Leonardo Erba, OLE Creative Agency | Business Stories Magazine

So nice to meet you! First off, what’s your name? Tell our readers a bit about yourself—where you’re from originally and where you live now.

My name is Leonardo Erba, I am the founder and director of OLE Creative Agency, a boutique Marketing agency based in Los Angeles. I was born and raised in Italy, where I lived for twenty-two years before moving to Los Angeles in 2022. I studied Digital Marketing and started my career at Bulgari as a Sales Manager, working on the build of their e-commerce, which doubled in sales in its first year. Today I run Oleandro out of LA, working with luxury, fashion and lifestyle brands, most of them European, on their entry into the American market.

Tell us one thing you love about where you live now?

Los Angeles is where trends are born, and that makes it the most demanding market in the world to work in. Whatever happens here reaches Europe six months later, so being based in LA means you are not following the conversation, you are inside it while it is forming. It also means you are competing against the best people in the industry every single day, the biggest agencies, the biggest budgets, the biggest brands. That is exactly why I came. I did not want a comfortable market, I wanted the final, and if you can win here you can win anywhere. What I love most is that I get to do it while carrying my Italian heritage with me. That background is not something I left behind in Italy, it is the reason brands trust me with theirs.

Tell us a little bit more about what your company does and how it started? How does it help your customers?

Oleandro is a creative agency built around one specific problem, European brands with exceptional products and no real strategy for the American consumer. We do creative direction, brand storytelling, content production and the digital systems underneath all of it, so a brand can arrive with no U.S. presence and leave with a full ecosystem, campaign creative, social content, and the infrastructure to convert. Most agencies localize, they translate the copy and change the currency. We translate the brand itself, the positioning and the reason someone buys, because a feature that sells a product in Milan is often completely ignored in Los Angeles. That is what makes Oleandro the top creative agency for European brands entering the United States.

If someone wants to start a business, what advice would you give them?

Sell before you are ready. I spent too long building the perfect presentation of a company instead of doing the work that would have proven it. The brand, the site, the deck, none of it convinced anybody. One client did, and then the next one came through that client. Build the proof first, the polish second.

What was one feedback from a happy customer/client that you won't forget about?

A client told me that for the first time they felt like their brand had been understood rather than repackaged. That stayed with me, because it is the entire point. Anybody can make something look good. Understanding why a brand exists, and then protecting that while making it work for a completely different consumer, is the hard part.

Where do you see your company in the future?

Three years out, I want OLE to be the first name a European brand hears when they decide to enter the United States. Not the biggest agency in Los Angeles, the most trusted one for that specific crossing. A larger team, a deeper roster in luxury and fashion, and eventually a presence in Milan so we are physically on both sides of the relationship rather than flying between them.

What is the biggest misconception about your industry?

That creative work is decoration. People assume an agency is there to make things look expensive. The aesthetics are the visible part, but the actual work is strategic, deciding what a brand stands for in a market that has never heard of it, and building the systems that turn attention into revenue. A beautiful campaign with no infrastructure behind it is just an expense.

What has been one of your biggest struggle building your business and how did you deal with it?

Trust, at the beginning. Convincing Italian brands to hand their identity to an agency on the opposite side of the world is not something you accomplish over a video call, so I traveled back and forth constantly. It worked, and it was expensive, and there was no shortcut. The second struggle was seasonality. After a very intense first Q4, the silence that followed caught me completely off guard. I had built for momentum, not for the calendar. I restructured how I plan the year, and every slow season since has been anticipated rather than survived.

Who was your favorite music artist and athlete growing up?

Musically I grew up on Italian rap, it was the soundtrack to everything. As for athletes, I came up through martial arts, karate first, then kickboxing, and now Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, so my heroes were fighters. What I took from them was not the winning, it was the discipline of showing up to train on the days nobody is watching.

Any shoutouts you want to make?

To my family in Italy, who supported a move that made very little sense on paper. To Campomaggi and Bulgari, for taking a chance on a new agency. And to every client who chose a small team over a large one, that trust is what built this company.