August 23, 2016

Meet Highland Park Creative Director and Wardrobe Stylist: Danika Ormonde

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Danika Ormonde.

Danika, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I started as a sketch artist and slowly moved into styling. I was blessed enough to land a great job styling for a major network. From that, I was able to enter into the styling world doing mainly commercials and music videos. This really taught me a lot about how the industry works and all the tricks of the trade. After many years I decided to move into design and open up my own creative artist group. I started LovesickLA in 2012 and took the fundamentals I learned from being on set and utilized them to run a successful team. We house photographers, makeup artists, hair stylists, wardrobe stylists, casting directors and creative directors. We shoot marketing ads, lookbooks , music, and events.

Has it been a smooth road?
Being a stylist has never been smooth. Every project brings new challenges. Hunting down the perfect piece, things were not tailored appropriately, last minute changes are made and the 3 days you took preparing was for nothing. The biggest struggle is making sure all people involved in the project are happy. The artist you are styling is not the only person you need to worry about . The director, photographer, and client need to also love the story you are telling through clothing. making sure you can problem solve while staying calm and under an extreme time crunch is a skill you must master in order to be successful.

What is the most difficult part of what you do?
The hardest part about my job is anticipating every change or anything that can go wrong. We have to make sure that if anything changes on set we are prepared. We have had time where whole themes and ideas change the day of. So we have to use what we got, anticipate changes by pulling extra options or even set decor and etc. Just in case the mood changes. We want to always be sure our client is left completely satisfied. Anther recurring obstacle I am finding is pricing. As a newer company, there is a lot of work that has to go behind our price quote. Many of our clients are new to us which means they are hesitant to spend an amount of dollar on someone we have not yet worked with. This is why we try our best to constantly keep all our social media extremely active and we shoot new themes and categories on our own. This way we gain trust and believability from potential clients and they are more likely to hire us at a fair price. For instance, if a t-shirt brand wants to hire us for a lookbook, but we have no previous t-shirt look books in our portfolio they think we are not capable. Trying to cover every category and idea is essential for us because it eliminates doubt in new clientele.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Personally, success is defined by satisfaction which I’ve come to realize I never am haha. It is also the realization that the people around you are happy. I feel most successful when we have a team booking and everyone is happy with the work they produced. Working on set can be long tiresome hours, and producing a whole project even more grueling. But when the project is done and you can step back and see what you and your team have accomplished, that is success. Each year I set many small one goal and one large goal, I am not successful if I don’t again them, only if I don’t try. Success stems from hard work. I am continually successful as long as I keep moving forward and give my everything to my passions.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
My plans are to increase my clientele portfolio, gain a larger team and hopefully start a new print project with LovesickLA. We really want to increase the knowledge of our brand and hit keep moving forward. I look forward to expanding our categories so that we may open up new worlds to our team members. I look forward to being on the direction/production end a bit more than styling. I really enjoy the change and being a part of the shoots entire production.

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