The team behind 222 brands.

Lucas Vandenberg has always been the person who digs deeper than the brief — not because anyone asked, but because that’s how he’s wired.

Before Fifty & Five existed, he spent a decade building an instinct for finding value where others saw routine. At 23, as a procurement analyst at Northrop Grumman, he was processing a Boeing rebuy for B-2 Stealth Bomber parts. Instead of moving it along, he got curious — read the blueprints, spotted a cross-program overlap from the F-35, and ran a competitive bid on his own initiative. It saved the government $6.28 million per purchase.

That curiosity — the pull toward “what if I look one layer deeper?” — became the foundation of everything Fifty & Five does.

In 2007, he joined Southern Wine & Spirits and helped build their first marketing department from the ground up. Zero wine industry experience on day one. Within two years he was running trade marketing across Walgreens, Kroger, CVS, and Target — 15% average lift in case sales across 200+ new account distributions. New industry, same operating system: learn fast, earn trust, deliver results.

In July 2009, Lucas founded Fifty & Five. The wine & spirits vertical came first — 34 brands, anchored by a 10-year run with Gruppo Mezzacorona across 5+ brands in their portfolio, adding roughly one million followers. Then hospitality, fitness, tech, food & beverage, tourism. Kendall-Jackson. Blaze Pizza across 300+ locations. Enterprise Holdings. Resorts World. Hong Kong Tourism Board.

222 clients across 18 years isn’t a number we chase. It’s what happens when you build an operating system that transfers across industries — and pair senior judgment with the leverage of AI.

“I built this agency because I wanted to do the work myself — not manage people doing it. That’s still true 18 years later. AI made it possible to scale that model without adding layers between me and the client.”