Paul Vu, Philly creative director

Always the kid drawing

I was the creative kid from the start. Before graffiti, before Photoshop, I was drawing Dragon Ball Z and anime characters on anything I could find.

Graffiti, beats and Photoshop

It started with graffiti. Classmates would hand me their notebooks and ask me to draw their names, and I'd fill pages with letters until the shapes felt right. My graffiti name back then was Fawx.

Drawing turned into art, and art turned into stickers. I became a graffiti sticker artist, hand-drawing my pieces on blank USPS shipping labels and putting them up around Philly. I sold sticker packs and canvases of my graffiti characters, and got into stencils and wheat pasting too. See them on the graffiti stickers page. The same hand is why custom lettering shows up in so much of my work, and why I later drew two graffiti typefaces of my own, Throwie and Fat Finger.

High school is also where I found Photoshop. I wanted my own clothing brand, so I taught myself the program to design it. That itch to make a clothing line never really went away.

And I made music. I produced breakbeat tracks in FruityLoops. Those are gone now, lost on an old hard drive, but music is still something I want to get back into one day.

My first client

My first real client came after college: a local club that needed flyers. It turned into an ongoing project that ran for a few years, a couple of flyers every weekend.

Killronin: sneakers, vapes and a camera

Then Instagram blew up, and I was right in the middle of it. I was deep in two scenes, sneakers and vapes, and that's where I picked up a camera for real: product photography, portraits, video and editing, all self-taught and all shot for the feed.

I started shooting product for Vapordelphia, a shop in Philadelphia, and posting hand checks constantly. Companies took notice and started hiring me. Killronin began as a clothing line I started, became my photography alias and turned into a big following and a network of people across the creative space.

That run landed me a feature in Tokewell Magazine and cover designs for the ECC and VPX Tour Guides. The network is what got me in the door at Kicks USA.

Kicks USA

At Kicks USA, a sneaker retailer with 200+ stores (now Snipes USA), I started as a designer and photographer and ended up owning art direction across e-commerce, social and in-store. I got to work with Nike and the biggest names in sneakers, and with artists and personalities like PnB Rock, DJ Khaled, Matt Ox, Bri Steves, Gillie Da Kid and Philly's Power 99.

I designed graphics for the Sixers' arena, both on the Jumbotron and on the LED ribbon that wraps around the stadium. I relaunched Kicksway TV on YouTube and created four original series, including Mayor Mondays with Mayor, which passed 262K views. I rebranded The Kicks Way, which drove more than 5,000 posts under #thekicksway, and grew Instagram from 70K to 101K.

Through Kicks I also teamed up with Garrixon on custom sneakers for Ben Simmons and for Arizona.

Gopuff & Made in America

At Gopuff I planned and shot product and lifestyle photography for the app and social, built stop-motion content and helped with a company-wide social rebrand. I worked on a project with Charli D'Amelio and Danny Green, and co-built an influencer program with custom packaging that drove a 15% lift in sales from influencer codes.

I also spent two years on event planning and creative direction at the Made in America festival, for the Kicks USA / Snipes USA booth and the Gopuff booth.

From pixels to products

Design kept pulling me toward the screen. I earned Google's UX Design certificate, took Harvard's CS50 and freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design, and started building. I built Dumplink, luxurybazaar.com, the site you're on right now and a stack of other apps.

A few of those apps are coming out soon, free.

Luxury Bazaar

Today I'm the creative director at Luxury Bazaar, a luxury watch dealer. I rebuilt luxurybazaar.com and the look of the brand, and I'm building apps and games for it. I rebuilt the email program, taking open rates from 25–30% to 70–80%, grew Instagram from 65K to 106K, and YouTube went from 210K to 506K subscribers.

Along the way I designed the Travel in Time holiday catalog and the Lil Uzi Vert watch menu.

Building things

Outside of work I'm usually building something. I design AI workflows and automated content pipelines that turn a brief into finished photos, videos and posts without losing the brand's look. For a while I ran Neluma, my own AI image and video studio, built from scratch.

That side of me feeds straight into client work. It's why I can take a brand from a logo to a website to a content system that runs itself. More in my AI design workflow.