Building the Streetwear Empire Kith | Ronnie Fieg

I wish we had recorded the conversation we just had. I love what you said. You said, “My favorite entrepreneurs can’t work for money.” Tell me more about this.

Yes, it’s true. For example, even some of the world’s largest companies, like Apple, and people like Steve Jobs, who is one of your favorite icons, I’m sure—if he’s not your favorite, he’s one of them, right?

One of them, yes.

1. The childhood shoe that launched his career

Okay. When you see the product he created, you can really tell there was passion behind trying to make a product that was going to change his own life. True? I felt that even then, when the iPod really changed the trajectory of the company, you could feel the passion through the product. That legacy lives on, even with the duo we see now. You can see that the legacy endures.

Does it live up to what Steve Jobs could have designed?

We’ll never know, but in the end, he created a philosophy that truly transcended, and that feeling penetrated everyone’s lives. It affected us in many ways.

I don’t apply that to my business. It’s simply there naturally because, when I grew up, I became passionate about my world at a very young age. I believe that is the most important element of success for any person or entrepreneur. If you listen to most of them, they’ll explain how their passion began so young, at a very early stage of their lives.

In my case, it started when I was 13 years old and began working in a warehouse. But even before that, I always wanted to dress well, and my parents couldn’t afford to buy me the things I wanted. So, back then, I started working strictly in order to buy my own things and dress the way I wanted. That’s how it began.

I think the passion for it grew, and as I learned about the product, it just grew more and more. Having started from the bottom and knowing what I wanted to do at such a young age gave me an advantage.

But how does a 12- or 13-year-old boy get into fashion? Does it come from hip-hop culture? What was happening in your life that made you say, “Hey, I want to go to school dressed well”?

Let me tell you. As I grew up, until fourth grade, my parents sent me to a private school, a yeshiva. In fourth grade, they couldn’t afford to send me there anymore. Actually, my grandfather helped my mom send me to a private school, but in fourth grade they couldn’t do it anymore, so they took me out and put me in the public school closest to my house.

I grew up in Jamaica, Queens, so I went to P.S. 178. When I attended 178, it was a culture shock for me because there were so many different cultures. Queens is the world’s greatest melting pot of cultures. From the first day, I could see so many different cultures in the way people dressed and in their styles.

There was a small group of guys—about 6 or 7—who became my friends immediately. This was back in the day when Polo, Tommy, and Nautica were everything.

I remember this. We were really—more or less—the same age.

I remember this.

Were you born in ’82? What year were you born?

’84.

At that time, and then upon entering high school, it became even more important—the way you dressed.

Yes, more importantly, the way you dressed. I found myself really wanting those things. I used to have to borrow clothes from my friends.

Dude, I had knockoff Tommy Hilfiger. I literally bought it at the flea market in South Florida. We didn’t have any money, and then they paraded me at school.

Do you want to hear an embarrassing story? I didn’t even know how these scammers operated in South Florida. They took old Wendy’s uniforms—the fast-food place—and gave them a collared shirt. I went to the flea market because we didn’t have any money, and there were these street vendors. I said, “Oh, this is Tommy.” I didn’t understand what was happening.

I wore it to school, and they said, “Hey, that’s a Wendy’s shirt.”

A Wendy’s shirt?

I remember being about 12 years old and being devastated that I was wearing a freaking fast-food uniform with a fake Tommy Hilfiger logo printed on it.

I don’t think things have gone that far. I haven’t thought about that in 20 years.

I can’t believe it. That’s absolutely insane.

There were a lot of counterfeit goods circulating. Even back then, a shirt that cost $65 or $85 was worth about $10.

I should have realized it because of the price.

Yes, that’s why you realized it. You needed me as a friend. I would have kept you safe.

2. “Keep the envelope. I want a job.”

But at school, that was really what we wanted to be. That style—what we saw around us—was what we wanted. My older sister worked and earned money by buying her own things. Some kids at school had the money, or their parents had the money, to buy them the things they wanted.

That really fueled my passion for wanting to work. I just wanted to earn money so I could buy my own things and my own clothes.

When I was 13, at my bar mitzvah, my mom’s first cousin—my second cousin—was David Z. He owned shoe stores in the city. He offered me an envelope with cash because he knew my parents were paying for my bar mitzvah party with the money I received from gifts.

When I was going to the bathroom during the party, he gave me an envelope with cash. I told him to keep the envelope. I wanted a job. I was 13, and he said, “Are you sure? There’s some money in that.”

I told him, “Yes, I’m sure. I want a job.” I started the next day.

I started working in the warehouse of a depot on Broadway, where David Z had several stores. I worked there all summer. After that, I worked at the warehouse on Eighth Street, which was probably the most important part of my upbringing and the most influential part of my life.

That’s where I could see that it really was the epicenter of culture: Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. On weekends, they closed off the entire block. There were basically street parties every weekend, and the police just let things run their course. The cars were parked diagonally because there were too many vehicles.

That’s where people used to come looking for their caps, or Gray’s Papaya on the corner, or Fat Beats, where DJs used to come to buy their vinyl records. Sam Goody was across the street. You had a lot of shoe stores and clothing stores where people bought their Iceberg clothes. Back then, brown shoes and boots dominated the streets of New York.

Like today, when you see kids obsessed with their Jordans or buying sneakers, back then they bought boots—hiking boots. New York was colder and it snowed a lot more, and for most of the year you needed to wear boots. David Z was the number-one place for those products.

You’re talking about brands like Asolo, Tecnica, and Red Wing. We had Polo, including the Polo Cookie boots, RLX boots, Timberland, Trezeta, and Dolomite—all hiking boots with Gore-Tex.

Hiking boots were everywhere in New York City in that culture. It was a subculture, but it grew huge. People drove from different states to buy these products because they were Italian brands manufactured in Italy and didn’t have mass distribution.

When do you go from admiring what others do to saying, “Hey, I’m going to make my own versions”?

That came later. I worked as a warehouse worker, receiving product and spending time alone with it. Then I was a salesperson, assistant manager, manager, purchasing assistant, and finally, buyer and general manager.

Let me ask you a question. Perhaps I should start here. If someone doesn’t know who you are and asks you, “What do you do for a living?” how would you describe yourself?

I do much more than design. I’m the CEO, creative director, and marketing director of the company. The creative-direction part of my role has evolved over time, but I contribute ideas and am part of every design of every product we launch.

It’s difficult to describe what I do because I do many things. A typical creative director wouldn’t handle buying or marketing, and I do most of those things. I’m involved in everything related to the product, and I also design the spaces.

I’m very involved in the entire 360-degree panorama of the business, even down to the experience people have when they come in—the food and drink part of what we do with Get Treats and now with Ronnie’s. So I do a lot of things.

I can’t really describe it, and it’s hard for people to understand what I do if they don’t follow along, because it’s been like building block by block from the beginning. It’s not that I’ve relinquished any responsibility. I’ve simply added more.

I saw you outside, and your car is very interesting. I stuck my head out and said, “Wow, dude, this is awesome.” You said, “Welcome to my world.”

Yes, it’s like building your own whole world. And, by the way, I’m wearing my product from head to toe, socks and underwear included.

We don’t need to see it, but I’ll take you up on that.

Just believe me. I truly live the product. I live and breathe the product I create, and I’m creating products for myself. I think people know that. They know there’s a lot of love in what I do.

If I design products for myself and want to use them, then, until very recently, I would try on the clothes for 4 hours a week.

I was the test model for the products we launched. The brand launches more than 5,000 styles a year across men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, accessories, and footwear. We’ve built a universe of products, and it’s been a really great evolution from the beginning. So, if you ask me what I do, I’m a world builder. I have built a world in which I live.

3. Why the CEO is also the fit model

But this is interesting. Why would it be important for you to be the test model?

4. Why Kith doesn’t wholesale or license

Because it’s literally as if it were for me, first of all. It’s a great question because it actually creates efficiencies. When we receive a sample and I test the product, I make all the decisions I need to make for that product during the test. I try the product and then decide if the fabric is suitable for that cut. I make alterations to the cut. Sometimes I even discard it, and then I come up with ideas about what we should do to evolve from that cut or how a specific design can be improved.

So, I give instructions live during a test. If my whole team is there, I have about 20 people in one test. You have your materials team, your merchants, your designers, the VP of product, and some assistants, and that’s where we’re making real decisions. We make the decisions about that product, and then we wait for the second sample to arrive and have to test that one, too.

I think many of these brands take shortcuts. I’ve talked about this a few times with different people—about how the industry takes shortcuts. Sometimes you go into a store and try something on. You have a shirt from that brand that fit you well, but then you try this one on and it doesn’t fit well, and you say, “Well, why did that happen?” You come back in the same style, and that’s because brands want to create another version of the same style but not try it again.

They apply a different fabric to the same cut but don’t try it again, and the drape is different. It looks different, and they take shortcuts. There are even fashion houses that do that. You go into a really expensive store and try on some product, and it doesn’t look good. It looks terrible.

So, I’m very meticulous with every detail because my wardrobe is emptied every season and then replaced with the new season’s clothes. If I’m going to use the product, it better look good, since I’m the brand’s representative.

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I love how you’ve used the word “love” several times.

Yes, several times. We started the conversation by saying, “Hey, the people I admire and respect the most came before us. Maybe some of them even operate today.” They just do it; they don’t do it for money. They make money because they’re so passionate about it, and if you love something that much, you end up creating great products. It turns out that if you maintain control and create a great product, you’ll end up making money anyway.

Exactly. So, about this love, let’s go back to the story you were telling a second ago. You basically learned almost the mechanics of the business when you were a kid, right? This was before you were putting your own spin on it.

I was learning how the business, or part of the business, existed before putting my own spin on it.

Exactly. When did you say, “Hey, I actually have my own ideas”? Both you and I know Jeff Staple, who was on the show. He told a very similar story, where he said, “Man, I was obsessed. I ate at every restaurant. I was the weird kid who would come home from high school and watch PBS cooking shows.” Then he says, “I’m eating at all these restaurants, and then I create content about it.” He says, “You know what? I have my own damn ideas about how this should be done.” When was that turning point in your life?

I was so damn obsessed with shoes. When Kith opened in 2011, we were a multibrand shoe store. I had projects with brands where I worked on my own versions of some of these iconic shoe silhouettes for the store. From there, it expanded to be much more.

But I’m going to back up because I was a shoe guy, strictly a shoe guy, until 2012 or 2013. I was buying over $30 million a year in retail from a lot of different shoe brands. I was the sneaker guy before I became the shoe-and-boot guy.

When I started working, I used to wear Nikes. Nikes were my thing before I started working at this brown-shoe-and-boot retailer. Then I helped David Z make the transition from brown shoes and boots to athletic footwear. As the weather got warmer and the seasons lengthened, winter was reduced to about 3 months instead of the 4 or 5 we were used to. It used to be cold in October, and then it was cold until April. Now it’s a little different.

Athletic footwear began to trend in New York and dominate the business of the brown-shoe-and-boot world. I helped David Z make the transition to athletic footwear, and he knew I was obsessed with sneakers. I would go to these trade shows and help open new accounts, new shoe accounts, and then I started as a buying assistant, being assigned to some of these accounts.

We built an incredible business with Onitsuka Tiger, which is ASICS, and it wasn’t even a sportswear brand yet. It was only Onitsuka that we were selling, but the sales rep knew I was a sneakerhead and knew I collected merchandise because I’d been collecting sneakers since 1995, when I turned 13.

That was the first pair of shoes I bought twice. They were Jason Kidd’s Flight 95. I don’t know if you remember them, with the carbon fiber in the midsole. They looked like a spaceship and were the first iteration of that type of shoe. It was a basketball shoe.

But were you buying to resell?

No, reselling didn’t exist back then. I bought a second pair because I loved them so much. The Air Max 95—the neon 95—had a design language that we had never seen before. I was drawn to them.

In 2006, when I helped turn Onitsuka Tiger into a multimillion-dollar business for David Z, they knew that I was passionate about collecting shoes. They knew I was a sneaker kid, so they opened the archive for me and said, “Hey, do you want to look at some of these styles and work on them?” I said, “What do you mean by working on them?” They said, “Oh, you can create your own version of the shoe.” And I said, “Ah.”

David Z had been doing this with boots for a while. They didn’t have the David Z brand, but they were considered SMUs, which is what they call “special makeups.” So, I did it with Timberland.

In fact, in 1997, David Z had the idea to make a gray Timberland boot. Timberland had never made a gray boot in its history. They were mainly for performance, in browns and blacks, if you used them for construction or hunting. They were really focused on the performance aspect of the brand.

David Z’s idea to make a gray construction boot was like, “What is that?” People saw it and instantly reacted. We sold about 10,000 pairs of that boot in a couple of years, without the internet. People came to the store, and it was a product we had. I saw him working as a salesman in the store, and I saw how people were drawn to something they couldn’t find anywhere else.

So, when ASICS offered me the opportunity to work on a shoe and I looked through the catalog, I found one.

How old were you when this happened?

This was in 2006. I was 23 years old. I’m looking at the catalog, and I see a shoe that my mom bought me when I really wanted a pair of Reebok Pumps. My mom left me outside the store crying. I was 8 years old.

Mm-hmm.

She got me a pair of ASICS GEL-LYTE III for $50 or something like that instead of buying me a pair of Pumps that cost $110 or $120.

The Pumps, too—the little one. That thing… Yes, that just wasn’t going to happen, was it?

But the Dee Brown or Victory Pumps were incredible. So, I had to use these GEL-LYTE IIIs, and I fell in love with them. When I saw them in the catalog, I knew that was the shoe I wanted to work on.

I was collecting at that time, and they were opening the archive. They said, “Hey, these are past models that we no longer make, manufacture, or create,” right?

Okay. So, why don’t you use the old catalogs?

Interesting. Yes, from 1990.

That’s even better because you just mentioned how important it is to have a differentiated product that can’t be obtained anywhere else.

That’s exactly why I decided to work on that shoe. I didn’t know if people would be attracted to that model. The minimum was 252 pairs, and we needed to commit to 1,000 pairs for the style to be manufactured.

I worked on 3 color combinations of the style, 252 pairs of each, and then they took the other 250 and offered them to a store in Amsterdam called Patta. That's how this silhouette returned in 1990. We created that shoe, and it was a huge success.

Even back then, when you say, “Okay, they offered me a silhouette. I can give it my personal touch,” was your goal simply, “Hey, I'm going to make the shoe look like what I would want to wear”?

Correct. That's still the case today. 100%. In other words, I'm always creating products for myself. That's the common thread running through all the products, at least the men's ones, and even the children's ones, that I want my daughters to use.

With women's products, it's my wife, my mom, and my sister—3 different generations. I know what my wife wants to wear. I know what my mom wants, and I know what my sister wants. In other words, I really design for people. If it's not for me, it's for someone who is my muse.

Mhm.

5. The Wall Street Journal, a line down the block and a visit from Adidas

I think, as far as footwear is concerned, if you look at this book, it was in 2007 when my first shoe came out, and it had a slow start on the first day. I had an event, and we sold 50 pairs. The next day, it went on sale in the store. We sold a few, but I sold one of the pairs to an editor from The Wall Street Journal who asked me a lot of questions about the shoe.

I didn't know he was an editor, so I gave him all the information I just gave you. He wrote about it, and the next day, while I was biking to work, my mom called to tell me I was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. My shoe was specifically featured because it was an article about limited-edition shoes.

There was a picture of the shoe I worked on in the “Pursuit” section, right next to the word “pursuit.” It was right there. A line formed that went around the block, and the shoe sold out instantly.

That same day, the CEO of Adidas North America was moving into his office across the street. He saw the line, went downstairs, and asked, “What's going on here?” I was working in the store. I was aware that I was working on this project, but I was still managing the store—the main store, which was at 556 Broadway, between Prince and Spring.

Then the CEO of Adidas North America comes in and asks, “Hey, what's going on here?” I tell him what's happening, and he says, “Did you work on the project?” I said to him, “Yes.” I had The Wall Street Journal there because my mom had called me, and I had bought a copy.

He said to me, “Let me take a look.” He looks at it, reads it, and says, “So you're behind this?” Then he asked, “What are you doing right now?” I told him, “Well, I'm working here.” He said to me, “When is your lunch break?”

I said, “I can go in about half an hour or an hour, or whatever.” He met up with me, and then we walked over to the Adidas store and went inside. He said, “So, what would you like to work on here?”

Wow.

Then I chose the Shell Toe. The second project was called Black Tie. At that time, I was dating a girl who was part of the design process for GoldBar down on Broome Street.

What is GoldBar?

GoldBar is a beautiful lounge that was the first of its kind. Back when all these clubs were really big, it was this small, intimate room. There hasn't been anything like it since. It became this super-energetic place that everyone—the downtown kids—was drawn to at night.

The staff were in these black suits, and the whole place was gold. It was beautiful. I remember her working there at 4 a.m., putting gold leaf on the ceiling, and I was helping her. I went up on the ladder and helped paint the ceiling of the space.

I was really in love with the space. Then it opened, and I became good friends with the manager. One day, I was thinking, “What am I going to do with this shoe?” I was holding the shoe in front of me, and I said, “I'm going to turn the Shell Toe into a dress shoe, and then I'll have the GoldBar employees wear these shoes.”

I ended up photographing the GoldBar staff for the shoe campaign. I called it Black Tie, and the shoes came with a black tie—an Adidas tie. That became the second shoe I worked on. From there, it was like a snowball effect, and I was doing this at David Z.

I still had a full-time job—more than full-time.

Oh my God.

This became quite a substantial business. We were selling these products that I was working on, and it grew and grew and grew. It became quite a big business relatively quickly.

Where does the money go? It's a big business. It goes to David, right? It goes to David, not to you. You don't have any kind of stake, financial tie, nothing. You're essentially just talent.

Yeah, right. Right. I was the buyer. I was a curator for this product, and then I was also kind of a general manager, managing the stores as well.

Sounds a lot like when I asked you, “What are you doing today?”

Yeah. Everything. Basically, it was a little bit of everything. He had a team of people, but I was young, energetic, and running a store for the masses.

When I started at David Z, it was a subculture. By the time I became a buyer for David Z, it was for the masses. David went the route of opening stores on Broadway and catering to tourists. I wanted to focus on local, and I was very into the collecting culture.

I was already collecting shoes long before that, and I was trading with Japan for products that David didn't have. At that time, I was collecting Nikes. David had a Nike account for a short time, but back then, there was a lot of competition with these individual businesses that were kind of taking advantage of the Nike account.

The Nike account was a big business back then because that was the brand that generated a lot of the revenue. He didn't have Nike, so I was trading and collecting because I had built up big industry relationships.

Basically, back in 2009, I started thinking, “Hey, this is amazing, what I'm doing, but I also feel like I could do it in a way where I can cater to the consumer who's looking for this product full-time, not just when I launch this product.” They were coming in.

What do you mean by full-time?

Full-time means that when I was working on projects like that ASICS shoe, for example, the guy who bought that ASICS shoe wasn't necessarily buying other shoes at David Z. Someone who was focused on collecting and special athletic footwear—elevated, very limited athletic footwear—would come back for the product I created, but he wasn't coming back as an everyday consumer.

The idea is, we have this special, differentiated product, but it's 10%. I'm making up numbers: 10%, and there's 90% of stuff you can get anywhere. Why don't we just focus on the special ones?

What do you say?

6. Get rid of the crap

Right. I wanted to do that, but that wasn't the plan for David.

7. Serve your customers, don’t chase new ones

I want to interrupt you. I have a funny story because you mentioned that Steve Jobs is one of my heroes, and I love that he was so direct. This was a few years before he died, and at the time, there was a new CEO at Nike because he loved brands. He said that Nike is one of the greatest brands of all time. He thought Sony was a great brand, Polaroid, and Apple. He loved people who built these brands—these brands with soul and emotion. That's how he put it.

I said to him, “Steve, do you have any advice for me?” He replied, “Nike makes some of the best products in the world, but you also make a lot of junk.” I told him, “Just get rid of the junk.” That's it. Focus on the good stuff.

That's exactly the revelation you're having right now.

But the junk was still making a lot of money.

Yeah, but Steve didn't give a damn. I don't give a damn either. That's where Steve and I are alike, right?

For me, I saw an opportunity in being passionate about 100% of the things I was doing, not 10% or 15% of the things I was doing.

Wow, that's a big insight. I don't want to overlook it. It's super important. I spend 85% of my day on things I don't care about. Just get rid of the junk.

We were talking about this earlier off-camera, and maybe we'll bring it into the discussion. You feel it. You feel when there's love behind what people are doing. Substance.

It's like they were doing things that weren't economic decisions, right? Let's go back to Steve. He insisted that you couldn't open MacBooks. You couldn't open the Mac back then. But when you did open it, it was beautiful. It looked like a piece of art, and everything was arranged.

Nobody was going to see it but him, and that was his point. He was like, “I don't care if nobody else sees it.” You learn that from his dad, who was a carpenter. He'd say, “You're not going to use cheap wood when we're building a cabinet or a dresser.” You put it against the wall. What do people do? Dressers go against the wall. You don't see the back.

People who don't give a damn use cheap wood. We're not going to do that because we know it's there. That's the difference between being such an active founder and being the end user of the product you make. It's also what it takes for greatness.

Patrick Bet-David is like a brother to me, one of my closest friends. You were on his show, and we were talking upstairs with one of the best entrepreneurs alive right now. He's a maniac, just obsessed with operational excellence.

We talked about his stuff, and Patrick made the observation. He said, “Man, it's amazing. Everything is [ __ ].” It doesn't matter what category or industry you're in. He said there are 2 or 3 guys in each one who do great stuff, and then there's a sea of mediocrity.

Yeah. Mediocrity comes when you're working in reverse for the money. When it's about the money and not the product, you can tell. I feel like it's transparent to people today, more than ever, really.

As this generation starts to go back to the basics, when you see vinyl starting to make a comeback, and local record stores having this resurgence with people looking to discover, people want to discover things in real life. I think the digital world has cheapened information, and information sometimes comes in the form of art. You could miss certain things by not touching them or feeling them. You wouldn't understand the essence within the product.

So, I strongly believe that because half of my life was before the internet. Pretty much like yours, right? I think the pre-internet part of my life—childhood, we should say. No, because the internet came out early. I was on AOL in '97, '96. So, half of my childhood was before the internet.

Exactly, but that wasn't an influential internet.

No, no, no. You had to call the internet when we were kids. I literally had to call the internet. It was like, “Oh, Mom's on the phone. I can't make calls online.” When you were online, they couldn't call you back because the line was busy.

I tried to explain this to my daughter. I even looked it up, and you can find it on YouTube—the noise it was making. She just said, “What is this?” I told her, “I was calling the internet.”

Funny, man. It's really true, but the first time the internet influenced you was really in the blogging era.

The development and beginning of the blogging era was right when I was launching my first product at David Z. They became interested in the products after that Wall Street Journal article; they were interested in what was going on. They were even writing for the right reasons back then. It was before brand deals; it was a hobby.

Again, back to love.

8. What luxury should actually mean

Yeah, man. Doing it for love. I never want to stray from that. Everything I do is for the love of what I do.

The marketplace needs more of that. It needs more attention to detail. It needs more purpose, and I think purpose is huge. I often come back to the purpose behind many of these products that Apple makes, and it's to improve people's lives. It doesn't just come in the form of technology.

The product you're wearing can make your life better. You can feel better with the product you're wearing. It can make you look better. It can give you more confidence. I want to give people more than they pay for.

There's a lot that goes into just that part—ensuring there's value in the product when you touch and feel it, or after 50 washes of a garment. There are a lot of words whose meanings are changing over time, like the word luxury and the word value.

Typically, luxury and value don't go hand in hand. Value is a term worn out by low-end retail. Luxury usually needs to cost a certain amount to be luxurious. What luxury should mean is how much people love what they're buying—that it's a luxury to own the product. That's what luxury should mean.

I think a lot of these luxury companies are overexposed now and are becoming less luxurious, at least to me.

That means they're too accessible. So, how do you avoid that with Kith?

First of all, we don't wholesale. Second, we don't license.

Why is that? What's important for someone outside your business?

Because then you can't control how those products are talked about, where they're placed, and how they're displayed. Then you can't tell a story around the product.

You can tell a story at a high level by creating TV ads, and then you go to the airport and there's a small, mediocre store, half of which is under construction. You go in and see the product in a haphazard way, and the people serving you aren't the best. Suddenly, people subconsciously associate your brand with that experience.

From day one, I've always wanted to control the experience people have because I thought I might be the best person to talk about it, since I'm the creator, right? I wanted to guide people through the entire experience, from the ideation to the moment they walk out the door with their purchase.

I feel like we're 50% storytellers and 50% retailers, but on the retail side, that's split into what we do digitally versus what we do physically. As the business starts to lean more toward digital, I feel compelled to open up more physical spaces.

That's how the brand grew, because I have a limit—a threshold where I don't allow the percentage of total website revenue to exceed a certain amount. I don't want to become a digital brand. The point of contact is the touching and feeling.

So, you're deliberately forgoing more sales. This goes back to the love and how the conversation started. You can't work for love or money. You're deliberately forgoing more sales because you have to be physical, and that's a better experience for the person.

If I order something on Kith.com, compared to going to your stores—

Yes, it's a much better experience when you control the whole story, the whole experience. We control everything from the website onward.

Actually, no, that's not true. I'm not forgoing revenue because website revenue is still growing. But I always wanted to be half digital and half physical. I want the physical to grow at the same rate. That's what I'm saying.

Okay. Does that make sense?

Yes, it's not like, “Okay, wait, we're at 50%; stop selling products online.”

Yes.

No, actually, that could be a good idea. It's like, “Sorry, the website will be down for a few days.”

Exactly. You have to come back later.

By the way, there are some brands that do that and generate demand because they disappear for a while. Supreme does that in the off-season, which I think is very smart.

So, wait, are you using online sales as a signal that, “Hey, I need to increase my physical presence—the number of physical stores I have in the real world”?

Yes. I think, because I've done it that way, the brand is in a unique place. I open stores where I travel.

Tell me more about that.

New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and then Tokyo, for example. When I started visiting Paris for Fashion Week, Paris became the next focal point for me. When I started visiting London, London became a focus for me.

Korea—Seoul—became important in fashion, so I started visiting Seoul, and that's when I thought it would be a good time to open a store there. I think the growth we've had has been substantial.

Now that we're planning to open—the news is out—we're going to open in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. We have the data on how many people shop online, as I mentioned before. Those people need the experience, the physical brand experience. They can't just have a digital experience if they're fans of the brand.

I feel like I owe it to them. I have a responsibility to give them the full experience, at least as much as the company can offer. That's really the mindset behind the growth.

This is a privately held company, right?

Yes.

Do you have investors or not?

No.

Do you own everything?

Yes. Well, my partner and I, yes.

You mentioned that you went to Tokyo. There's this crazy thing—you probably know about it—like one of the best pizzas. You wouldn't expect to find the best pizza in the world in Tokyo, but there's this guy who's crazy about it.

That's not true. I do expect to find the best of everything in Tokyo. But keep going.

Well, yeah, maybe. Someone told me this. They said, “The way you make pizzas is like you have a Japanese spirit,” the craftsman, the shokunin, where it doesn't matter if you're sweeping the floor or making sushi. Whatever you do, you have to be the best at that one thing.

Yeah, exactly. Whatever you do, you just take it really seriously and you're the best at what you do. You maximize the potential of any role.

Yeah, and this guy—I forgot. I went to that pizza place. I forgot what it's called, but people who hear this will know which one it is if they've been there, because he makes 3 kinds of pizza.

You can't make any modifications. You can't say, “Can I order...?” The answer is no: “I'm going to make these 3, and they'll be the best.” When their day is over, they just shut down. That's it.

Yeah, they just shut down.

So, if you're a private company, you said something that came to mind: these brands overexpose themselves. They overexpose themselves because they have the pressure from investors and shareholders of, “You have to grow, grow, grow.”

But for artisans, it's like, “I don't know. I make 3 pizzas. I'll do this forever. This is what I want to do.” So, if this worries you, you could stop or slow down.

I do. In many cases, I do, but not in the sense of shutting down the website.

Exactly. That would be the extreme.

I'm definitely not going to make 3 pizzas either. I have a lot of ambition to maximize the potential of what the brand can achieve.

The brand has expanded way beyond footwear and clothing. You just came in here and said, “Hey, man, filming at the Aman is really cool. The next one we should do, we should do one at the Ivy.”

To your point, you're just saying, “I really have no limits to my ambition, and I can take this into hospitality and other spaces as well.”

9. Building the opposite of an arrogant sneaker shop

I'll say this: if I were to be easily swayed by what people expect or want me to do, I'd be in a very small box, because we started with something like streetwear, although we didn't actually start with streetwear.

We started with a cut-and-sew pant in the New York Fashion District. There's a long story behind that. I could talk for 2 hours about that pant, but it was our entry into the apparel world. We didn't start with a T-shirt or a graphic tee.

We started with a pant that then became a varsity jacket, and that happened because I built a community around the store. How did that happen? Back then, as I said before, I was collecting and very involved in product culture in Midtown Manhattan.

But the stores that offered this kind of streetwear and limited-edition footwear were arrogant. You'd walk into those spaces, and they weren't very friendly. I saw a problem with that because I came from David Z, which was becoming a massive retailer. As a consumer at the time, I always felt that talking to whoever came in, even if they weren't there to buy anything, was important so they'd feel at home.

The concept of Kith, which means “friends”—part of the phrase “kith and kin,” friends and family—means friends. I wanted people to feel like they could come into the space and enjoy their day, even if they weren't going to buy anything. That's what prompted me to open the store in the first place.

Then we built this great community based on those values of wanting to be very welcoming. It created a community because it was something people were looking for; they just didn't know it. As I was creating the community, people wanted to wear the store's name on their chests. They wanted to represent the store. We weren't a brand yet. We were a store.

10. The Italian crook who registered Kith’s trademark

Explain the difference then compared to now. What was it like initially? Did you just sell other people's products? What was that like? Now we're a brand first and foremost, right?

I think the difference—the gap between then and now—is enormous, but let me explain the difference in even simpler terms. When I first opened the store, my lawyer asked me if I wanted to register the intellectual property of the product. I thought, “Well, I'm not manufacturing any product. I'm collaborating with these shoe brands, but I'm not making clothes, so I don't need to buy the brand, right?”

He said to me, “You still have protection rights. Even if you use it on clothing, you'll still have some rights.” I said, “Okay.”

Then, 4 years later, some damn con artist in Italy went and registered my trademark—the same trademark—in Italy for clothing. I had already been successful with clothing; I just never considered buying the intellectual property again. All of a sudden, I had to buy my intellectual property and negotiate with this con artist to get the trademark back and own it globally.

That was a very expensive lesson I learned, but I didn't even consider myself a brand at first. Not at all. Even for the first few years when I was making products, I was just thinking, “It's just a cool thing I have lying around for the store.”

But that changed very quickly. When Kith, the little 800-square-foot space in the back of Atrium, expanded into the entire Atrium space because we were that successful, we took over another 5,000 square feet. Suddenly, I had to quickly set up a plan to become a brand.

I came across one of my all-time favorite quotes while reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, “The most powerful pattern I’ve ever noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do it by thinking about business from fundamental principles rather than formulas.” That’s exactly what AppLovin has done with its advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion new potential customers in mobile games. AppLovin lets you capture exclusive attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That’s retention that far surpasses other advertising platforms, and you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin delivers. No complex setups, no experience required. And AppLovin scales rapidly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other companies have seen immediate results, scaling to hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily spend and increasing their revenue by millions. So, you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on board. AppLovin. And you can do that by visiting applovin.com. That’s applovin.com.

When you had 800 square feet, what were you selling in the store?

Just shoes, and the clothing was just a rack.

Were these shoes just the collaborations you were doing?

No. It was still the same as when I was at David Z: a small percentage of collaborations. David Z wasn't a tier-one distributor or a product retailer. David Z had the main product catalogs.

Then I opened this store strictly to have tier-one distribution for all the brands I carried.

What does tier-one distribution mean?

I'll explain.

Okay.

For example, the easiest brand to explain would be Nike. Nike has what they call “Tier Zero,” and then they have “Quick Strikes,” which are below Tier Zero. Tier Zero would be the most limited product they make. Quick Strike would be the second tier, and then you have the main collection, which is a catalog that a store like Dick's Sporting Goods can access.

The whole premise behind the Kith space was to have the best shoe wall in the world. That was going to be top-tier, and this was at a time when it wasn't that popular. Sneaker culture has grown tremendously since then, but I wanted top-tier distribution of all brands.

I didn't invent that. Sneaker boutiques already existed, but I wanted to be the best of them all. I had enough knowledge as a buyer, as a trader, and as a seller to know how to do that and curate the best wall in the world.

Okay, so you combine this industry knowledge with the fact that, at this point, you've been a collector for over 10 years.

Exactly—a collector, maybe even longer.

So you can combine both in the first Kith store, which, again, was 800 square feet.

Right, but also, thanks to the relationships I built by opening these accounts at David Z and buying from these same accounts at David Z, I was able to establish incredible relationships. I then worked on products with all these brands for Kith.

We had top-tier distribution for these brands, but we also had collaborative products that I worked on with them. We had very limited products, and that made people come to our door for something very special. They also came to see the special products these brands were launching, so they were important launch dates for all these brands with different products.

I'm sure you've heard of Virgil.

Yes.

Virgil and Nike created incredible products, and Kith was one of the main retailers to offer that product in the United States. Then there were the Yeezy products with Adidas, for example. There are many other products at that level where Kith became the main destination for people to come and buy them. We built a community around that.

From that point on, when the clothing started selling at the rate it did, the growth of our brand—our own fashion brand, Kith—exceeded any demand we had for anything else. As we started opening more stores, we were able to offer that to different communities in different cities. Seeing the success of the different stores, we understood that our reach was global.

Today, for example, when we do a product launch, like the big project we just launched with BMW—it was about a month ago, I'd say—

Is that what I just saw outside?

That's from the latest project.

Okay. But when can other people buy that? Is it something you custom-make for yourself?

No, we made 47 of those. The 47 represented the years between the M1 and the XM because they're the only 2 exclusive M models BMW has ever created.

You can buy an X5, and the X5 will come in an X5 M version, but there's a regular X5. For the XM, there was only 1 M version of that car. For the M1, there was only 1 M version of that car. There were 47 years between them, so we made 47 of those units.

Do you have one of the 47? Is that what I just saw?

Correct. Yes.

Okay, I understand.

I have 2 of the 47 because they came in purple and black.

Of course, you had to have both. Of course you did.

When we work with BMW, I bring this up because globally—in Seoul, Tokyo, France, London, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Chicago—there will be lines outside every door we have worldwide.

I know there are very few companies that achieve that, that have demand in different cities and launch something with lines outside the store on launch day. I know there are other brands that do that, but I never take it for granted.

We know we have global reach, and at this point, with the power the brand has and my ambition to grow beyond just the product, that's where Kith Ivy was born.

Explain what Kith Ivy is.

Kith Ivy is a membership club for avid padel players, but also for people who want access to a very high-end spa. There's a private dining room with a visual experience, a gym, and a shop. It's 16,000 square feet on the top floor of a building in Tribeca, and then there are 3 courts where people can play padel upstairs. We also have an Erewhon juice bar—the first Erewhon juice bar in New York—in that space.

It went viral when it came out.

Yeah, definitely. This was even before you and I met.

Yeah, I saw it everywhere.

Yeah, it was pretty amazing.

That's become a really special place, especially for me. When thinking about the space, I really built it for myself first, like I do with anything else, whether it's a product or a space. I do it for myself first because I know my eye for the brand and its focus have been consistent for 15 years.

That expanded what the brand can do from a hospitality perspective. Now I love that part of the business. That idea then started to filter into what I'm doing now with Ronnie's.

So, Ronnie’s is a fine-dining restaurant in London, and Ronnie’s Pronto is a gourmet sandwich shop with a window and a patio in West Hollywood. Now I have plans for what I’m going to do to bring that to New York, which I’m working on now and which will end up happening at the end of this month. I have a book here that talks about 1,800 designs because I spend a lot of time on footwear. Footwear has always been the anchor, but now it represents a much smaller part of the business because Kith products have categorically surpassed everything we’ve done in the brand.

As we move into hospitality and I see the opportunity for growth outside of product, that’s where I think the future of the brand will be. It will be multiple categories that are outside of product.

Which business is better? I know—no, now you don’t do this for the money. Obviously, you’re very successful, but for me, wouldn’t the product be a better-performing financial business than hospitality? Am I wrong about that?

No, you’re right about that. You’re right today. You know, you’re right today for my business.

Understood.

So, I gave the brand the opportunity to grow organically and maximize its potential, and I’m planting bigger seeds in other business categories that I plan to grow organically and authentically. I won’t force growth, but if I feel there’s a demand beyond what I’m doing, I’ll try to expand it.

I think we’ve provided this experience for people who live in that area near TriBeCa.

I think Keith McNally has changed. I know I have.

I don’t think so, because people have told me that that space literally changed their lives by living there. For that kind of experience, you used to have to travel out of town, out of New York, maybe. So, I think being disruptive in that way, and being polarizing in the way we present ourselves, is part of the DNA of what we do as we try to break into other business categories. But it’s hard for me to describe and delve into stories that lie 2 or 3 layers beneath the surface if you don’t first understand what I do.

11. How a $20 deli experiment became Kith Treats

Something that intrigues me is this very unique decision. Why include Kith Treats? Where did that idea come from? You did it at the beginning, but why even do it?

When I expanded the Brooklyn space, I wanted to add a happiness element where it was 100% undoubtedly a happy bite of something. You’d smile, right? I wanted there to be another way for people to consume the brand for under $10. That was the idea, and I knew it would be a hook product, or at least I thought so.

Originally, it was going to be a white chocolate bread that I first tried at Club Med.

White chocolate bread?

I traveled to Club Med a lot on vacation, and in the cafeteria there was this very famous white chocolate bread. I tried it, loved it, and the concept came to me: to include some kind of food section in the store. That’s where I got the concept. I thought, “People need to smell this.”

When you walked into the café, that was all you could smell. People had to smell it as they walked through the store, so we installed ventilation to the outside of the building. I wanted people to smell the white chocolate bread.

I brought the chef to New York, and we started working on that white chocolate bread at Café Bari, on Spring and Broadway, before it was the Nike store. It was a very famous café. The chef left, we tried to make it ourselves, and it just wasn’t coming out right. Then, as we were walking to the deli, I saw a guy behind the counter putting frozen fruit in a machine, and when he pulled the lever, it came out like soft-serve ice cream.

Mm-hmm.

So, being a cereal fanatic, I saw a box of cereal. I saw the cereal, I saw the ice cream in the container, and I paid him $20 to mix them in the machine and see what would happen.

Mm-hmm.

And it came out perfect. So, I came up with the idea of mixing cereal with ice cream right there while we were trying to figure out the concept for the white chocolate bread. From there, I decided that was what we were going to do.

Then we changed the concept to a cereal bar, an ice cream bar with cereal. It grew to be much more than that, but that’s how it started. Then I noticed people eating it, and every single person who took a bite smiled. That’s where the concept was born.

But you said you initially thought it would be a loss leader.

Yes, I was just thinking about getting more and more people’s attention. This could be their first contact with Kith, and then they’d be like, “Oh, this is nice.”

What’s happening next door?

No.

Is that the idea or not?

No, it was people coming into the store.

Oh, I see. The other way around. Right. Okay. If you have it that way, or if you think about it the other way, like you just mentioned, then you’re forcing the situation. What you’re trying to do is create a new consumer, and I already had the consumer.

Everything that started when Kith was founded, I was very paranoid about whether we’d even be able to cover expenses. Once we were able to do that, I was very happy. That just became a starting point and the organic foundation that I had. Growing it from there was idea after idea, like building blocks. But it wasn’t until much later that I thought, “Hey, let’s do something here and start building a new consumer.”

I’m glad you said that because it ties into this tangent we’ve been going on in the most beautiful way in the conversation: “Yes, but I just want to focus on the 10% to 15% that I really love, and not on these other things.” The reason I thought of ice cream as the inverse is because I just read this very dark biography of Sam Walton.

People know that Sam built, obviously, the largest retail empire in the world. But for the first 5.5 years of his career, he had just 1 store in a town of about 2,000 people. I didn’t know how he didn’t have what you had, where you said, “I’ve got the people. How can I continue to serve them?”

Which is where you’re going with this. He was like, “I need them to come into the store.” So, he put an ice cream cart out front. He was selling popcorn, hot dogs, and all kinds of things to attract more people.

Yeah.

Exactly. That’s why I made the analogy, and you’re like, “No, no, I already have the people, this core group that’s really special.” I mean that in a positive way. It’s like they have this cult following. Then it’s, “Okay, you’re so special and unique. How do we continue to serve them and extend that?” Instead of the other way around.

All of our growth has been based on that. How do I best serve my customer? How do I give them the opportunity to have the best experience, and from there gain more customers?

And you knew this because, remember, let’s go back to that story about the gray Timberlands. This is before the internet. If you serve these almost devoted followers that you have, they’ll go out and recruit others.

People on your behalf. When it happens organically like that, and people hear about it through word of mouth instead of seeing it on Instagram and being curious about a photo, the emotional connection people have with the brand becomes so much stronger.

When they can discover it for themselves based on what people are saying, or when they walk into the space for the first time, they don’t necessarily think the space will be as grand as it is when they walk in. Through conversations with some of my general managers in the store, it’s like, people come in with suitcases—their first stop from the airport.

They walk into the store and just stand there. It happens several times a day, where I have to say, “Excuse me, do you need any help?” And they’re like, “No, we’re just enjoying the moment.”

Walking into the West Hollywood store today is breathtaking. Every time I walk in there, I still get excited because I can’t believe we’ve gotten to the point where I can build this for the community, for people to come and have this kind of space.

I was able to build a space where the product sells itself. At this point, the product has such a following because there’s so much value in it. I don’t need to build these incredible spaces at $1,300 or $1,400 a square foot, which is what luxury brands spend. But I do it because that’s how I give something back to the consumer, giving them an experience they can truly value and enjoy.

They spend the day there. Families come into the store and spend real time in the space. Then they’ll go to Treats, or they’ll go to Ronnie’s, and they’ll really spend the whole day there.

So, I never take people’s time for granted. I never take people’s purchasing power for granted. I always feel like we need to make better products and offer more for the same price.

That kind of philosophy is about the end result of what people get and the essence of what they feel. It’s very different from trying to change human behavior, like Steve Jobs did in the past, whose creations sought to improve people’s lives as they transitioned from one style of technology to another.

This is a familiar product. If you buy clothes, you’re buying clothes. We’re not reinventing the wheel there. But when you buy an item like the shirt I’m wearing, for example, and compare it dollar for dollar with other products on the market, I truly believe—and this is a matter of feel and perception—that if you want to put 2 pictures side by side, you could put a Uniqlo T-shirt next to a Kith one, not notice the difference, and argue about the price.

But this is for those who know. Kith is built for people who know the difference.

Know the difference between what?

Good product versus great product. That’s really the brand’s motto.

12. Always give people more than they pay for

Tell us more about how you think about pricing.

I always feel that people should get more than they pay for. Where we price the product in the market becomes very important, not just to be competitive, because that's not really our challenge. It's mainly about the fact that we don't look at prices elsewhere, although I do study the market. Just to have the knowledge, I don't necessarily apply it to how we price our products.

We look at the previous season or the previous year to see how the product was priced and try to improve it, sometimes at the same price or by raising prices a little, but offering much more in the product. So it's not necessarily a formula; it's more like a feel and an intuition from being in the business for 30 years—well, 31 years—and knowing the difference between good and great.

Have you read this book called The Strategy of Luxury? It's a red book with white lettering.

I haven't.

Well, I'm going to send it to you because I think what you're touching on is simply that there are other people in the industry, especially in the luxury industry, who know that there's a human psychology where price is a shortcut for us. We're all busy, and if you raise the price without reinvesting in the product, in some categories it makes it more desirable. In fact, it increases the lineup and the demand for it.

You say, “No, no, no, I don't try to maximize or charge using any psychological tricks.”

That's a bias. That's a bias—what you just mentioned. Well, it's a very enduring thing in human nature, but my point is, I don't want to make money just for the sake of making more money. If I'm going to charge more, I want them to get more value.

Is that it? Am I understanding what you're saying?

100%. And I think the consistency of that thought process is the reason we've been able to grow at the rate we have. The consumer has seen that year after year.

A lot of these parents who are my age—44—a lot of them have grown up with the brand since they were 30 or 29. My primary age range of followers is between 28 and 35, and the second is 35 to 44. I feel like the growth that people have experienced over the last 15 years of seeing the progress constantly has made them feel like they're part of the journey. We've come so far creating products that it's mind-blowing.

When you compare the first collection to a current one, we had absolutely no clue. You can see this in this book, right? This book is different because this is the step forward. The footwear was a collaboration, and I already had 15 years of experience before working on this product. The first shoe came 15 years into my career.

Whereas in clothing, my first product was in 2012. So, if you think about it, that was 14 years ago. When you look at the progress, there will be a much bigger difference than in this book.

13. Seeing 15 years of work laid out on the floor

Would you do another book just about clothing?

I thought about it for 15 years, but then we were building the second floor of my office a few years ago. We expanded. We have 60,000 square feet on the third floor, and then I took another 30,000 square feet for the design studio on the second floor.

Before we started building on the second floor, I knew I had about 6 to 8 months to design the space. So I knew I was going to have an empty space. We had already taken up the space. My archivist's name is Jordan Bloom, and I asked him to arrange all my footwear from day 1 in chronological order.

Is this the picture I just saw on Instagram?

Yes.

Yes, that's awesome, man.

So that's it, and it's actually here. First of all, the first time I was able to see all my work in one place was a few years ago when I saw this. I did that because I'd never seen it before, so I was curious to see the progression for myself. I wanted to see how far we'd come in footwear.

It's impossible to see 1,800 different shoes by flipping through pictures or in a way that lets you see the progression. It has to be in person. There's no other way to do it.

When I saw it, 2 things happened. The first was that people need to see this. Then I thought, people need to see it physically. We have to do this. So the first idea was that we needed a display for this product, which we'll be doing at the end of this month.

The index is all my products that came out for sale, but more importantly, all my unreleased products. The unreleased products consist of samples that led to the final pair. So there are about 800 released pairs and another 1,000 unreleased pairs.

I wanted to have them all in one space and basically do an exhibit. It's called Walk the Index. We'll have a digital version of the index loaded into people's apps, like the Kith app. You need the Kith app to access it, so you can see it and actually walk through the index of the book, which I thought was really cool. People will obviously be able to buy the book there.

During those 4 days that the exhibit is open, we'll also have panels with each of the 4 main collaborators: Nike, Adidas, New Balance, and ASICS. Some of the executive leadership will be there to attend.

In addition to the exhibit, Ronnie's will be launching for the first time in New York City via a truck. The truck we built is a really special truck. It will feature what I call the Ronnie's menu.

There are 2 sandwiches that really became popular. One is in London. It's called the OG Burger. Then there's one in Los Angeles, in West Hollywood, called the Wagyu Pronto. The Wagyu Pronto is a Wagyu pastrami sandwich, and the burger is this Wagyu burger. It's amazing, with our own sauce and a mix of sautéed onions. I think it's one of the best burgers you'll ever taste.

It comes in this red box. In the box comes 1 of the 2 sandwiches you order, along with Pronto fries and 1 of the 2 frozen drinks we make in Los Angeles.

Most importantly, it comes with a toy: a toy shoebox. I'm bringing back, for the first time in its original form—because we'd already brought it back once with a navy sole—a shoe that really made me known when I opened Kith, called the Salmon Toe. It's an ASICS Salmon Toe. It's a GEL-Lyte 3 with a salmon-colored blocked toe and a navy quarter with white stripes. It's beautiful.

A miniature version of those shoes will come in a small box, and that will basically be the toy on the Ronnie's menu. The truck will only serve the Ronnie's menu. That's the only product it will serve, and it comes with the options I mentioned.

That will launch for the expo, where we'll be showcasing the sample, which I can't mention right now. Then the truck will be permanently located in front of the main store after the expo.

I got the city to approve outdoor seating in front of my store on Lafayette, so I'll have the Ronnie's truck stand there. We'll also be launching delivery for the entire menu from a ghost kitchen, which I think will happen at the end of October.

I love this idea of maintaining a catalog of past work and revisiting it from time to time. On my other podcast, Founders, where I read biographies of historical figures and entrepreneurs, I became obsessed for a while with the world of fashion designers. So I studied Coco Chanel, Ralph Lauren, and then Balenciaga. I think Balenciaga isn't—I don't want to insult him—but it was like, “It's just not my thing.”

The interesting thing is, I always wonder who’s at the top of their profession and who they consider the best. Warren Buffett has this idea: if you want to invest in a company in a sector, ask all the industry leaders, “Hey, you have 1 bullet. You can take 1 out. Who would it be?”

Usually everyone will point to the same person. He says, “That's the guy you should invest in.” So with Balenciaga, that was the case. Coco Chanel and Christian Dior called him “the master of us all.” I think that was one of the quotes.

I didn't know. It seems crazy to me how I think of Balenciaga now and how they thought of him back then. But about Balenciaga, if you haven't read about him, I'll send you some good recommendations.

Basically, he redesigned his stores almost like they were a church. He had a kind of reverence—a religious reverence—for what he did. One of the most fascinating things is that he had notebooks because he didn't just design; he physically sewed everything himself.

He was one of the few couturiers, or whatever you want to call them, masters of haute couture. I thought about this idea that his career, in his case, started relatively late.

Let's say it took 20 years. He can look back and say, “What was I doing 18 years ago?”

Yes. But the work was very important to me—and this is very important, especially in footwear: I also learned to make a shoe from scratch. Looking back and seeing the progress we made, and the knowledge gained from working with certain brands—some brands do things better than others—I feel that, because of the amount of things you learn along the way working with so many brands, in footwear I've become the most well-rounded and knowledgeable person.

I was able to see the difference between athletic shoes, dress shoes, and boots. I was able to really learn how these brands manufacture their products, go to the factories and their offices, and understand the dynamics of what makes them so special. So this book represents much more than just the product at first glance.

For me, it's a timeline of the feelings I had and the knowledge I acquired along the way. When I recall a moment, there are things you remember based on certain events, news, or milestones in your life—things that happened in your family, or whatever. I remember my life through the product. I think about when I got married, and I also think about the product of that time.

When I opened my first store, and all the stores that came after, the milestones in your life were anchored to the products you created. And that brings us back to why it's so profound.

We talked before we started recording. What I'm trying to understand is that I can't grasp how you drive your work until I understand the personality of the person who developed the ideas.

Right.

14. Growing up before the algorithm

I'm trying to understand who the hell is sitting in front of me. Why—how on earth do I ask you, if you're 13 years old, how on earth are you interested in shoes? Then I thought, think about the culture he's in, think about where he lives, think about what he listens to, and think about what he's involved in. You can't understand Ronnie unless you understand everything that happened back then.

Yeah. Going back to that, taking 2 buses to get to high school—the Q17 to the Q30—or taking the train to work. When I used to take the F train from the last stop at 179th and Hillside to Broadway–Lafayette, or West 4th, when I used to work on 8th Street, what you see on the train—because you go through certain neighborhoods—becomes your world.

Every stop or every 2 stops was like a different culture getting on the train. Cultures are dispersed, they create communities, and then they get on the train in groups. Along the way, basically from the first stop on the F train to the last one, going into the city, what I could see became my world. That was my influence.

I could see so many different styles, people dressed in so many different ways. That's when the sense of individuality was at its peak, before you were influenced by your algorithm. Now, a lot of people want that because it's based on what they see, or what brands have to pay for in terms of mass content distribution. We live in a very different era.

I could see people walk into a store with no idea what they were looking for, without knowing the brands, and I could see what people were drawn to first based on the visuals—on what they thought looked different or went with what they wanted to use. I was able to understand why so many different people preferred so many different products for so many different reasons, and that became a big part of who I am because it became part of why I like the product.

That was my influence, basically: seeing so many different styles and then forming my own edit.

That's a lost art. Wait, wait, talk more about that.

I got to see so many different styles. You absorb all this information, then you synthesize it and process it in your head and say, “Okay, what's my twist or my version of this? What's my opinion on it?”

Back then, when you went shopping, you were forced to have an opinion because you hadn't seen everything. If you watched a music video, you'd see 1 or 2 different pairs of shoes or boots, right? If you opened a magazine, you'd see 10 different boots. But then you'd walk into a store and see 500 different boots. You walk in and you're forced to have an opinion.

Nowadays, people walk into a store and they know all the products before they even walk in. They've already seen someone wearing it, a picture, a lookbook, or a campaign about it. It's like outsourcing your taste to someone else.

Yeah, and I'm not saying people weren't influenced by the media back then—they were. But it was a much smaller opening to what people were seeing. Then you'd come in, and back then, you were just forced to have your own opinion. I feel like it captured the vibe of wanting to live more in an analog world.

Man, damn, yeah.

I want to. I really do. I tell my wife every day, “I wish I could throw my phone away. I wish I could...” And you know what's funny? I really feel like, just like fashion is very cyclical, people's thought processes are cyclical too, in terms of how they're influenced. I feel like that's cyclical as well, which means that if you tried what we had before the internet, you would find yourself craving the analog, the physical.

I want to be influenced outside of the digital. I want to travel, disconnect from everything, and just not have an internet connection. Something we had as kids is that you were forced to be bored and alone with your own thoughts. My daughter says, “I'm bored,” and I say, “That's great.” It's wonderful. You have to understand that's when you use your imagination. When you're bored, that's also where a difference emerges.

I just flew to Milan because I know a lot of founders and entrepreneurs. I know so many of them, and I met this guy called Luca Ferrari. He has this company called Bending Spoons. I remember having lunch with him back in February, and the lunch was so impactful because he was describing how he built his company with ideas I'd never heard anywhere else, especially since he's the same age as us.

Yeah.

And I said, “Dude, stop. You have to repeat that.”

I took out my phone. We were on WhatsApp, and I started bombarding him with all the things he was saying. He asked me, “What are you doing?” I said, “I'm taking notes on your unique ideas for when you come on the show.” He hadn't even agreed to come on the show. I just assumed it.

I told him, “Dude, you've got some crazy stuff in your head. I need to get it off my chest.” One of the things he said was that he was building a tech company, but he grew up in a small town of 900 people. His parents were hairdressers, and he said, “I started in Copenhagen, then I moved to Milan.”

He said, “I couldn't copy the mantras of tech startups because I didn't even know they existed.” So he was forced to—he was essentially in a digital world, but it was like we were as kids. He said he only had his own thoughts and his own reflections, and because he was engaged in his own thinking, he wasn't influenced by anything else because he doesn't pay attention.

Yes. This is where you get creativity. This is where you get original things. This is where you get true differentiation.

And that's very similar in the sense that Queens played such a big role in my life because in Queens you see so much. New York City is honestly the most inspiring place in the world because there's so much presented to you every day. Even if I'm talking about something outside of digital, just walking around, you get to see so much.

In terms of what I want to accomplish, it goes beyond the typical run-of-the-mill retail brands and the concepts that have helped define those brands we all know. I want to move away from a lot of that, and I want the brand to do so much more than that.

If you knew exactly what I do in the context of the culture I'm in today—the product culture or the retail culture—understanding how much we've expanded beyond the typical retail space is extraordinary. But where we go from here and how it could expand even further is even bigger. So I try not to have limits in the way I think about the business, if that makes sense.

This is actually a very important point, and I have certain people in my life that I turn to—a kind of living board of directors. What happens in many cases is that you're obviously ambitious and determined. Every single person who's going to be on the show is ambitious and determined. I feel the same way, but there are certain people in my life that you talk to about what's going on, and they're like, “Oh, you have this weird ceiling that doesn't actually exist. Why don't we just knock that damn thing off, since it doesn't exist?”

Do you have any—

That's corporate structure, though.

No, but in your own personal life, when you think about running your company and you say, “Hey, man, I have some damn big dreams.”

I have things—no, I don't consider myself as... Maybe I'm part of this culture, but I can expand beyond it. I can do whatever I want. I don't look left or right. I'm focused on what I want to do.

Do you have someone in your life who can just take the top off your head and say, “Hey, man, you have no ceilings? You have no limits?”

My partner Sam has allowed me to do that. He's my business partner, and he's always been someone I can talk to who's given me the energy to go and pursue anything I have in mind.

I listened to an episode—one of your episodes—this morning. I'm not even sure which one it was, where you just rambled about Steve Jobs. It's incredible.

That's how you know he listens to the show. The episode was about simplicity.

Oh, yes. How Steve Jobs kept things simple.

Right. That's for my other podcast, Founders. I think it's episode 349 or 350. Okay, someone look it up. Let's see if I'm right. That would be quite remarkable, actually.

It's similar to when Steve Jobs got into music. It's like, “What the heck is Apple doing getting into music?” I'm sure it got a lot of attention. But for him to take that initiative and have shareholders and a lot more pressure than I'm under from a financial point of view—

349. Wow. What are you up to now in Founders?

435, something like that. Where's Ian? He posted it for me yesterday. Yeah, I finish each one saying, “435 down, 1,000 to go.” And 1,000 never ends, because people say, “Oh, you're going to do 1,435?” I say, “No, no, no. I'm going to do this until I die.”

It's really incredible, man. I just go through my workout and I'm just like, wow.

Dude, I was walking to dinner last night. The crazy thing is, you know my friend Elvis? Every time I come to New York, I text him because I care about him so much. First of all, I admired him before I even knew who he was. I was doing episodes about him, and then we became friends. He's a wild guy. Even at—I think he's 82—he's still crazy, and his demeanor is absolutely insane. I'm not even going to tell you off-camera what happened last night.

I'm walking to dinner, and a guy literally taps me on the shoulder. He's listening to Larry Gosling 325. See if I'm right about that for me. This damn whiskey right here. He's like, “Man, I'm in sales, and I listen to this to motivate myself over and over again,” because essentially Larry Gagosian built a billion-dollar empire with a phone and stuff like that. He's just a salesman.

325? Boom! 325. Look at that. And so on, but I do the same thing. I go back and listen to it because it reinforces the lessons and motivates me.

Anyway, what does it do for you? Does it motivate you?

I think so. The reason I mentioned Lonnie Ali a while ago, and why I think we'd get along, is because I do it from the heart. I put my soul into it.

For starters, I think podcasting is a miracle. Like we said before we recorded, whatever topic in the world you want to hear about, you'll find someone who's gone deeper than any existing university course. Whatever you want to learn, you can do it on demand and for free while your eyes are busy. The format is also incredible. I thought it was a miracle when I discovered it back in 2010. I still think it's a damn miracle to this day.

What I would say is, I make the podcast that I myself want to listen to. I think there's a bad part, and I'm going to ramble a little, but my mom was a fundamentalist Christian, so I was forced to go to church every Sunday. It was in the South. Unfortunately, this took a bad turn. She ended up getting breast cancer, and at first she tried to pray for the cancer to go away. That's how extreme she was, damn.

It took me about 2 years to convince her to go to an oncologist. I don't want to get all emotional now, but it got to the point where I had to drive from Miami, where I lived, to Orlando, where she was, every time she had an appointment with the oncologist. If I didn't show up and take her, she wouldn't go. She ended up having a horrible death, damn.

Obviously, I don't want to get into that now. But what I would say is that the benefit of growing up in the church—and I didn't realize this until I saw it at Founders—is that I have a kind of Southern preacher style because I'm an evangelist. I consider myself a journalist. I'm an evangelist for entrepreneurship.

The way I think about everything we do is that religions, cult-like followings, or brands thrive because of repetition over time, again and again and again. For me, this is episode 349. I read the book, recorded it, edited it, listened to it before it came out, and published it. I bet I could go back there and still forget some of that [ __ ].

I'll go back, and I think that's what people overestimate. We forget that we forget. We forget that we forget. I think going back to great designs in books, great books you've read, great podcasts, and great movies builds up over time. I've seen The Godfather Part II, I don't know, 15 times. I'm still learning things. I've seen every episode of Game of Thrones, I don't know, 10 times. I'm still taking notes on that.

That's what builds up. It reinforces these lessons, and it energizes me. Inevitably, you're going to stumble upon something today—maybe not today, maybe tomorrow, but definitely in the next month or 2 months—and you're going to run into some messed-up problem in your business. You're going to be like, “Man, I need another pair of eyes on this.” Or, “Oh, this is what Steve Jobs did. This is how he kept it simple. This is what he did.” So I'll definitely apply some of that.

But let me tell you something, folks. For everyone listening right now, if you can create content that you can later come back to for motivation, you've made it in life. Congratulations on that.

Now, we have another podcaster, because I'm also obsessed with other podcasters. Jackson Doll is off-camera. Can you find the tweet between you, me, and Sam Hinkie about this? I spend a lot of time with other podcasters. I think Jackson is one of the most talented people. We talk a lot about the business, and other podcasters come and watch what we do because we're trying to operate at the highest levels here.

There's a Twitter exchange between Jackson and my friend Sam Hinkie. Sam is talking about me because I was saying that I listen to every episode before it comes out. Sometimes I find myself laughing at things that happen. Sam Hinkie replies to this tweet where I talk about laughing: “Good luck competing with the maniac who laughs himself silly while recording his solo podcast, which he remembers because he loves listening to his own podcast.”

Jackson is sitting off-camera here and says, “Today is July 22, 2025.” He adds, “He once told me that he loves podcasts, but there just aren't many that are good.” So the rational conclusion is that he usually ends up listening to his own episodes again.

Hey, if listening to yourself is your first choice, that's crazy. But you know what? Again, what are you doing? Doing it for yourself. That's incredible. It's the same thing. I think you might be the only one, but I love that.

15. How a padel obsession created Kith Ivy

Let's get back to that before I interrupted you and started rambling. You were talking about Steve Jobs and music. I want to talk about Ivy because—well, go ahead.

You asked me about Ivy, and I want to go back to that for a second. 3 or 4 years ago, I spent some time in Miami, and I was introduced to Wayne Boich. Wayne is the founder of Reserve. He builds padel courts, and he also built a members' club on a seaplane base in Miami. I used it as my office, we played padel all day, and I was answering calls all day. I just became obsessed with sports.

What I realized about the people who played was that they didn't know how to dress for the sport. As I became obsessed with the sport, I would see people coming to play in vintage jerseys and basketball shorts. Honestly, it distracted me. I thought to myself, “How can I begin to help shape what the sport might look and feel like?” It was totally new.

The first courts in the United States, I think, were in Miami, built by Wayne. He was sure the sport was going to grow. As the season progressed, I went back home, and for the next 6 months all I heard was padel. People wanted to play padel and didn't have a court to do it on.

I'm the creative director of Wilson Tennis, but that's been behind the scenes for quite some time now. We launched a new line called Sport Professionals, which is a higher level within Wilson, and I helped them with that through design.

When I returned, I thought about starting to apply some of the ideas I had about tennis, but in a very different way, because padel is a much sweatier sport. It's much more active in terms of how the fabrics and movements should feel. You turn a lot, and there's a lot of vertical and lateral movement. It's very different from tennis in the way you move during the sport.

The idea was to shape the identity of a new sport that would expand into the States and become a major sport in the States. That really excited me to take on the sport and help define the identity of what it would become. That became the idea of Kith Ivy—how it looks and feels. If you come to Kith Ivy, you'll love it.

It's probably the space that I'm most passionate about, but also the one I'm most proud of. What we've managed to build there is the community. As I started traveling to different cities and playing padel, many of these players used Kith Ivy products.

Kith Ivy is a membership club, but the product is sold on the website, on the Kith site. You can still participate in the brand if you play padel elsewhere and aren't a member of the club, for example.

As I started traveling the world, I saw people using the product, and it became, I think, the highest form of how sport can look and feel. The mere fact that an idea arose about how the sport or its identity could be improved created this concept around a 360-degree, holistic vision of what Ivy is.

It wasn't just about shaping the identity of the clothes people wore, but also the experience surrounding padel. What should playing padel feel like? Padel could easily be a sport that Rolex gets involved in, or it could be one of those other sports that then get mixed up, like ping pong and pickleball.

So, which direction will this sport take? I wanted to be part of the progress that the sport has made and elevate it to where it is today, in which I believe I played a role.

I think it's a perfect illustration of your idea of world-building—telling that whole story. It's also a perfect place to end our first conversation. What I want to do is repeat this in a few months. I think we filmed in Ivy and focused on the fact that you have a very unique, almost filmmaker-like vision of world-building. But, friend, thank you for taking the time. This is incredible.

I appreciate it.

This is great. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you hear this and leave a review. And be sure to listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of the greatest entrepreneurs in history looking for ideas you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.