Lorin Ogawa, Chief Swag Officer at Creative Solutions

What is Creative Solutions?

Creative Solutions is a women-owned swag company that creates gifting experiences that capture a company’s identity. Creative Solutions partners with clients to redefine their narrative by finding the perfect balance between brand ethos and creative flair. Creative Solutions was founded by Debbie Harkavy in 1990 with a vision to deliver highly creative concepts and cultivate relationships based on trust, creative freedom, and collaborative spirit. Today, Debbie’s daughters Lorin and Marissa work for Creative Solutions, carrying on the family tradition and bringing in their own style and ideas.

What does a Chief Swag Officer do?

As Chief Swag Officer, Lorin manages projects from beginning to end and builds relationships with her clients. Her goal is to deliver?a valuable product that customers love. In order to deliver on her promise, Lorin focuses on three main bodies of work:

• Relationship building - It’s critical that Lorin is in regular communication with her clients. I can speak from personal experience that Lorin is an excellent relationship builder. She not only cares about the success of the project, but also about her client and their personal life. Lorin adds creative touch points to ensure you feel celebrated as a customer and as a friend. Relationship building is also important as Lorin (and her sister, Marissa) manage a team of nine women. It’s important that she’s building trusting relationships and a healthy team dynamic so that she and her team are primed for success.?
• Marketing - It’s essential for a swag company to have effective marketing in order to showcase their products. Lorin works closely with her marketing director to create?catalogs, self promotional mailers, and other touch points that will engage existing and potential clients.?
• Product management - creating the product and gauging how people respond to it. Each iteration is a case study of what people like and dislike. Curating the product is a creative process between Lorin and her client. The cycle starts with relationship building, grows? into ideation, and ends with logistics, fulfillment, and a full cycle debrief.

How did you get this job? What skills do you need to be successful in your role?

Lorin and her sister Marissa grew up watching their mother, Debbie, run a business and serve as a positive role model?for?entrepreneurship and hard work. Debbie brought home work samples which peaked?both Marissa and Lorin’s interest in the swag industry at?an early age. Lorin worked for Creative Solutions after graduating from college, but was immediately fired by her mother for being lazy. This prompted?Lorin to re-evaluate her professional options and work ethic. Lorin went back to school to earn her teaching credential and taught in Philadelphia for a couple of years before deciding that teaching wasn’t her calling. At this point, she begged her mom to return to Creative Solutions where she proved her worth by starting at the bottom and working her way up. Looking back, Lorin is grateful for the stumbling start to her work career because her failures motivated her to work harder and to think deeply about what type of career was the best fit for her talents and interests.?

Lorin highlighted three main skills that allow her to succeed in her role today. Click on the below hyperlinks to expand your learning on LinkedIn Learning.

Detail oriented - Lorin has to be on top of her operations and communications to ensure that production and delivery are done right. Added an extra 0 to a purchase order? Suddenly you have 20,000 water bottles instead of 2,000. Lorin has a checks and balances system to ensure she can controls the controllables from her end and?prevents small mistakes that result in big mishaps.?

People person -It’s Lorin’s and Creative Solution’s mission to connect with their clients on a personal level. To that end, she invests heavily in building and maintaining professional relationships and lasting friendships.??

Thorough communicator - It’s important to communicate expectations, customize your style to meet the client needs, and keep clients in the loop on project work. This ensures realistic expectations and clear roles and responsibilities.

What do you like about your job? What are the more challenging aspects of your job?

Lorin is a people person at her core and is energized by?the connections she has with her community. Lorin enjoys?working?with amazing individuals and with wonderful companies that she admires and respects. She adores the?team she works with everyday and appreciates that they are?so motivated, talented, and all-around superstars.?What Lorin likes most about her job is using the creative process to create a tangible product that brings people joy.?

A major challenge for?Lorin and Creative Solutions is an over-saturated promotional products space with many larger companies. Lorin differentiates Creative Solutions from those companies?by putting service first and leveraging her understanding of her client to create swag that speaks to brand vision and ethos.? Additionally, after Lorin has invested her time and energy in building relationships and designing and pitching products, she must also close the sale, which can be very stressful in the (stuffed) dog eat (stuffed) dog world of swag sales. Despite these challenges, Lorin loves what she does and finds great joy and meaning in her work.

What advice do you have for people pursuing a career in this industry??

It’s important to bounce back from setbacks in the swag industry. You must adapt and keep coming back with optimism and solutions. It’s also important to set realistic expectations about?career growth. It takes time?to build relationships, your personal style, and a portfolio. To help you do this, absorb all content around you. What’s trending and where? Why? How can you get ahead of the trend? Paying attention to the world around you to stay up to date on trends, news, and pop culture will help you in this industry. Have more questions? Reach out to Lorin on LinkedIn or check out the Creative Solutions home page!

Thank you for reading #whatsupChuck! Tune in next month for more of the inside scoop on? the world of work.