Geonni Sigl and the trouble with real flowers

Real flowers have an inconvenient habit of behaving like real flowers. They wilt. They change over a long shoot. They resist being attached to things. For Geonni Sigl, designing a Prime Video Blue Room for The Summer I Turned Pretty meant solving an additional problem: the flowers needed to belong to the brand’s particular blue.

Her team made more than 200 of them by hand, in different sizes, using a material they found in the right shade. The result could satisfy the camera, the client and the practical demands of the set. Floristry had acquired a production schedule.

It is a good place to begin with Sigl, the founder, CEO and chief creative at Onni Creative. Her work joins things that can appear to live in separate departments: the appearance of a room, the mechanics of making it, and the marketing purpose it serves. In that blue room, the connections were visible flower by flower.

The degree that came with a second career

Before there were branded rooms, there was retail marketing and event management in Las Vegas. Sigl later moved to Los Angeles with her husband and returned to education at Santa Monica College, studying interior architecture and earning a certificate in art direction for film and television. Design offered a field for interests that had never fitted comfortably into a single job.

Studio marketing entered the picture, too. She worked at Annapurna Pictures and became director of in-theater marketing at United Artists Releasing. Her professional biography lists campaigns across MGM, Annapurna and Orion’s films, including Booksmart, Creed II, No Time To Die and Licorice Pizza. Those titles put independent films and larger releases within the same working history.

There is an obvious temptation to draw a straight line through these experiences. Architecture teaches space; marketing teaches audiences; a creative agency follows. Sigl’s own account is less tidy. She tried different roles because no single one seemed to accommodate everything she wanted to do. The conventional promise of climbing a corporate ladder held little attraction.

After furloughs, she founded Onni Creative in 2020. Art and production design were central to her intentions. Independent cinemas also needed marketing help. The company developed around both kinds of work, carrying earlier experience into a business that could make use of it.

A set has to hold up at work

Onni’s production practice includes set decoration, art direction and production design for film, television, advertising and photography. Its portfolio features editorial projects involving Lizzo for Vanity Fair and the cast of Euphoria for The Cut. The range makes sense for someone whose training crosses graphic design and interior architectural design: an environment can be built for a still image as readily as for a scene.

Sigl’s credits also show hands-on department work. She is listed as a set dresser on Death to 2021 and on 2023 episodes of I Think You Should Leave. Her 2023 credits include art direction on two NASCAR 75 Years television specials. Different assignments ask for different kinds of attention, from finding and placing objects to helping establish the visual world around a performance.

The production practice also spans hand sketches and digital rendering, with tools including SketchUp, CAD, Revit and Photoshop. That combination puts an initial drawing and a more developed spatial proposal within the same process. For a client, the useful part is being able to discuss an environment before it is built. For the designer, it gives an idea somewhere to become specific.

For Xbox Game Pass and EA Sports College Football 25 content, she described bringing four settings to life: a tailgate, an office, a café and a living room. Each is familiar enough that an audience already has expectations. A designer has to make the setting legible quickly while giving the action somewhere convincing to happen. Familiarity is quite a demanding client.

A Pringles digital campaign supplies another concrete credit. Onni identified Sigl as set decorator, alongside production designer Tom Castronovo and prop master Brooke Wastler. The company described shopping for the décor and dressing the set. Behind a short piece of branded content sit distinct responsibilities, collaborators and decisions about what belongs in the frame.

Seen together, these jobs explain the usefulness of keeping more than one skill in circulation. A campaign may need an image. Making that image may require a room. Making the room may require knowing which object to buy, where to place it and how it will read through a lens.

A souvenir with dinner attached

The cinema side of Sigl’s work brings design into a different kind of room. Here the audience walks in, orders something, notices a promotion and perhaps carries a piece of the evening home. Onni’s cinema portfolio includes digital menu boards, promotional graphics, merchandise and private-label products. Each is a relatively small surface on which a film can acquire a physical presence.

Alongside those visible products, the agency describes audience research, digital strategy and paid advertising. The less visible task is deciding whom a campaign is trying to reach and how a cinema currently connects with its community. A graphic needs a place to go and a reason to be there. That planning sits behind the finished invitation, even when the audience only encounters the image.

One example is almost indecently useful for explaining the business. Onni’s Five Nights at Freddy’s pizza boxes attracted customers who wanted the box without the pizza. Sigl described the response while discussing collectible concessions merchandise. The packaging had become desirable enough to make its original contents optional. Somewhere, a pizza was being upstaged by cardboard.

Her observations about manufacturing are more practical than the souvenir suggests. Elaborate shapes require molds; overseas production adds shipping and customs complications; film marketing assets can arrive late. A design that fits something a cinema already uses can be easier to put into service. The appealing object still needs to reach the counter in time.

“We’re competing with people’s couches.”

Geonni Sigl

That remark identifies the scale of the invitation. A cinema promotion asks someone to leave a comfortable room for a shared one. The object, the image and the visit all contribute to whether the trip feels worthwhile.

In December 2024, Sigl announced that Onni had become a partner with The Coca-Cola Company, describing cinema marketing and concessions programs as part of the work ahead. It was a concrete business milestone for the agency she had started four years earlier. A cup or container may look modest beside a film premiere, but its route to the audience involves a substantial working conversation.

An introduction is a kind of infrastructure

Sigl’s professional story also includes helping other people understand how to enter the industry. Old Girls Entertainment’s founders have described turning to her for advice about business administration and career direction. Such exchanges are less photogenic than a completed set. They can be useful at precisely the moment when a new company has to work out how to function.

A former Onni intern, Noah Fahn, publicly described developing graphic design, writing and research skills during an eleven-week placement. He thanked Sigl for teaching and mentorship, alongside other team members. It is a specific account of what an early industry experience can contain: unfamiliar software, new responsibilities and people willing to explain the work.

The distinction between making work and explaining work matters here. A newcomer can see a finished campaign without knowing which departments produced it or what the entry roles involve. Advice from someone who has crossed several of those departments can make the possible routes easier to understand.

Sigl’s broader industry role has grown alongside the agency. After serving as vice president, she was named Women in Exhibition president for the 2026–2027 term. The organization connects people across exhibitors, distributors and suppliers. Its activities include a speaker series, mentorship and work on panel participation. It gives professional visibility a set of recurring places to happen.

Celluloid Junkie included her in its 2025 Top Women in Global Cinema list, recognizing her agency leadership and advocacy for women, people of color and independent cinemas. The connection between those interests is practical: both a small venue and an emerging professional benefit from access to expertise and people who understand their circumstances.

Keep the extra skills

There is room for personal taste in this working life. Women in Exhibition’s member spotlight offers a memorable detail: Sigl likes ghost pepper flakes on popcorn. An ordinary cinema snack, apparently, can stand a little additional drama. It is a small reminder that the person developing an audience experience gets to enjoy one herself.

Her advice about visibility has an equally human complication. She encourages people to speak about their achievements while acknowledging that self-promotion remains difficult for her. “Brag about yourself!” is easier to recommend than to practise. Her willingness to admit the gap makes the advice more useful: a person can understand the value of being seen and still have to work at it.

Onni now describes its work in terms of branded environments for entertainment, culture and live moments, extending its cinema foundations into a broader set of physical experiences. For Sigl, the direction fits a career spent bringing different kinds of knowledge into the same assignment. The old jobs remain available when the new brief arrives.

Think again of the blue flowers. Their point was to look right, stay consistent and belong to a particular room. Making them required accepting the constraints and choosing a workable material. Sigl’s career has involved a similar willingness to assemble something from the skills actually at hand. There is no requirement that a useful working life should arrive in one matching set.