Vans Vanguards Puts Women Skaters at the Center of Off The Wall
Vans launched Vanguards in the United States in March 2019 as a four-minute film celebrating the identities and stories of four women skateboarders drawn from three countries, positioning the work as the opening chapter of the brand's broader This Is Off The Wall platform.
The campaign arrived at a meaningful cultural moment. Published in March 2019 and timed to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8, Vanguards introduced athletes Lizzie Armanto and Brighton Zeuner from the United States, Yndiara Asp from Brazil, and Mami Tezuka from Japan. Rather than framing the film around product features or competitive performance, Vans chose to foreground the personalities, motivations, and cultural contexts that shape each skater's relationship with the sport, as documented by clapboard.com and confirmed by thedrum.com. The campaign contained a single media asset — the film itself — letting the four-minute runtime carry the full weight of the brand narrative.
In the United States, where skate culture has long held an ambivalent relationship with mainstream fashion and apparel marketing, the Vanguards approach represented a deliberate departure from convention. The activation extended beyond the film's March 2019 release, with women's skate workshops and planned touchpoints running throughout the year at Vans Park Series events, according to shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com. Vanguards earned a Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100, reflecting strong creative intent and cultural specificity within the Retail Services category. The campaign's agency of record for this production was not publicly disclosed at the time of this writing.
Vans built Vanguards on a recognition that women skateboarders had been systematically underrepresented in brand sponsorship and mainstream skate media. Jamie Reilly, Vice-President of Creative at Vans, captured the historical tension directly in The Drum on March 6, 2019, stating that sponsoring skateboarders used to be like sponsoring burglars — an observation that underscores how far both the sport and the brand's relationship to it had shifted by 2019. That shift created the strategic opening Vanguards was designed to occupy.
In the United States, the athletic footwear and lifestyle apparel markets were expanding steadily at the time of the campaign's release. According to marketresearch.com, the global athletic footwear segment was estimated at approximately 51.6 billion US dollars in 2019, with a compound annual growth rate of around 5.1 percent projected through 2025. Within that landscape, Vans competed directly against Nike's skateboarding-specific lines and Adidas Skateboarding, both of which had invested significantly in male-dominated skate rosters and competitive sponsorship structures. By anchoring Vanguards to women's stories rather than contest results or product launches, Vans differentiated its positioning in the United States market without ceding the authentic skate credibility that defines the brand.
The decision to feature athletes from Brazil, Japan, and the United States also served a geographic strategy. Vans Park Series events provided a ready-made international infrastructure for extending the Vanguards narrative throughout 2019, as reported by shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com. In the US specifically, aligning the campaign's launch with International Women's Day amplified cultural relevance and press coverage, turning a brand film into a broader conversation about representation in action sports.
Vanguards is a four-minute film. That runtime is itself a creative statement — in a media environment where skate brand content typically runs to thirty-second edits or highlight reels, Vans committed to a pace that allowed character and context to develop rather than compress.
The film drew its four subjects from distinct national skate scenes: the United States through Lizzie Armanto and Brighton Zeuner, Brazil through Yndiara Asp, and Japan through Mami Tezuka. Each athlete's segment reflected a different cultural register, and the editorial structure of the film let those differences coexist without forcing a single homogenised narrative onto them. The result, as described by thedrum.com, was a celebration of female skater identities rather than a conventional product advertisement — a distinction that shaped every creative decision from casting to tone.
Erwin Federizo, Global Executive Creative Director at Vans, articulated the brand's intent in The Drum on March 6, 2019. Federizo stated that Vans' brand identity is continually inspired by personalities such as the women featured in the Vanguards campaign, and that by sharing their stories, the brand is able to continue celebrating the unique individuals who are living and breathing Vans' Off The Wall ethos. That framing — identity before product — guided the film's visual and narrative approach throughout. Production credits for Vanguards beyond the named internal creative leadership are not publicly documented. The campaign appeared in the adsoftheworld.com archive with a single media asset, confirming the film as the sole deliverable of the creative work.
No verified performance data for Vanguards is publicly available in terms of view counts, earned media reach, conversion metrics, or sales attribution. The campaign was not entered into major award shows under publicly traceable records, and no third-party measurement organisations have published figures specific to this activation.
Structural analysis, however, points to several factors that would reasonably contribute to effectiveness. Launching in the United States on International Women's Day gave Vanguards immediate editorial context and the kind of cultural timeliness that earns organic press coverage — coverage that thedrum.com duly provided in its March 6, 2019 report by Andrew Blustein. The decision to extend activations through Vans Park Series events across the rest of 2019, as confirmed by shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com, distributed the campaign's audience touchpoints well beyond a single release moment, building cumulative exposure rather than relying on a single spike.
The campaign's positioning as the first chapter of This Is Off The Wall also provided structural longevity. By anchoring Vanguards to a platform rather than a standalone execution, Vans created a framework that could accumulate meaning over time. The Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100 reflects that the campaign demonstrates clear cultural purpose and disciplined creative focus, even in the absence of quantified results. Where the score finds limits is in the single-asset format, which constrains the campaign's ability to demonstrate range or adapt across different audience contexts within the United States market.
Vans Vanguards is a four-minute film released in the United States in March 2019. It served as the first chapter of the brand's This Is Off The Wall platform, celebrating women skateboarders Lizzie Armanto, Brighton Zeuner, Yndiara Asp, and Mami Tezuka through their personal stories rather than product messaging, as reported by thedrum.com.
Vanguards features four professional women skateboarders. Lizzie Armanto and Brighton Zeuner represent the United States, Yndiara Asp represents Brazil, and Mami Tezuka represents Japan. Their inclusion reflected Vans' intent to present a geographically diverse portrait of women's skate culture, as documented by clapboard.com and confirmed by thedrum.com.
Vans timed the Vanguards women's skate workshops to launch on March 8, 2019, coinciding with International Women's Day. The alignment gave the campaign immediate cultural relevance in the United States and extended its reach beyond a standard brand film release, connecting the work to a broader public conversation about representation in sport.
Vanguards was explicitly positioned as the first chapter of Vans' This Is Off The Wall campaign, according to thedrum.com and shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com. That structure gave the 2019 film a platform role rather than a standalone one, allowing Vans to build on the Vanguards narrative through subsequent activations at Vans Park Series events throughout the year.
Global Executive Creative Director Erwin Federizo stated in The Drum that Vans' brand identity is continually inspired by personalities like those in Vanguards, and that sharing their stories celebrates individuals living the Off The Wall ethos. The four-minute runtime prioritised character depth over product promotion, distinguishing it from conventional fashion and apparel advertising formats.
Vans Vanguards received a Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong cultural focus, purposeful casting across the United States, Brazil, and Japan, and its role as the opening chapter of a larger platform. The single-asset format limits the score's ceiling within the Retail Services and lifestyle apparel category.
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