Meet the Founders
Oak Theory was started by two people who kept watching the same thing happen: an organization would learn who its audience was, then hand that understanding to a team that had never met anyone in it. Veronica Shelton and Hannah Ryu built the studio that closes that gap on purpose.
Hannah Ryu
Co-Founder & Principal · Client Strategy & Positioning
“I'm not above any task. I'm just focused on getting the work done.”
Nonprofit work, magazines, then product management. She leads client strategy, org expansion, and positioning... the groundwork that makes a pitch land and outlasts any single deliverable.
Read the full bio →
Veronica Shelton
Co-Founder · Creative Direction, Technology & Operations
“I translate voices into things people can actually use.”
A decade across startups, agencies, and Fortune 500 teams — brand systems, product interfaces, and the code underneath. She runs our AI practice and holds the line on craft when timelines get loud.
Read the full bio →Two instincts, one studio.
Two halves of the
same job
Most studios are founded by two people with the same instincts. Ours weren’t.
Veronica
Asks how far a thing can go before someone calls it impossible.
Veronica drives creative direction, technology, and the systems this studio runs on. What the work looks like, what it feels like, and how much the technology will carry. She prototypes the hard question herself rather than argue about it in a deck.
Hannah
Asks what it costs, in what order, and who is holding it.
Hannah leads client strategy and positioning. She works at the intersection of business strategy, human relationship dynamics, branding, and UX... which is precisely the place most agencies hand off to a project manager and quietly leave the room. She sits inside org expansion work, campaign execution, and executive hiring panels, because the strategy that decides anything is rarely the strategy in the deck.
The contrast is the engine,
not a workaround.
We run Oak Theory as true counterparts. Different brains, different instincts, and no overlap either of us has to negotiate for.
0.1%
of design studios are founded by women of color.
We mention it for one reason: it explains why the work is different, not why you should feel good about hiring us.
Diversity here is a mechanism, not a statistic. We hire against named gaps — in discipline, in audience knowledge, in the way someone reads a room — so that when we tell a client that someone shaping their project understands their audience from the inside, it is an operational fact.
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