By Elena Văduva.

Oana Șandru wears purple sneakers. “Well, they are somewhat purple.” She is from Reșița, a ”shrinking city”, as she calls it, where everyone knows everyone and where you can’t make a move without other people noticing it. In Bucharest, Oana is creative and designs bags.  

From basketball, a sport she thought she was good at but realized that her teacher didn’t really know the rules of, to chemistry, which she loved and dreamed of pursuing, Oana decided to become a copywriter. She wanted to use her love for poetry in creative projects, so she applied to SNSPA in Bucharest. A lot of her friends went to Timișoara, a city much closer to Reșița, so Oana felt really alone in Bucharest, where she found herself surrounded by unknown people and buildings.

In the second year of college, things changed. She got an internship at Mercury360, an advertising agency where she currently works. She remembers the internship very well. She didn’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator, so she downloaded it the night before the final meeting. Her task was to create an advertising campaign for a real client, a brand of memory pills. She managed to finish the project by using a casino table for her advertising poster. She wrote: ”How many cards can you remember?”, a clear reference to the movie (and game) 21. She never imagined that her project was going to open the door to a career as a copywriter.

When she was 16, Oana decided it was time for her to create something special. One of her friends was already making bracelets and some girls from another class were even part of a makers association. She decided to design bags, so she asked her mother to buy her a sewing machine. They bought it from Top Shop, a teleshopping business, and Oana remembers she could only use it once. She managed to create a bag out of some old jeans, even if the sewing machine could not handle the entire job and she had to sew by hand the last part. She posted it on her newly made blog and on breslo.ro, a site for handmade clothes and accessories. Her bag was bought in two hours, so Oana knew her business was going to work. Now, several years later, Oana still makes bags and she sells them through her facebook profile.

Oana can’t remember the first time she attended CreativeMornings Bucharest. She just used the opportunity to meet with some friends and, since then, being with us every morning became a sort of monthly escape for her. She loves the coffee and the people who come to speak at CreativeMornings. She hopes she will one day sum up the courage to ask the questions she wants to ask. She always has lots of questions for the speakers, but she never dares to raise her hand up. Being shy is a part of her personality. Just as her purple sneakers.