Leonie

S uper influencer Leonie Hanne is a perpetual high achiever. Before launching her fashion blog Ohh Couture in 2014, she worked as a strategy consultant for a German online retailer. She has three degrees, two in fashion and one in business from HSBA Hamburg School of Business, where she met boyfriend and business partner Alex Galievsky, who is equally motivated.

“As his girlfriend, I’d prefer him to work less,” she jokes, when we speak before her cover shoot. “He’s very good at a lot of things, he liaises with brands, he’s my photographer, he films behind the scenes videos and now he edits them, too. It’s a running gag that Alex always wants to learn a new skill, it’s not even a joke.”

Despite going down the corporate route initially, Leonie has always loved fashion. From the age of 13 during school holidays she would work in boutiques in her hometown of Norderstedt, which is just outside of Hamburg. “I don’t come from a monied background, so I always had two jobs to enable me to buy fashion.”

Being ambitious and good with numbers she fell into her first job. “I wanted to make everyone proud, but I did feel I was neglecting being creative. My career was going really well, but I wasn’t happy. And, although I wouldn’t want to go back, I’m glad it happened,” she says, adding how she finds it exciting doing PowerPoint presentations for brands, “I still have it in me”.

Leonie has two sisters, one a doctor and the other a teacher, she describes her parents as “hippies” and says that all three siblings did well at school because they weren’t put under pressure. “They were really cool parents when we were growing up. My mum would sometimes say to me, ‘Leonie, don’t study too much. Get your friends over’. It was almost like everyone wanted me to do something fun and I was like, ‘No, I’m also smart’. I actually feel I did that career first to prove I could do it – and then I started doing something fun.” Although Leonie loved the idea of launching a blog, she felt the platform was already saturated, “I thought, why me? I felt that I was already too late”. So her first foray into fashion and social media was selling clothes on a pre-loved website.