Future Moves with Onika Simon, Co-Founder of OK Sorted
Welcome to the first Autumnal edition of Future Moves, cosy socks at the ready (more on that later actually). Hope you’ve all been making the most of the back-to-school mindset shift, we’ve had a busy few weeks at M+M Towers with a couple of projects ending and a few exciting ones starting!
We also gave a talk at Google HQ on AI for marketers and how to beat the overwhelm. You can find (here) some of our ‘five fast learnings’ from our journey as reluctant AI adopters to now, dare I say … fans?!
For anyone new to the party, Future Moves is here to ask business leaders and experts all the big questions on brand-building for tomorrow's world. Brought to you by us, Jess + Nat, award-winning founders of brand consultancy, Mac+Moore.
Let’s dive in…
Onika Simon, Co-Founder of OK Sorted
💫 What do IKEA, Uniqlo and Paris all have in common?
💫 Why are the best partnerships like matching socks?
💫 What does showing up in culture really mean?
Onika Simon is the co-founder of OK Sorted, a creative communications studio building brands between commerce and culture.
She’s a strategist who has directed future-focused research, design, marketing and business growth for over 20 years. As a British West-Indian Londoner who has also lived in Manchester, Brooklyn and now Berlin - she navigates the nuances of place and identity with a keen eye and ear.
I was introduced to Onika in 2020 when I did a D&AD Creative Leadership course where she was a guest speaker. I’m always searching for brilliant strategists to learn from and the time I spent listening to Onika and her brilliant mind stayed with me. Three years later I’ve been fortunate enough to connect and learn from her again. I especially loved our chat about successful partnerships and how special it is to find someone who is your match. It reminded me how fortunate Nat and I are to have each other, how rare it is for two people to connect and blend their talents so seamlessly and why we should never take our secret sauce for granted.
Jess: Onika, Introduce yourself and what you do!
Onika: My name is Onika Simon. I'm 44 years old and I'm from London, but I have spent the majority of my adult life in New York and now Berlin. I am a strategist. So my responsibility on every single project, no matter what the context, is relevance. By this I mean, what are we building and where is it going to resonate with the right people at the right time to give us the right returns?
I started out in advertising in New York at a company called J. Walter Thompson, as part of the WPP Marketing Fellowship, followed by a research consultancy which was part of the Kantar Group, also within WPP. I learned about lots of different qualitative and quantitative research processes. Then I decided to learn more about innovation with clients like PepsiCo International and Levi's - thinking about how research is best plugged into the development of future products and services. That experience made me want to work with the people who actually make the things that will go out into the world.
So I joined the foresight team at an industrial design company called SeymourPowell in London - and they were developing everything from kettles and toasters, to suitcases, desk chairs, car door handles and spaceship interiors. Then I did a longer stint with a retail design agency called FITCH, which is where I met my husband.
We became life partners by being successful project partners, and along the way we figured out that great comms power all great things - so after 12 years of talking about it, we founded our own creative comms studio called OK Sorted.
Jess: Did you always think you’d own your own business?
Onika: I will say that OK Sorted is the outcome of several extremely selfish decisions. I am someone who has never wanted a job. I studied philosophy and the only thing philosophy teaches us is how to ask questions. But it's not vocational. And as I said, I didn't want a vocation, I wanted to become a philosophy professor and have my own tiny library in my own tiny study on a campus somewhere until I turned gray.
But Tony Blair took away free higher education in 1997, so I was in a panic about being in debt. I realized I was gonna have to find a job situation where my personality was a help rather than a hindrance. So being labelled a strategist by a global corporation at the age of 21, was a stroke of luck that I’ve had to live up to ever since. To answer your question though, yes I knew very early on in my career that I was going to end up working for myself. Because jobs have strings attached that you’re not supposed to challenge or even talk about, and I’m a say what I see kind of person.
Jess: You co-founded OK Sorted with your husband Kwame. Was that a natural decision to work together?
Onika: Yes, because as I said, we met at work. I had lunch with him on my third day of a new job and my brain just said yes, this is someone that I can show up for every morning without fail. Then everything we worked on together was successful. When the design team was in a slump and feeling very uninspired I would bring in something very random, a bit bonkers and he would translate it so that the creatives could understand my thinking.
When I left the company on not-so-good terms and moved to Berlin, he was part of the agreement to keep me working for them as a freelancer because they hated my guts but loved our work. Eventually he moved to Berlin too, we had kids, and then we had to figure out how to support our family without losing our minds. We've both tried full-time jobs while the other one is a freelancer, but it simply doesn’t work if we're not fully doing it together. So OK Sorted is also the outcome of trying to be normal and failing miserably.
Jess: Nat and I are always asked what is the secret to a great partnership. What is yours?
Onika: This is like one of the mysteries of the universe that has always fascinated me from an early age. Why are some people like chalk and cheese, and no matter how much you grind them together, you get no reaction. And then other people, as soon as they make eye contact, they connect.
I have a theory that I wrote when I was 17 and kept until adulthood, and I call it my Cosmic Sock Theory. People's souls are like socks. Each sock has a material, it has a pattern, it has a size. So every now and again, you meet somebody who you have at least one sock attribute in common with (either material or pattern or size) and that’s why you feel a tingle or connection.
And obviously socks come in pairs, so you are born with a sock soul and then you spend your entire life in search of your matching sock soul, and some people simply never find theirs, because the infuriating thing about socks is that they get lost in mundane ways all the time. Life is a spin cycle. Some socks don’t make it back in the drawer.
So when I met Kwame, we had good sock energy, then we found out we've got a lot of random shit in common. We were born in the same hospital exactly six months apart. Our parents used to rave together in West London nightclubs. Our grandparents arrived in London from the Windward Islands within a year of each other and it was just a lot of weird stuff like that. So if you ever feel matching sock energy with somebody, just wave at them and see if they wave back. That’s my theory anyway.
Jess: I love that - we’re always told we’re so lucky to have a partnership as you’re not doing it alone. How important is it when choosing who you are going to work with?
Onika: The best piece of advice I was ever given by a corporate manager was that everybody who gets an interview is basically qualified skills-wise, right? So don’t choose based on skills, choose the person that you wouldn't mind being trapped in a lift with. And apply this rule to every part of your life.
Seriously. I'm only friends with people that I can be broke with. I only work with people that I can be stranded with. That's kind of a big litmus test for me that I actively think about. Who can I be sad with? Who can I be injured with? Life is hard. And work is hard. And what we're doing is made harder in so many ways. So if you can work with your people then you're already winning, even when the pipeline is empty, even when the client is nuts, even when the invoices don't get paid. You're already winning.
Jess: You’ve worked in New York, Berlin and London, how do they differ?
Onika: I feel like I was in the perfect place in each decade of my career. So I arrived in New York when I was 21. And the biggest lesson I needed to learn was that I was not the weirdest or wildest person in any given room. The business world in New York is like a zoo. New York business culture taught me that anyone can become a big deal, people are running on like fumes and magical realism.
Then I got back to London when I turned 30, and because I was from London but had international experience, I started trying to get promotions and salary increases to pay off Tony Blair’s student loans. But it was so fucking depressing. In New York, depressed people get desperate and shouty. But in London, people don't do that. They don't talk. They just politely drink themselves to death.
So I moved to Berlin when I was 35 and it’s basically like hospice care for people who used to have toxic office jobs in big cities. Everybody here is just doing whatever they want to do before they die. After WW2 Germany demilitarized and used the cash to build a great social welfare program, so you literally cannot die from poverty here. I immediately noticed that the majority of the homeless people in Berlin are not ethnic minorities. They're older white people who just want to be left alone to drink.
Jess: Culture is a bit of a buzzword in the industry right now. What’s your point of view on this? What does culture really mean?
Onika: For me, it's really simple. Culture is shared understanding. And both of those words are big ones. And communication is the fundamental way that we build culture, which is why I chose to focus on it with OK Sorted after working across everything else. I tend to think in concentric circles.
If you can imagine a chart with concentric circles and macro culture is the biggest circle in the chart, i.e. what everyone has to understand to function in society. The kind of culture that agencies refer to is like a tiny red dot of light whizzing around all over that chart. So when I’m sitting in a meeting or a workshop and someone asks how can we impact culture? I counter with which culture? Whose culture? You have to work with serious insight and foresight folks to learn how to meaningfully navigate and participate in culture. But in most design and digital agencies, it's just a throwaway term.
Jess: Are there any kind of agencies or businesses or brands where you just feel like actually, they're fucking cool. And like, they get it?
Onika: One of my earliest research projects was for Disney Parks and Resorts in China. And one of the insights was that beloved brands are like Gods or family spirits who protect your house. The idea stayed with me and it’s another thing that made me notice my husband. We wore and liked all the same brands.
Our brand roster as a family is so well known that our friends tease us about it. We are a Uniqlo household. We are a MUJI household. We are an Aesop household. We are an Arket household, albeit secondhand. And we are not ashamed to love IKEA. IKEA is just our store. We fall more deeply in love there, as I go in with a home improvement plan and he makes me adjust the plan to make it also beautiful. And we always figure it out over meatballs and mash in the canteen before we hit the shop floor. IKEA can do no wrong.
If you look at how they've continued to expand their democratization of good design, while making sustainability and social innovation part of the model without screaming about it. They're Swedish, so they just don't care about being cool. And with Uniqlo, I'm an anti-suit person but I bought a blazer and skirt combo when Uniqlo did a collaboration with Jil Sander.
A brand that we don’t agree on is Apple, because he loves how certain brands can become like a religion but I have church PTSD, and immediately had a visceral negative reaction to standing in the Apple store but couldn’t figure out why. Then I saw store blueprints and realized it’s because the retail journey is designed like a church. You walk in and there are ushers at the front that greet you. Then you're shepherded to a pew where you commune and pray with the product the same way you would with a bible or a hymn book. And if you fuck up and you break your device, the fucking Genius Bar is like a confessional booth. Diabolical.
On the other hand, one of my favourite brands that Kwame doesn’t care for is Paris. The first international trip I did by myself was the Eurostar from Waterloo to Paris when I was 13. As a brand Paris has never disappointed me. There have been moments where the police have felt a little bit too militarised - but I really love that ordinary people are willing to go outside and fuck shit up whenever the government messes with their lifestyle. This is a part of French culture I would absolutely universalize.
How We Move Forward
A book, podcast or cultural movement that's made you think differently? Cradle to Cradle. It took me a long time to enter the design industry and then to overcome immense impostor syndrome. Creative spaces in agencies are designed to be like these hallowed spaces that only geniuses can occupy. So I did what I always do when I'm feeling like an impostor, and I just read everything I could get my hands on. After reading this book the circular economy became an obsession.
Which future technology (or application of existing tech) are you optimistic for?
None of them. What I care about is how future designers and strategists will deploy whatever tech is available to do the work that needs to be done to save the human race. We're not actually trying to save the planet, the planet is going to be fine. We're actually trying to save ourselves. The reason why there should be much better comms about this calamity is because the bits of Earth that are dying are the bits that humans need. The planet isn't actually going anywhere though. It will simply sneeze us out, like the flu, then it will continue and we will just be gone.Your hope for creativity in the future? Toni Morrison gave an interview in the late 90s, where she was asked by a very prim white lady when she was going to begin to write stories for white people. One of the points that she responded with, that's always stayed with me, is that the function of discrimination is not hate, it's distraction. And what she meant by that and which I think is so valid, not just for racism, but also for sexism, ageism, for all forms of discrimination, in the workplace, is whenever there is systemic oppression, what it does is it makes the oppressed or the marginalized group have to explain and justify why they deserve to be there, rather than doing the job that they’ve been hired for. So all these DEI initiatives that have popped up are the ultimate form of distraction. Because everyone with DEI in their job titles could have just been great at their intended vocations. They could have just been designers or engineers, or CEOs, or investors, they could have been just brilliant at what they’ve trained to do. But instead, they've had to advocate and justify the presence of people who are like them in ways not related to their work. It's this crossroads unfortunately where all this excellence has now been split into those who have to justify our presence, and those who can just get on with it. So my wish for creativity and the future is that everyone will be able to just get the fuck on with the doing of it.
Who do you follow online for ideas, inspiration + advice? Zoe Scaman - I love how unapologetic she is. Chance Marshall who’s the founder of Self Space. They're growing, I saw an open call for new hires on LinkedIn and it really made my heart sing. I was like, Yeah, we need more of that. And one of my favorite humans is Saleem Reshamwala. We met when we were 23 on a Friendster date in New York and he's one of those people that can communicate anything. He makes videos that feel like Sesame Street for adults. He can make an instructable video on any subject with a catchy tune and amazing mnemonic visuals that will stick in your brain. So I always follow anything he does.
One word to describe your hope for the future? Soft. By which I mean soft power, which is the opposite of extracting compliance by threat of force. Soft power is about invitation, understanding, the exchange of ideas to find common ground, and all those things that capitalism and patriarchy do not currently prioritize. We can only have a future under soft power leadership. The other way is what’s gotten us here.
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