We don't just make things look good. We help brands figure out what they should say, make, show and do next.
We learned this by building.
Figures reflect Dressed in Joy, the independent fashion brand Mikaela founded in 2019, and audience across the channels we own.
Two people, two halves of the same problem.
Mikaela Pabon
Mikaela is a fashion designer, entrepreneur and brand builder who founded Dressed in Joy in 2019 and grew it into a seven-figure fashion business with more than 12,000 customer orders. She has led everything from original print and collection development to campaigns, content, community and a New York Fashion Week runway debut. Her work with major brands including Microsoft, Samsung, Walmart and Clorox gives her a rare view of how product, story, customer and culture work together. At HashtagBK, she brings that perspective to creative direction, brand development and product strategy, turning ideas into something people can immediately understand, connect with and want.
Dre Pabon
Dre has spent over twenty five years inside the fashion and apparel business, starting as an intern at ENYCE and working his way up to Marketing Director before moving through Phat Fashions, Liz Claiborne, The Shrine Company and Oved Apparel Group. His name and reputation became a strategic asset in their own right, and the content and partnership strategies he built kept those businesses moving, including turning a single NBA activation into a multi year licensing deal and growing e-commerce revenue by triple digits year over year. At HashtagBK he brings that same instinct for structure to brand strategy, content systems and campaign planning, so the creative work has a plan underneath it.
Creative instinct and data are supposed to work together. One does not replace the other.
Four ways to work with us.
{{ svc.title }}
{{ svc.tagline }}
{{ svc.keywords }}
We have sat in every seat at the table.
{{ item.title }}
{{ item.body }}
Built, launched, sold, adjusted.
{{ cs.title }}
{{ cs.body }}
Companies with capability who need a stronger bridge to the customer.
We are most valuable to companies that already have manufacturing, technology, distribution, products or data in place, and no one in the room asking what the customer on the other side of it actually wants. That is the gap we fill.
{{ svc.title }}
{{ svc.what }}
The problem it solves
{{ svc.problem }}
Best for
{{ svc.bestFor }}
{{ svc.line }}
We do not publish pricing. Scope, timeline and the level of involvement vary enough that a number on a page would be fiction. Tell us what you are working on and we will come back with a real proposal.
We learned this by building.
Before HashtagBK had a name, we were running the full cycle ourselves. Idea, product, content, audience, sale, data, adjustment, repeat. Everything below is our own work.
{{ cs.title }}
{{ cs.body }}
{{ cs.detail }}
Client case study
This page is built to grow. Each new HashtagBK engagement drops in as another module with the same structure: the situation, what we did, what happened.
HashtagBK gives a name to work we were already doing.
The studio
We are Mikaela and Dre Pabon, married, based in Brooklyn, and we have spent years building brands, campaigns, products and audiences together. Some of that work was ours. Some of it was for other people. All of it taught us the same thing: the distance between a good idea and a business people care about is mostly made up of decisions.
Between us we have lived on both sides of the business. Creativity and analytics. Product and marketing. Instinct and strategy. Storytelling and conversion. We know what it is like to have something worth making and still need to figure out what the idea actually is, who it is for, how to position it, what it should look like, how to launch it, how to tell the story, how to create the content, how to measure the response, and what to do next.
That sequence is the studio. HashtagBK exists because clients kept asking us for the whole thing rather than one piece of it.
Mikaela
Mikaela is a fashion designer, entrepreneur and brand builder. In 2019 she founded Dressed in Joy and built it independently from the ground up, on original prints, color and inclusive design, using a low inventory print to order model that let her test ideas quickly and keep the creative risk on her own terms.
She has designed and launched apparel collections spanning athleisure, matching sets, dresses, robes and accessories, debuted on the runway at New York Fashion Week in September 2024, and appeared in outlets including the TODAY Show, PIX11, ESPN during the NBA Finals, TheGrio and HelloBeautiful. As a creator she has worked with more than thirty major brands, among them Microsoft, Samsung, Walmart and Clorox.
Her real skill is not visibility. It is understanding the relationship between product, brand, story, customer and culture, and knowing what makes a person feel something about a thing they were not looking for. She helps founders stay recognizably themselves while getting sharper about the business.
Dre
Dre is the strategist and systems half of the studio, and he came up inside the fashion industry rather than around it. Over twenty five years, he's gone from an internship at ENYCE to Marketing Director, then through Phat Fashions, Liz Claiborne, The Shrine Company and Oved Apparel Group, working brand strategy, content and partnership strategy the whole way.
The pattern shows up in the results. A single NBA activation at The Shrine Company became a multi year league licensing deal, driven by the content and partnership strategy behind it. At Oved Apparel Group, he grew e-commerce revenue by 400 percent one year and another 140 percent the next. In both cases, it was his name, reputation and strategic thinking that kept those businesses moving forward. That's the same muscle he brings to every brand he works with now: take the creative instinct, build the structure that makes it repeatable, then read what the audience actually does with it.
He is the person in the room asking what we expect to happen, and then checking whether it did.
Neither half of this works as well alone.
Mikaela works from the human side. What does this make someone feel, and would she want it. Dre works from the structural side. Who is this for, where does it live, and what did the response tell us. Left alone, one of those makes beautiful work nobody finds and the other makes efficient work nobody remembers.
Together it means a client gets the idea and the plan in the same conversation, from two people who have already argued it out. We have been each other's first critic for years. By the time work reaches you it has survived a fairly demanding room.
The mark carries its own architecture, and the original brand guidelines built on Brooklyn Bridge blueprint drawings. The grid rules and measured type across this site come from there.
