I joined Officina Stellare in 2018 as the Marketing and Communication Manager, a role that had previously been handled by the co-founders themselves. At that time, the company was preparing for a significant milestone: going public on Borsa Italiana. This provided me with the opportunity to deep dive into marketing and communication aspects and experience the vibrant enthusiasm that the entire process brought with it.

Over the years, the company has expanded its lines of business, growing steadily from 30 to over 120 employees. An Amazing journey which, back to my role, has meant getting involved in daily tasks such as creating content for our social channels and website, which we have completely updated twice since 2019. I am responsible for writing press releases to inform various audiences about our progress and new achievements, drafting articles for different media outlets, organizing interviews, and collaborating with press agencies and journalists. Additionally, I coordinate our presence at various trade shows, technical conferences, meetings with students, and industry delegations, tailoring our communication accordingly.

Since 2023, I have also been coordinating the marketing and communication activities of ESABIC Padua, one of the Business Incubator Centers of the European Space Agency, managed by Officina Stellare. This has been another fantastic opportunity to engage with young minds, helping them find their voice and place in the space sector.

This is always good fun and it's very rewarding to me, definitely one of the best parts. Colleagues genuinely appreciate being involved in activities beyond their usual design, calculations, integration, and testing tasks. I engage with them daily, getting them involved in the technical aspects of press release writing, which I wouldn't be able to do on my own. I seek their collaboration in photo shootings and video making - the best actors ever, but they are shy! - I also kindly ask them (lie, I menace them brutally), to provide updates on production progress , when time comes for a video or a photo shoot before we deliver the object. I'm trying to make them aware of the necessity to document and gather information for our company storytelling. It is working!

Media evolves as fast as the Space sector. The way the audience absorbs information today is not the same it used to in the pre-social media era. Same goes for marketing: costumers are more oriented towards buying values, rather than the simple product, see Nike, Iphone, Patagonia to cite a few examples. However, the Space sector seems unaware of this, still stuck in an old approach to marketing and communication. There may be different reasons for this, maybe it's because it is a predominantly engineering-led world, with a very scientific approach to knowledge. This makes the sector sort of water proof to anything that comes from the outside world. So the same goes for communication where I find myself struggling, at times, to make management understand the message should be carried in a different way. It's very difficult to make the engineering side trust the communication side. But I believe that an opening towards the way we think as communicators (emphatic, storytelling driven) can only enrich the sector, which unfortunately suffers of the typical characteristics of the tech dimension: a bit rigid, a bit depersonalized, a bit too tech focused...a true meeting of our two worlds can only enrich both.