Substance and Meaning: Atelier Oluwatosin's Tosin O. Hoskins on the Strategic Layers Behind Creative Decisions
Tosin O. Hoskins by Elizabeth Joy Sanders.
By Julia Gamolina
Tosin is a brand strategist and spatial designer specializing in high-end identity and experience. As founding principal of Atelier Oluwatosin, she helps heritage and emerging businesses craft resonant narratives, immersive environments, and distinct market presence. Her practice weaves psychology, aesthetics, and a commitment to social equity to redefine luxury as intention over excess.
Grounded in the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, Tosin creates brand ecosystems that endure. She holds an MArch from Harvard and an MBA, with over a decade of experience. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Tosin talks about her interdisciplinary training, and how strategy and creativity go hand-in-hand, advising those just starting their careers to trust their path.
JG: You are focusing on your own brand consultancy full-time as of recently! Congratulations on this — tell me what you're thinking about most with this step. What should all of us be paying attention to and reading about for 2025 as well?
TOH: What I’m thinking about most right now is how luxury navigates contraction. The industry feels simultaneously overexposed and under-anchored. To stay relevant, brands must shift from spectacle to substance. Those who succeed will have clarity of purpose and the courage to build emotional resonance over fleeting appeal.
As someone with a foot in both design and business, I keep a close eye on reports from Bain, Vogue Business, and McKinsey. Much of what they’re surfacing confirms what many of us sense intuitively: desire is fragmenting, and in today’s landscape, meaning has become the rarest form of capital.
Harlem Flagship Store Design, courtesy of Atelier Oluwatosin.
Now let's go back a little bit — you have degrees in environmental design, marketing and branding, and you got your M.Arch I from the GSD. What is the why behind the various steps? What were you hoping to do in the world?
Architecture offered a creative career path with a sense of stability, which led me to study environmental design at the University of British Columbia, the closest program to architecture available at the time. While pursuing that degree, I immersed myself in visual arts: fine art, contemporary media, sculpture, and digital design. What felt like fun electives became the foundation for everything I do now.
Then, as a junior designer at Vancouver firms like HCMA and HDR, I moved fluidly between disciplines, contributing to construction sets, supporting communications teams, and designing signage systems and client presentations. I began to drift from traditional architecture toward a more integrated practice that allowed room for brand and storytelling as much as spatial composition.
That thread carried into graduate school at Harvard. While completing my MArch I at the GSD, I became increasingly drawn to the strategic layers beneath every creative decision. This led me to pursue an MBA alongside my architecture degree, earning the additional master's just a few months after I defended my architecture thesis.
Through it all, I’ve come to believe that design is not surface work. It’s a tool to achieve social, financial, and strategic outcomes. My hope — then and now — is to leave the world a bit more beautiful than I found it by shaping dignity, sparking imagination, and building experiences that delight.
Tell me about the evolution of your branding consultancy — what did you start with, how did you find clients, etc.
I started Atelier Oluwatosin in the thick of the pandemic, during a moment of global pause and social reckoning. In 2020, when traditional employment prospects were shaky and the world was grappling with COVID and calls for justice, I began offering graphic and architectural design services as a way to build income and autonomy. My earliest clients found me through social media, where I shared work I could do for storefronts, visual identities, and local businesses in need of a reset.
The turning point came when I reposted a personal project from 2016 called Labels: a graphic statement I had created in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin. I reshared it after the murder of George Floyd, noting with deep frustration that its message was still painfully relevant. The post resonated. It gained traction and brought more eyes to the rest of my work. I was invited to contribute to a feature with CBC, one of Canada’s largest media outlets, which gave me further visibility and momentum.
Where are you with the company today?
Today, Atelier Oluwatosin is a strategic brand consultancy that partners with founders, executives, and directors to clarify positioning and translate it into experiences — from flagship spaces to visual identities and product ecosystems. We’ve evolved from execution-first to strategy-led. We’ve built to an in-house team of four, with a bench of a dozen specialized contractors we pull from for larger, more complex projects. Increasingly, we’re brought in not just to design, but to advise. We sit at the table for brand and business decisions, and only pick up our pens when needed.
Small businesses with extraordinary vision will always have a place in our portfolio. But we’re now targeting higher-value corporate engagements that allow us to stretch further, scale our impact, and build out thought leadership in parallel with delivery.
“I’ve been surprised by how therapeutic branding work can be...you’re helping someone name who they are and what they stand for. It’s emotional.”
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges?
The biggest challenge has been making peace with visibility — or the lack of it. There is a quiet grief that builds over time when you feel consistently underestimated, especially as a Black woman navigating the worlds of architecture and business. I’ve learned that excellence often unfolds quietly. Thoughtful, focused work doesn’t always scale on schedule. But that doesn’t make it any less valuable, and it doesn’t mean we stop showing up.
At times, the setbacks have felt small but cumulative — the unanswered messages, the closed doors, the nods that never led anywhere. There have been instances of large prospective projects that fall through in the final moments. The next step has always been to be sad and angry for a short little while, then gather myself and begin again.
How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
I refined my process and kept building the work I believed in, even when it felt like no one was watching. Often, they were – just silently. And sometimes, it was those silent watchers who would later open a door, send an introduction, or invite me into the room.
But I have never done this alone. I’ve been held, championed, and encouraged by the mentors, clients, and friends who saw me clearly. Most tenderly, my husband, who saw the late nights, brought me food and water when I forgot to eat, listened as I worked through frustration and doubt, and then gently nudged me to keep going. He reminds me that I’m not building this for validation, but for vision.
I am proud of my resilience, but I also want to name the truth that resilience shouldn't be the price of admission. It takes active resistance to keep showing up in rooms that weren't designed for you — to speak boldly in a world that constantly signals you should shrink. But I do it. I keep showing up, not just for myself, but for the ones coming up behind me.
Harlem Restaraunt Branding, courtesy of Atelier Oluwatosin.
What has surprised you? What has encouraged you?
I’ve been surprised by how therapeutic branding work can be. When you’re doing it well, you’re not just choosing colors or crafting copy — you’re helping someone name who they are and what they stand for. It’s emotional.
What’s encouraged me most is the quiet validation from the people I serve — when clients come back for more work, when they refer their friends, when they share, unprompted, how the work changed something for them — their confidence, their pricing, their ability to lead. I’ve had large clients tell me that the strategy and creative quality matched or surpassed what they’ve received from top-tier agencies with ten times my resources and recognition. That kind of feedback matters, because it proves that small studios can hold just as much power as big names…sometimes more.
And then there are the smaller internal moments. When someone on my team gets bolder in a client meeting. When they lead a body of work end-to-end, delivering in ways they didn’t have the skills or confidence to when I first hired them. That’s the part no one sees, but it reminds me why I built this in the first place. We’re not just making brands. We’re shaping belief in others, in each other, and in ourselves.
“Trust your path, even if it feels non-linear. You’re not lost. You’re layered.”
Who are you admiring now and why?
I’m drawn to people who blur disciplines and expand what design can do, especially those who use beauty, joy, and cultural memory as a form of protest or proposition. I’m captivated by the work of designers like Garance Vallée, Jennifer Bonner, and Malene Barnett, who are all crossing traditional boundaries in their own ways. Malene in particular stands out — her work in clay, pattern, and community uplifts ancestral craft while pushing forward a modern Black aesthetic that refuses erasure.
I’m also deeply inspired by creatives who center beauty not as decoration, but as resistance. People like Aurora James, Doechii, Christopher John Rogers, and Kerry James Marshall create from places of abundance, care, and cultural depth. Their work feels like a reminder that joy, colour, and elegance are not distractions from the political moment, but essential responses to it.
And then there are the thinkers who shaped how I see design in the first place. bell hooks, who taught us that love is a political act. W.E.B. Du Bois, whose data visualizations were some of the most quietly revolutionary design work of his time. Their legacies live on in how I teach, how I write, and how I hold space in this field.
Tosin O. Hoskins presenting the Archival Labels Project. Courtesy of Harvard GSD.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
I want to help shape a world where beauty isn’t a privilege, but a principle, and where brands, spaces, and systems are built with intention, cultural awareness, and emotional depth. My mission is to restore meaning to luxury by anchoring it in palimpsest — layered, lasting, and alive with memory.
Success, for me, is quiet influence. It’s clients whose offerings become more resonant because we worked together. It’s a life that feels artful, not just impressive. A business that is not a performance of success, but an honest extension of who I am and what I believe.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career?
Choose alignment over approval. It’s harder than it sounds, especially early on. There’s so much pressure to contort yourself into a title, a tone, a version of success that looks good from the outside. But if it doesn’t feel like yours, it won’t last. Or worse: it will, and you’ll disappear inside of it.
Some of the most meaningful parts of my career started as detours. I followed my curiosity, moved across disciplines, and found that what looked like inconsistency was actually coherence unfolding. Trust your path, even if it feels non-linear. You’re not lost. You’re layered.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.