3 ways we're like Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen

Sure, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen were a household name before they launched their clothing line. But the world’s arguably most famous twins chose not to rest on their well-known laurels, instead taking what they learned from a lifetime of working in the entertainment industry and applying it to start their own fashion empire, spearheaded by their luxury brand The Row. The Olsens are now on course to be America’s next billionaires, as reported by a recent article in Newsweek.

MK and A fascination aside, their strategy - including a small, core group of diverse talents, resources, and values, is a lot like ours at Orion Creative Group.

Don’t believe us? Read on:

1.  They balance each other: Olsen twin lore has it that Ashley focuses on the technical aspects of each design while Mary Kate is somewhat of an aesthetics fetishist.

• Like Mary Kate and Ashley, we have a technical expert in Travis and an aesthetic expert in Harley. The two perspectives that they bring to each project are necessary, as is the collaboration between the two.

2. They're champions of form and function: As Newsweek’s Rob Givhan points out, “Most young designers create collections for their contemporaries—or some fairy-tale version of them. And even as designers grow older, they tend to shift their focus to women who are their junior. The Olsens seem to revel in the promise of maturity. Their work avoids high-society, leisure-class clichés. Instead, it evokes a professional, tailored, hail-a-cab-in-the-rain reality.”

• While sometimes we’re all about the fantasy, we focus on building websites that are clean, professional, and tailored to the unique needs and desires of your target audience. You work hard, so should your wardrobe - and so should your website.

3. Their products are locally made: Newsweek reports, “[The Olsens] have become champions in a longstanding effort to save this country’s garment factories. In 1965, factories in America produced 95 percent of the clothes sold in this country, according to savethegarmentcenter.org. The Olsens have taken up this blue-collar cause by producing their collection in factories in New York and, to a lesser degree, Los Angeles. “I really believe in our being able to create here and utilize the skills that people have here,” says Ashley. “The skill set is here. Our main issue is that some of the machinery is gone, so some knitwear is produced in Italy. But whether it’s clothing or cars, I believe in manufacturing as close to home as possible.”

• While we may not be blue collar, we’re definitely advocates of keeping web development in house, and creating our sites right here in the USA. We applaud the achievements of countries around the world that are emerging as software engineering hubs - but at the same time, we want to create growth here in our own backyard, and we also believe that working with a local team has major benefits that outweigh any cost savings from offshoring development work.

As Harley pointed out in a recent strategic recommendation for a client: "In cases where the specs are defined precisely and you have internal personnel keeping a daily watch on the work, offshore providers can sometimes execute quite well, and of course the costs are much lower. However, in actual fact that's a very rare scenario for web development. Much more often, a client knows their overall goals, and may even have designs, etc., but doesn't have a granular plan that goes to the level of database schema, coding techniques, and so on. So they may end up with a site that looks like their designs, but key omissions of underlying structure can make maintenance a huge headache. A great development team that shares your language, customs, and at least general time zone can be an enormous help in thinking through the process of creating your site, guiding you to the best decisions that serve your long term goals and helping you to avoid problems you may not even be thinking of yet."

Now, if the Olsens ever need web dev or design work, we hope they know where to go!

Brand Strategist

Erna's job is to keep the narrative for the brands she manages consistent and in constant evolution, through various channels and media platforms.