Hidden Gems: Meet Leonardo Erba of Oleandro Creative Agency

Today we’d like to introduce you to Leonardo Erba.

Hi Leonardo, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I started in Italy, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in Digital Marketing and then joined Bulgari as a Sales Manager, working on the build of their e-commerce. We doubled online sales in the first year, and that project set the direction for everything that came after. I visited Los Angeles once and understood immediately that this is where trends are born. It is the Super Bowl of marketing, and if a brand wins here, it wins everywhere. I wanted to play against the best, so I moved in 2022 and founded Oleandro in 2023, a creative agency in Los Angeles built around luxury marketing and brand storytelling. Our first client, Campomaggi, came through networking, and it confirmed the gap I had been seeing from both sides of the Atlantic, European brands with extraordinary products and no real strategy for the American consumer. That is the space Oleandro occupies today, helping European and Italian brands enter the U.S. market and actually sell in it.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Not a smooth road, no. The first obstacle was structural, visas and paperwork on one side, and on the other, convincing European brands to trust an agency operating from the opposite side of the world. Trust is not built over a video call, so I traveled back and forth constantly. It worked, and it was expensive, but there was no shortcut. The second obstacle was cultural. Product features that carry enormous weight in the European market are often ignored entirely by the American consumer, and the reverse is just as true, so a campaign that performs beautifully in Milan can land flat in Los Angeles. Learning to translate a brand rather than simply localize it took time. The hardest stretch was the beginning of my second year in business. After a very intense Q4, the silence that followed caught me completely off guard. I had not built for seasonality, and I felt it. I adjusted, restructured how I plan the year, and made sure every slow season since has been anticipated rather than survived.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Oleandro Creative Agency?
Oleandro is a boutique creative agency in Los Angeles built for luxury, fashion and lifestyle brands, with a specialization that is fairly rare here, taking European brands and making them work for the American consumer. We handle creative direction, brand storytelling, content production and the digital systems underneath all of it, which means a brand can arrive with a beautiful product and no U.S. presence and leave with a full ecosystem, campaign creative, social content, and the infrastructure to actually convert. What sets us apart is that I have stood on both sides. I built e-commerce for an Italian luxury house before I ever sold to an American client, so I know what a European founder is protective of, and I know what the U.S. market will reward or ignore. Most agencies localize, they translate the copy and change the currency. We translate the brand itself, the positioning, the reason someone buys. Brand wise, I am most proud that our first client came through a relationship rather than a pitch deck, and that most of our work since has arrived the same way. If you are a European or Italian brand preparing to enter the United States, or an LA brand that wants the polish of a European house, that is exactly who we built this for.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Most people who meet me through the agency see the creative side, the campaigns, the aesthetics, the Italian brands. What they usually do not know is that I have spent most of my life in martial arts, karate first, then kickboxing, and now Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It shaped how I work far more than any marketing course did. Jiu-Jitsu in particular teaches you that the person across from you is not a problem to overpower, but a puzzle to read, and that patience beats force almost every time. That is exactly how I approach a brand. You do not force a European label into the American market. You study it, you find the leverage, and you move when the position is right. It also taught me how to lose, which is a useful skill in this business, because you will lose pitches, campaigns will underperform, and quarters will go quiet. On the mat you learn that losing is just information. You reset and go again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.oleandro.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oleandrollc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/61578491761469/