We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Oyin Antwi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Oyin, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s go back in time a bit – can you share a story of a time when you learned an important lesson during your education?
Over the past decade in my career and entrepreneurial pursuits, my ethos includes a commitment to developing innovative products, services, and systems that promote resourcefulness and efficiency, while enhancing the ‘human experience’. This ethos was forged in part from an impactful lesson I learned during my academic journey studying Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE). In 2008, as I entered my sophomore year at the University at Buffalo (UB), I was faced with the decision to formalize an academic major. And with my upbringing inhabiting different worlds – migrating between West Africa, UK, and the USA, while growing up in a family of designers juxtaposed with engineers – this created a battle in my mind of whether to choose a creative or technical academic path that would allow me a career path that impacted people across borders. As I stared at the checkboxes beside each undergraduate major application, I took it upon myself to setup meetings with key staff from the handful of majors I was considering, to discover their department’s “why”, and see which best resonated with me before making the final decision.
As I sat with each department’s key staff member, I prefaced the meeting with an introduction on my migrant journey and my left/right-brained skills to see if and how their department’s major accommodated it. It wasn’t until I sat with an Industry Professor from UB’s Industrial and Systems Engineering department did I hear the words “here, you would be pursuing an academic journey that would allow you to bridge the gap between the human, the process, and the technology; meaning you will learn systematic and mathematical methodologies of Industrial and Systems Engineering, but you can apply it specifically to the creative industry, being of service to them and society”. From our discussion that day at his desk in the ISE lecture hall, I learned you don’t have to fit yourself into a major, but can fit the major into your desires, carving out your own career path, and bridging your worlds.
From there, as I journeyed through my Industrial and Systems Engineering courses, I challenged myself to apply the knowledge to solving problems in creative industries. While my fellow ISE classmates went off to intern and work with traditional industrial manufacturing companies like Kellogg or Ford Motors, I went on to work with manufacturers and designers like fashion designer Nicole Miller, textile designer Liora Manne, and fine jewelry designers Gabriel & Co., to later cofounding an online interior design company at Via Asha Design with my sister, and a tech venture studio at Digital Park with my husband, recently launching our app: Drift Wellness.
To each company, I brought the IE mindset of systematic, but creative problem-solving. For creatives, whether they be designers or artists, this optimization can allow them to streamline their process in ways they hadn’t thought possible. For example, when working with textile designer Liora Manne, whose rugs were often created as a single canvas and then broken into smaller pieces, I realized that the most expensive part of her costing model and the longest part of the rug’s manufacturing process was due to the orientation of her bird design on the rug. By changing the slight detail of the bird’s positioning and reengineering the design to make the rug entirely with a less expensive, but beautiful and functional vertical thread process, Liora was able to keep the integrity of her art and materials that her customers love about her designs, while also saving money on each rug’s production, and allowing for a more efficient design and manufacturing process for her workers.
With experiences like these, while cost-savings and process efficiency allowed me a rewarding career to-date, what I prize the most is how my work ultimately impacts people around the world, and their human experience. All of the industries I’ve worked in – fashion, textiles, jewelry, interior design, and tech – involve heavy labor and/or complex systems and processes, and my goal is not to replace the manufacturing workers in Asia or Africa or to eliminate the designer’s role in NYC or London, but instead to optimize their work day, ultimately making their lives easier and more efficient. On the opposite end, I also get to bring joy and meaning to the consumers who get to enjoy well-made, thoughtfully-designed products or services, whether they be a dress, a rug, an engagement ring, an easy and enjoyable interior design service, or a wellness app that helps them sleep better at night. At the core, the lesson of servicing and improving human experience through my career and entrepreneurial pursuits, weaves the way.
Oyin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Oyin Antwi, and I am a 33 y/o Nigerian and British citizen currently living in Brooklyn, New York City. Over the past 10+ years, I have enjoyed an impactful and rewarding Industrial Engineering career, specifically focused on developing products, services, and systems in the creative industries (including fashion, textiles, and fine jewelry to-date). In parallel, I cofounded an online interior design company with my sister called Via Asha Design, and cofounded a tech venture studio with my husband called Digital Park, recently launching our app: Drift Wellness. The thread that weaves my Industrial Engineering career and Entrepreneurial pursuits to date is my ethos to: ‘develop innovative products, services, and systems that promote resourcefulness and efficiency, while enhancing the human experience’.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
THE RISE OF E-DESIGN: WHAT TOOK THE WORLD SO LONG TO CATCH UP WITH US?
It’s April 2020, the peak of the COVID-19 quarantine: shelter-in-place orders are
heard across the world, social distance rules are in place, and now home = office
= restaurant = gym = lounge. Suddenly, making every space count was key, not
only for the best Zoom backgrounds as many began to work from home, but also
to serve as a refuge through the compounded difficult times. And now, Via Asha
Design’s e-design business model of great interior design, affordable prices, serviced
conveniently online, was enjoyed even more by our early-bird adopter clients,
and e-design rose to the top of Google searches for our new clients, many
discovering us that Summer 2020, though we had resiliently been around since 2014.
Co-founded by sisters Oyin Antwi and Sade Hoffschroer, Via Asha Design
has built a successful business transforming spaces across the UK and USA.
Our approach to working with clients incorporates a unique twist to traditional
interior design as our services are online (e-design) via our design portal, where
our small team of designers collaborate directly with customers. With over 100
rooms in our portfolio to date and glowing customer reviews, we have won the
Best of Houzz award 6 years in a row, were added to The List by House and
Garden Magazine, and featured on Apartment Therapy multiple times.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
With my 10+ years career to date as an Industrial Engineer working with companies in the creative industry and helping fashion, textile, and fine jewelry designers better streamline their product manufacturing, processes, and systems in a more efficient, cost-saving, and impactful way, I decided to bring my talents closer to home to the 2 creatives that inspire me the most. Both my cofounders/business partners are family: my sister and I cofounded online interior design company, Via Asha Design and my husband and I cofounded our tech venture studio Digital Park.
In 2014, when my sister, a London-based interior designer, wanted to offer her services to a wider range of clients, I dove in on the operations side, and Via Asha Design was born. I helped conceptualize, create, and implement a streamlined and efficient e-design process so users simply take a style quiz, get matched with a designer, and collaborate with them to envision an interior that will suit their lifestyle and budget. It’s very gratifying to help students getting their first apartments or young families create inviting, comfortable homes, because the concept of home is very important to me.
In 2019, I joined my husband in launching Digital Park, a tech venture studio. Teaming up as head of operations (me) and head of product (him), we provide branding, web, and mobile app development subscription services to clients and recently released our own app, Drift Wellness, which consists of a growing collection of videos and sounds to improve focus, sleep, and relaxation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/oyinantwi
- Instagram: @oyinantwi
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oyin-antwi-n%C3%A9e-akintan-8a253369/
Image Credits
The images are all from different photographers, so please let me know which ones you are using and I can inform you. Thank you