About
Sam Swan is a creative director with 16 years of building brands and campaigns that bring in customers and keep them.
He’s Partner and Chief Creative at Alleyoop Group. Before that he co-founded hoo.be and ran all of its creative for eight years, including building the team. Through Sterlinghouse he has worked independently since 2016 for Beam Suntory, Pernod Ricard, Lufthansa and Diageo.
He’s known for telling real stories about real people and places, and for setting up the process that lets a team do great work on deadline.
Experience
Alleyoop Group
Partner, Chief Creative
Leads all creative for the agency and select clients, starting with the Alleyoop brand itself.
Led the creative campaigns for Wet Hydration’s distribution across Walgreens, Duane Reade, Pavilions, Circle K and Amazon.
Built and maintains the brand bibles for Foodie and Skip.
Sterlinghouse Creative
Independent Creative Director and Motion Designer
Creative direction and motion for hospitality brands, with a contract editor on production. Incorporated as Sterlinghouse Creative LLC in 2024.
Gave each Xenia restaurant its own slice of Greek culture inside one shared content system.
Built VentureTech Group’s visual system and a brand bible they can build any company material from.
Mar 2018 - Feb 2026
hoo.be
Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer
Set the creative direction for brand, video, motion and product marketing.
Built and led the creative team, hiring and growing the people behind the brand.
Built and launched lifecycle email in Braze and Klaviyo.
Aloe Attiva
Creative Advisor and Producer
Led a two-person creative team bringing an Italian brand to the US and growing it here.
Apple
Retail Training and Development
Wrote the training In-Store Guest Trainers taught across Northeast stores. Trained 200+ employees, and average tenure went up 1.5 years.
Skills
Creative strategy and vision, building and leading creative teams, hiring, creative operations, review and approval
Brand systems and governance, positioning, campaign development, audience insights
Acquisition, conversion and retention, A/B testing, lifecycle and CRM (Braze, Klaviyo, GoHighLevel)
Creative direction, motion design, video, print
After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, Framer, AI-assisted production
Also
I’m Making a Difference
Pandemic community platform
Co-created a platform that connected the public with 15 to 20 doctors for real information about COVID-19, with live seminars for 100 to 500 people each.
Muhlenberg College
Bachelor of Arts
English (native), Spanish (intermediate)