Growing up as a company is way more fun than growing up as a person.
It happens a lot faster (hopefully), and it's far more linear and compounding — small wins lead to others and before you know it, if you're careful about your costs and make things that people want, you're in a place where you can start thinking a little less about now (operations and product) and far more about the future (the kind of company you want to be).
And we've always wanted to design far more than products — a great company is part of that.
So over the last few months, we decided to reinvest in ourselves by designing and building our first space to call home.
These were the principles that guided us:
Garage as crucible.
As we've been building this thing out, we couldn't help but be reminded of all the original garage startups in California, the Apple's and HP's of yore.
The concept of the "garage startup" is perhaps one of the most important ideas in modern American business.
And although we're decidedly not a tech startup, we intentionally wanted to re-capture that spirit and aesthetic, which today seems lost to shitty, faceless co-working spaces.
A working studio, store, and hangout all-in-one.
One of our goals is to bring consumers closer to the production of the goods that they consume.
We mean this literally and figuratively.
Literally in the sense that we find the aesthetics of great studios — in design, architecture, art, advertising etc. — to be of the highest aesthetic order. (We'll write more about our favorites in short order). They're endlessly fascinating — messy, chaotic, sometimes loud, but also beautiful, serene and the kind of place where, in a world full of talking and posturing, shit actually gets decided on and even made.
And figuratively in the sense that we think too many retail experiences today are too sanitized — "world building" has become the de facto approach, vs. trying to connect customers to the designers in the space and time that actually made the thing they're buying.
Sure, you probably don't want to walk by a CNC machine in full operation to buy a tee, but maybe a drafting table?
We'll start there.
An ambience of honesty.
Some of our favorite experiences in the space thus far have been showing friends and family around — letting them see our work in full flow, in a warm, communal space that doesn’t create any expectations or try to project something artificial around who we are and how we operate.
It may be our “office” but it should never, ever feel like the dictionary definition of office.
A literal hand in making.
Everything we've made and achieved thus far has been carried on our own back — of course with a huge amount of support from early friends and family like you.
So we wanted the studio to reflect this...
We leveled the floor and poured the concrete ourselves.
We painted the walls, hung the art, designed our own objects where needed, and generously sourced furniture from our close network.
A handmade feeling is crucial to us — analog spirit — so we wanted our first space to embody that.
Permanently semi-permanent.
Everything we've bought or designed for the studio is designed to travel with us wherever we find ourselves in the future.
Hopefully the only way is up.
But landlords are fickle, the economy is crazy, so portability is key.
Los Angeles, not New York.
We've always viewed New York as our intellectual home.
But LA has always been our actual, operational, and spiritual home.
It's just so much easier to transport, mail, make, and live an indoor/outdoor studio lifestyle here. It's not even close.
It's also where the lion's share of our clients and collaborators live and work right now.
Someone once said that New York is for the mind and California is for the body, and that's largely true — the crucial point being, you need both in your life to some degree to be truly alive.
