EDS, as well as the digital advertising platforms of Rakuten. Barker attended London South Bank University. 

Maria (Maru) Velandia brings more than 10 years of digital marketing, recruitment marketing, and employer branding experience to Astound, with a proven track record of helping companies like Philips define their differentiating employer value proposition and communicate and market it to become a talent destination of choice. Based in Panama, Maru holds a masters in communications and advertising from Andrés Bello Catholic University. 

Thomas and Matthew will report directly to Astound Global CEO Michael Kahn (MK), and Maru will report to Matthew.

“Astound Commerce has a singular goal of being the global leader in digital commerce solutions. As a company, we are committed to delivering maximum value every single day, and these critical new teammates will further fuel our pursuit of that mission,” says MK. “We are thrilled to welcome Thomas, Matthew, and Maru, esteemed leaders in their respective areas of expertise, to our global leadership team and look forward to watching them excel.”

Astound Commerce congratulates Vanessa Cartwright, previously the company’s chief client success officer, on her immediate promotion to chief operating officer of Astound Commerce North America. 

In this new role, Vanessa will take leadership of all financial and business planning for Astound’s North American operating company and for performance management to achieve financial and business goals. She will also hold responsibility for managing the client success team, which includes client services, business development, and sales, and for operations, people management, and overall culture.

“Vanessa has consistently demonstrated her unshakable commitment to our company and the quality of the work we do, holding herself to the highest standards as a leader, mentor, and teammate, says Igor Gorin, CEO of Astound Commerce North America. Astound Global CEO Michael Kahn (MK) adds, “This is great news for Astound and for our North American operating company, and it's so very well-earned and deserved.” 

Following Astound’s acquisition of digital customer experience agency Fluid, Vanessa—who was a CEO and managing partner of Fluid—played an indispensable role in driving the successful integration between the two companies. Igor notes that her outstanding work as chief client success officer has shown her natural representation of Astound’s core values. 

Vanessa’s prior leadership roles included serving as a senior vice president at digital agency Blast Radius, part of WPP, and she also held senior positions at RMG Connect/J Walter in Canada and Rapp Collins in the UK. She acknowledges that her success is notable in part because such leadership roles for women are still not as common as they should be, with just under 6 percent of S&P 500 companies run by women. But ironically, Vanessa’s drive to succeed is in part a credit to an upbringing in which gender was simply never discussed as a either a help or a hindrance. She adds that, across the board, the companies she worked for early in her career were helmed by women in senior leadership roles. “I just never had any inkling that women serving in these roles couldn’t or shouldn’t be the case,” she says. 

Regarding the COO position she now takes on, Vanessa expresses great optimism and excitement about helping to guide Astound’s future. She notes that MK coming on board as global CEO was “an incredible acknowledgement from our founders that we need to sharpen our focus”—a focus she sees as perfectly summed up in Astound’s mission statement of maximizing the brand and business value of every digital commerce touchpoint. “That’s a bold message,” she says, “and it’s one that we are fully prepared to execute on.” 

Vanessa adds that given the unprecedented impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on every aspect of our lives, including commerce, brands have a greater need than ever for a digital commerce specialist that can help guide the way. 

“Last year drove so much transformation so quickly,” she says, “and companies like Astound can really partner with you to design a strategic commerce solution aligned to your business objectives.” She also sees Astound’s service offerings as greatly enhanced by the company’s recent acquisition of digital performance marketing specialist MarketForce, noting, “It further demonstrates our commitment to helping the brands we work with create audiences and then be as relevant as possible to those audiences.”

Looking forward, Vanessa hopes to further channel her passion for environmental causes into Astound’s support of clients who are making great strides in sustainable commerce. “Through our work with visionary brands like The North Face and Rag & Bone, we are able to help offset the toll retail takes on the environment through different business models, including recommerce.” 

That’s just one of many aspects of Astound’s mission that has Vanessa so excited about her new role. “I have great confidence in Astound's future successes,” she says, “and I so appreciate the trust that’s been placed in me by the company’s founders.”

Today Astound Commerce announces the beginning of an exciting new chapter, with Michael Kahn (MK) joining the organization as our new global CEO. Whether working for a startup or leading a multinational digital agency, MK has always brought a combination of passion, perseverance, and personal commitment to his work, and he’s eager to devote his relentless energy to the role now before him.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a BA in Journalism, MK started his career at high-profile advertising agencies including Campbell Mithun Esty, DDB, Ketchum, and J.Walter Thompson, where he was responsible for account and client services leadership. After several years at these top firms, he joined and led a creative agency startup, Mitchiner, Ross & Kahn.

After holding CMO and CEO roles during the late ’90s and early 2000s at a series of B2C and B2B digital startups, he joined Performics, a leading digital performance marketing agency. Beginning in a role as the head of strategic account management, he ultimately became global CEO in 2014. In this role, MK saw the build-out of Performics from a team of 300 in Chicago to 3,400 teammates in 57 countries, a six-year organic growth rate of more than 15 percent, and operating income margins of more than 20 percent.

In 2017, MK became global brand president at Digitas Worldwide, The Connected Marketing Agency. He built a unified go-to-market strategy and team that led expansion of the Digitas network from 27 offices in 13 countries to more than 50 offices in 30 countries in a two-year period, driving an international growth rate of more than 6 percent.  

In his new role at Astound, MK brings his many years of experience in global operations and talent leadership; business strategy, development and expansion; and branding, marketing, and communications. He will serve as a member of the Astound Commerce Board of Directors and act as chairman of the Managing Board.

Based on a 40-year career filled with successes and a great many lessons learned, MK has developed a set of overarching operating principles and philosophies that guide his actions every day. His leadership approach is to connect, listen, learn, evaluate, ideate, synthesize, actualize, and execute via ongoing collaboration and commitment. He’s a strong believer in open feedback and embracing integrity through a 360-degree view of performance inclusive of managers, peers, and employees, and he champions a growth mindset, continuous improvement, and embracing the idea that our best days and best work, as a company and as individuals, lie ahead.