I'm Yasmin Gagne. I'm David Salazar, standing in for Josh, who's on a reporting trip this week. And this is Most Innovative Companies.
On today's episode, Fast Company contributing writer Nicole Gall-McElroy on why Envision failed. It just became too big and too distributed. Legendary designer Paul Smith on where he finds inspiration. You have to be individual and you have to use your own eyes and ears and observation and you have to keep reassessing. And as always, keeping tabs. Forget a rat czar, I need a double parking czar. But first, here's the download.
The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation. The Federal Reserve is scheduled to meet this week, and it looks like their preview of potentially cutting interest rates is not going to happen anytime soon. Jay Powell, come on. Maybe if he goes and sees the dead's run at the sphere, he will change his mind.
You know, financial experts are saying that it's not going to happen in part just because of this wealth effect from older Americans helping push inflation. And this is 17% of the population of boomers who are...
are fueling a lot of consumer spending, which in turn helps push inflation up. So it looks like we're going to have to wait a little while for rates on things like credit cards and business loans to come down. I do think it's funny that we are the most reviled generation for sure as millennials, but people have really turned against boomers quite sharply for shit like this. Well, because I think they finally realized that avocado toast is a cold comfort for never owning a home. Yeah.
Yeah.
which Microsoft's Azure 1 by 40%. One day, I will know how to pronounce that word. It's a toughie, as is the cloud and AI computing business, apparently. Yeah.
But, you know, I think despite being unpronounceable, Microsoft's solution seems to be beating Google. And in other news, last night, NYPD officers in riot gear arrested pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University, which is our alma mater. They breached a building that student demonstrators occupied, Hamilton Hall, and...
Columbia's president Manoush Shafiq, who has been in the news quite a bit, in a letter to the NYPD asked them to come in and clear the building, also asked them, police that is, to stick around through at least May 17th. So that's after all the graduation commencement ceremonies are done.
But Columbia's not the only campus that seems to be in turmoil, especially last night. The LAPD was called in by UCLA to break up violence between protesters and counter-protesters who were attacking the encampment there. It followed weeks of protests on other college campuses, including UT Austin, Virginia Tech, Cal Poly Humboldt, among many others. All the protesters have been demanding that these schools divest from Israel-linked companies.
and be more transparent about their investments. The counter example to all of the chaos on various campuses has been Brown University, where students set up an encampment and then the school said it would consider divesting, and then they took down the encampment. It was a very straightforward process over there.
So I'll just say this. Student journalists at Columbia, we were both. Specky is part of the Columbia Daily Spectator back in the day, have been doing a really incredible job covering the protests, especially, you know, the college radio station WKCR, which normally plays a lot of jazz today.
Did a really remarkable job covering what was going on last night. Yes, absolutely. Last night I was listening a little bit to WKCR and it was pretty impressive the way they held it down, but also just like their jazz knowledge, you know, giving updates on the situation in between John Coltrane life in Japan, which pretty great. Yeah.
Yesterday, Walmart announced that it will close all 51 of its health care centers across Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, and Texas. The company will also end its virtual health care services after acquiring telehealth provider MeMD in 2021. The retail giant cited a challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs for the discontinuation and also stated that these centers were not profitable.
The move comes just five years after the first clinic opened in Georgia in 2019. I know David has a lot of thoughts on this, so we may actually do a separate segment. Totally, yeah. I mean, what I'll just say is that it's pretty clear that healthcare is not as easy to make money in as a lot of these companies seem to think. And it's actually sad because these clinics were super focused on affordability and price transparency. Like you didn't even necessarily need insurance.
And you would go in and they like had a menu of the services that they offered, like x-rays and like primary care stuff. So I think it will be a big blow to these communities because they're really focused on underserved communities. And it'll obviously be a big blow to the employees who will soon be out of jobs. On the topic of employees, it was May Day today, aka International Labor Day.
And in Boston and Toronto, among other cities in the U.S. and Canada, hotel workers rallied to demand significant pay raises. They're trying to reverse a lot of staffing and service cuts that were made during the pandemic. And beyond improving the position of these unionized workers, it could also have industry-wide repercussions with even non-union hotels raising wages and improving benefits. That's the news you need to know today.
So David, you have spoken to me a lot. You've edited stories about plus-sized men's fashion. And I'm curious, what's a brand that's actually getting it right? There are very few, is what I'll say. Um...
You know, this is going to make me sound like a suburban dad. What I would say is my favorite shirts that I get are from JCPenney's Mutual Weave brand, which sounds absurd to be talking about JCPenney in 2024. But they actually, they've been putting in the work. Yeah.
Yeah, it's true. It's funny because I feel like you either get too baggy and crazy or just not good proportions. Yes. What is the issue there? I mean, part of it is just like there's not a standard plus size body, right? You can kind of generalize a small, medium, large with the right amount of fabric, whereas...
Just the variation of body types gets a little strange, but it tends to result in very strange pants where they just assume that your entire leg is the width of your thigh and not in a fashionable way. Yeah.
You know, we had a while ago now, but one of my favorite interviews was with Jens Greed, the CEO of Skims. You tested out some of their menswear, right? I did. I'm actually currently wearing my Skims. I don't know which collection it is. I do really like a lot of the Skims stuff, especially like there's like performance style stuff that's more like slick, but they've got like a cotton collection that has become a big like wardrobe staple. They have
Super comfortable underwear, super comfortable, just like basic black T-shirts that I really love and are super soft and nice to wear. The reason I asked you is because later on in the show, we'll be talking to legendary menswear designer Paul Smith about his Melrose Avenue store and broadly about, you know, just his long history of dressing the most famous people ever.
But first, we're going to talk about InVision. InVision was once a prominent player in the design software space, but the company that was once valued at $2 billion announced that it will be discontinuing its design collaboration services by the end of the year. The founders, Clark Wahlberg and Ben Nadell, originally designed the software as a prototyping tool for their designers, but it quickly gained popularity and ultimately achieved unicorn status after raising $100 million in 2017. The company's
This was followed by another milestone when it raised $115 million the following year, which effectively doubled its valuation. So what happened? How did this unicorn unravel? Here to help us break it down is Fast Company contributing writer Nicole Gall-McElroy. Also, just to note, this segment was recorded before Josh went out of town, so he'll be part of the rest of the episode.
Hi, Nicole. Welcome to the show. Hi, Yasmin. Thanks for having me. So this seems like a pretty straightforward story, but I want to give our listeners basically the arc of it. So going back to the beginning, tell us how the company first started. Ben Nadel and Clark Valberg started the company together. They're engineers. It kind of happened by accident. They had met at some sort of like
ColdFusion meetup in New York. And they decided at some point to start a consulting business together called Epicenter Consulting. And that business created custom mobile apps to help businesses boost efficiency. And
So they were renting a really small space, like I think a space of a space in Manhattan. It was just for the two of them. They built an internal app, which didn't really have a name. It was just for them to be using to help them
communicate better with their customers and help their customers within their organizations communicate with each other, you know, the employees at those organizations. And from that, InVision was born. And they realized themselves, like, this is a really good idea.
So really what the thing was that they had built this internal software, it was a way for them to create a prototype and they could present the prototype to their customer. And the customer would think that they had built the thing that was ultimately supposed to be at the end of this process for them. And so it allowed them to create something beautiful that kind of trick their customer into thinking that was sort of the end thing that they were meant to present.
And just to be clear for our listeners, like you're turning a Photoshop design into a product simulation in browser, right? So it's not like you're creating a physical prototype. Yes, this is like totally digital. Yes. But then they could kind of change it and iterate on it very easily and easily.
take that feedback that would normally be sort of like late in the game feedback. They were able to get it really early. That also allowed their customers to sort of have a look into what they were doing and understand their process and
have some empathy for it. And then they could also have empathy for their customers and understand what their pain points were along the process of creating this thing together. And then it allowed them to get to the end result much quicker and more efficiently with also just a better relationship with their customer, less frustration, less sort of confusion and more feedback on
more innovation with just a more efficient and productive end result.
So it sounds like in less than a decade, I think I read, its staff grew to nearly 1,000 people. It achieved a $1.9 billion valuation. I mean, tell us about adoption of the product once it hit the market and why designers liked it so much and who was using it. Well, so initially, Clark had kind of floated it to just a couple of designers, just designers that he knew, just kind of passed it off to them and said, hey, just try this thing that we made. Like, tell me if you like it. Tell me how you use it, what you don't like about it.
And I think it just sort of grew word of mouth that way. And he started to get feedback that it was pretty great. And that's when he and Ben realized like, oh, this actually might be its own business on its own, not just something that we're using internally. And they grew pretty quickly. They had, of course, just the two of them in this like liver of office space. But then they realized,
that real estate in New York City is not cheap and that they couldn't really afford it. And so they decided immediately to be a fully remote organization. And this, of course, was 2013. So nobody was working remotely at that time in this way. Because they were remote, they didn't just have to deal with a talent pool in a certain geographic area. They could
pretty much hire anyone across the globe. And so it grew very fast in a short period of time. I want to say the fastest growth period was probably between 2014 and 2019. They did come to have about a thousand employees and it was valued at $1.9 billion in 2019. They also simultaneously began to build out
different arms of the business. And obviously, product development was one. That was a big one. But Clark is kind of a marketing genius, it seems. And he just has a knack for understanding that designers were this untapped community in the business world and that they had the opportunity through Envision, which they called the company Envision because it was a play on the word envision.
So I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about financials. So first of all, explain to us how they monetized it. Was it a subscription business? It was a subscription business. And I think initially they said it was like $8.99 a month that their $8 a month subscription plan. That was in 2011. Eventually that grew into enterprise business.
clients. All of the Fortune 100 companies used Envision during its heyday. They were doing this. It was sort of not done to subscribe to software on a monthly basis, but that is how they grew their business and it worked. And then in terms of fundraising, I know it achieved a $1.9 billion valuation in 2019. I think those years were the height of companies raising...
stupid amounts of money and having insane valuations without maybe- Soft bank's heyday. Yeah, exactly. Soft bank's heyday. But tell us sort of who they raised from, how much they raised, what that picture was like. So they did take on some funding and like their total raise was $350 million. Their last round was in 2018. It was $115 million. It was a series F
round. Man, some funding is putting it lightly for sure. Yeah. When that Series F happened, it was valued at $1.9 billion, right?
Yeah. I mean, they had a lot of money to work with and people loved InVision. The films that they made out of their marketing arm were being screened at all kinds of design conferences. AIGA screened it. Lots of organizations screened it for their employees to understand what designers do and how they operate. And I think that only helped
bolster interest in the business and in their product. I think the problem came though when they needed to innovate. Before we get to that, can I just ask how close were they to profitability? Like what did that look like in 2019? He was like not specific on a lot of that. I mean, I know that they were making money and he said basically like when it was on, it was on. When it was off, it was off.
So I think there was like a very sharp plummet after that valuation. Got it. That makes sense. So you're saying the plummet would be that they had a revenue of $100 million in 2018. And then they just didn't. Four years later, you know, the revenue was cut in half. Yes. Okay. Let's go on to talk about basically the crux of this article, which was how the company failed.
What exactly happened? What was the sort of inflection point for them? So Envision version 6 was the latest version all of their enterprise customers were using. And they decided in 2015, I believe it was, to work on Envision 7. And they devoted an incredible amount of resources, time, energy,
manpower to building out version seven. And one of the reasons they wanted to do that is because envision is built on cold fusion, which is a pretty antiquated tech stack to
So they were trying to get it off that tech stack. Yes, for a couple of different reasons. So they started working on version seven. And I think they just, and Clark said this, he said, you know, I can admit every mistake, like I'm here to serve and just learn from me. But I think they just underestimated the lift that was while they were still taking on enterprise clients, while they were still growing to 1000 employees, they
And I think just the pace that the company was moving and this colossal task of building version 7 and then migrating all of the data from 6 to 7, it was just too much.
Too much. It was just too big. There has been a lot of criticism and there's been a narrative that has existed that because their marketing arm was so powerful and beloved that perhaps they just invested too much in that. They were sort of like all smoke and mirrors and no meat and potatoes.
in terms of product. But I don't think that that's accurate. I spoke to the director of product from Envision and he said, look, I know what we spent on product and I know what we spent on marketing and we spent more on product than we did on marketing. It just looks like we spent more on marketing.
Well, in your piece, it seemed to say, you know, that on the product side, there was so much of the team focus on v7 that v6 basically didn't get improved upon at all, right? Didn't at all. It was so incremental. And they kept saying, well, v7 is right around the corner. So why would we build this into v6? We don't want to use ColdFusion anymore anyway. We can't be devoting our resources toward v6 anymore. We need to just keep focusing on v7. But yet v6 was still chugging along and people were using it. So
I think it became a focus distraction and got tripped up in that transition. And then they sort of lost innovation altogether because they were so focused on building version seven, but it took, I think, four years. They spent four years on it. It was just too long.
I'm not a coder, do not have really any clue about different tech stacks overall, but is it possible or is there anything that you might have known whether that transition to cold fusion in addition to being a huge lift?
kind of came too late for them? Should they have adapted sooner? If you ask Clark, the other aspect of this is that Figma had entered the space in 2015. That's kind of what I was going to ask you about, which is how did Figma basically impact
Envision's customer base? I mean, I think Figma began to eclipse the people using Envision for prototyping. By 2019, Figma was more effective and more efficient.
And at that point, Envision was not a one-stop shop and designers were looking for a more seamless tool. And I think that designers are pretty non-discriminant when it comes to their tools and they'll switch to the new products that work best for them at the moment. And so Envision was seen as the industry standard for quite a while.
And in 2016, Figma was a pretty small competitor. And Clark admits that at the time he was more worried that Adobe would sweep the market. And when I asked him, what could you have done differently? And he said, we could have just built something better than Figma before Figma. Figma didn't really help them. It wasn't necessarily the only thing affecting their trajectory, but
There were other things going on at Envision in terms of their growth. And I think also because they were fully remote and that large, there weren't as many checks and balances in terms of what was really happening and who needed to stay, who needed to go. And I think that it just became too big and too disorganized.
distributed maybe to manage a project like V7 and the growth that they were experiencing while there was this very ambitious project
Figma emerging on the scene as well. And what did designers like about Figma so much more than InVision? Just to be clear, it seems like InVision wasn't a one-stop shop. In your article, you sort of talk about that. Yeah, I think the idea was that Figma became just a little more seamless because InVision you were using on top of
other products and other tools. You know, the company obviously unraveled. Tell me, you know, when it was finally declared dead. I think some people working there would say, and if you look at some comments on LinkedIn and other sites, people that were working there at the time felt like,
by 2019, the writing was kind of on the wall. So that's only a year after their last fundraise. Yeah, or maybe 2020. What kind of impact do you think its closure sort of has or will have on the design world broadly? I mean, I think that InVision still is beloved by so many people in design. I
I think that it's done so much for the discipline in terms of labeling design as a real engine of change and innovation across business. And that it's something that whether you work in sales or marketing or finance or design, something you need to know about and have some level of understanding that
The way designers solve problems is powerful and it's useful and it should be infused throughout an organization. And it can really like make companies more creative, more flexible. And I think that that Envision was able to get that message across.
to C-suites at big corporations and also other really powerful startups. Like, obviously, Airbnb was started by a designer, but like Zappos and even IBM and Microsoft and all of these household names, that is a big part of the Envision legacy. Well, this was great, Nicole. Thank you for taking us through all this. We're going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with legendary designer Paul Smith. ♪
Legendary designer Paul Smith has been working in fashion for more than 50 years. Aside from the clothes he makes, he's also heavily involved in designing the appearance of his stores around the world. His iconic store on LA's Melrose Avenue has a bright pink wall that's been around since the early 2000s.
But since the 2010s, the site has become an Instagram hotspot with people lining up to take photos against the hot pink backdrop. Smith explained to us how the wall, which costs about $66,000 a year to maintain, has changed brand awareness. He also talked about his long career as the designer of choice for stars including Daniel Day-Lewis, David Bowie, and Johnny Ive.
Well, I'm so excited to talk to you. I grew up in London. Ah. My mom's from Leeds. Oh, yeah. My husband especially loves your outlet store on Avery Road. Oh, yeah. That's the secret one. Don't tell anybody. So I'm really excited to talk to you today. Thanks. You obviously have this legendary design career. But I want to talk about your L.A. store. You know, you created in 2005 before Instagram was around. That's right, yeah. Tell me about the thought process at the time. Yeah.
Completely by chance. I mean, where I'm sitting now is a very big table. And this table is where I work with my designers, not just on clothes, but on architecture. And we design all our own shops.
around the world and uh yeah i've been to la many times and i'd noticed that everybody's driving and the streets are very long and straight and this is on melrose avenue of course right in the middle yeah and i thought well you've got to build something which is really eye-catching and crazy and different and so it's a very big pink shoe box that's what i call it anyway
And where did you get the inspiration for that color? There's a designer called Louis Barragan, an architect who passed away years ago. But I loved his work and he was always using yellow and blue, but especially pink. And I just thought a pink, big pink building on these very straight roads where almost everybody lives.
drives and nobody walks that uh that that could be a real eye catcher but completely unknown to me
The wall is incredibly expensive to maintain, right? I mean, tell me about that. Well, it's been stripes at one time and it's had the Trump-Loy effect where it looked like the corner of the building, the pink had been pulled down to reveal stripes. Of course, at one point it had some graffiti, which luckily only once-
That's kind of surprising. Yeah, with the graffiti. It was huge, though, the graffiti. On air, I won't tell you what it said, but it was basically talking about the narcissistic qualities of selfies, I think they were trying to. Right. Yeah.
But the other things have been done by us, where we've just done something to the wall because so many people drive by it every day and are very familiar with it. So sometimes it's nice to surprise people. One time early in the...
In its life, we projected a film, a movie onto the wall and fenced off the car park and we had an evening showing a film. So that was nice. What was the movie? With Nail and I. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Great movie. Yeah.
Because the Widnail character, played by Richard E. Grant, in real life was a personal friend of mine. Oh, really? And he actually worked in my little warehouse packing boxes. You know, I went to his grandfather's house, which is featured in the movie, and we used to dress him, and we were really good friends. He often stayed at my house, you know, so...
There was a very close connection to the film. So the wall was around long before, you know, the sort of summer of pink that we had when Barbie came out. Yeah. Did you benefit from those cultural associations? Did you see like extra people coming to take selfies? What was that like? I never saw Barbie herself. You never saw her? No.
I don't think we, I don't know is the answer, but I don't think we benefited from Barbie. But what we do get is this astonishing quantity of people every day
I don't know whether it's true, but they think the average amount of people every day is about just under 400 people every day that photographs themselves in front of the wall. And apparently it's more, you know, photographed than the Hollywood sign or the Frank Gehry musical or whatever.
So it's been a bit of a phenomenon, a bit mad, really. Because what's so lovely about Paul Smith is we design all our own shops around the world. So we've got a shop in a house in Notting Hill Gate in London. I love that store. Yeah. Yeah. And we have a shop in a house in Kyoto in Japan. Yeah.
In my hometown of Nottingham, we have a shop in a house built in 1760. So, you know, we've got some lovely buildings. Do you think, you know, with the sort of massive quantity of people coming to take photos, it's changed awareness of the brand? Or do you think people literally think of the wall as separate?
I think a bit of both, to be honest. There's a lot of people just come to photograph themselves and then probably don't come into the store, even though I like to somehow tempt them into the store. But luckily, I mean, it's a store which is quite popular anyway. So I think often you'll get people photographing themselves and then coming in and maybe not buying much or not buying anything, but at least it's
Well, it helps the brand as well, I think, really, without realizing it. Yeah, you've got a sign there, I think, that has the Instagram handle of your brand and the geotag. Yeah. I mean, that's got to probably help things, right? Yeah, I mean, that was something we did fairly recently because, you know, for so many years, it was just the pink wall behind it. The pink wall, yeah. Nobody knew where it was, you know, or anything. It was on Google Maps for a while.
Now it's Paul Smith, Pink Wall. But for a while, it was just Pink Wall. Pink Wall. And you were like, no. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, asking broadly about before we zero in on the L.A. store, tell me about your design process for your stores. How do you create these kind of unique shopping experiences in different cities? Well, I suppose it starts with the principle of individuality, which is not something the world really embraces like it used to do. When I first started, individuality, an idea, this I'm talking about clothes now, an idea from your head and your heart and
hoping people liked it. But now the brands are so huge and they're so homogenized, you know, all around the world or there'll be very similar stores with a certain brand. And I've never liked that. I always think I like the idea that if you go to Paris and
it's really worth popping into the Paul Smith shop because a, the style is different and also the clothes will be different in each store. The artwork for sure will be different in each store. So it's always been about individuality really. So we sit around the table where I am now and then,
We look at the neighborhood, look who you're sitting next to, whether the particular area has got a certain style of architecture, and then slowly build it up from there.
I want to talk a little bit more about what you said, which is style these days feels so homogenous. I follow you on Instagram. I know you love Japan. Oh, yeah, yeah. I have a lot of stores in Japan. But tell me about how social media or whether it's affected your own design process at all or the way you think about style. Yeah, I mean...
We have been around a lot longer than Instagram. And actually, just changing the subject slightly, we had online e-com, oh, very, like many years before Instagram.
a lot of people. So we're pretty savvy on that front. But in terms of Instagram, I got persuaded to do it, you know, and then it became a bit of a burden to do it every day. So I sort of do it occasionally now, you know. Yeah, when you feel like it. Yeah, but I do take lots of photographs. I always have, you know, my father was a amateur photographer. So I was
weaned on photography from the age of 11. I had my own camera and so I'm a very visual person. So a lot of my inspiration doesn't come through any other thing
other than just looking, really. And do you ever scroll or do you only post and then sort of move on? I never scroll. I wouldn't know what to do. You might be horrified or impressed by my wife. She doesn't have a phone at all. My wife has no phone. I'm jealous. Yeah. I think I'm jealous. She has something called a landline. LAUGHTER
And she has no email and no computer at all. No computer. I'm so jealous. No cell phone. And I don't have an email either. So I've got three very capable assistants in the next room who...
Poor things get about 600 emails a day, apparently. You're living my dream. I never get any work done. You know, when you look at the fashion landscape, you know, I just saw that Alessandro Michele is taking over Valentino. You hear these big names kind of shifting around. Is there anyone that's really inspiring you right now?
My wife always is a pretty good inspiration because we've been together since I was 21 and I'm now older than 21. But, you know, no, the answer is not just my wife. It's no, because...
As an independent brand and as the owner of the brand, you have to be individual and you have to use your own eyes and ears and observation, you know, and you have to keep reassessing. We have a scary sentence, which is nobody cares how good you used to be. Yeah. So we're always into that.
moving as the business is predominantly men's of course we have women's but predominantly men's in men's fashion you sort of nudge rather than shove you know so if you change too radically then
you can easily lose customers around the world. We sell in 65 countries and a lot of our clients are shops we sell to and our retail clients have been buying from us for many years. And so you always just surprise them but never really shock them. That's the important thing. What's an example of a nudge? Is it like a wider lapel? Is it, you know...
Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. It could be like at the moment I've got a cashmere suit on, which has got a very soft pad, very soft construction. And coming out of COVID, you know, where many men, especially, well, all of us, you know, wore more casual clothes. So getting men back into suits, which luckily they love Portsmouth suits, you need to make them more comfortable and more organized.
almost like wearing a cardigan rather than sort of too constructed. And luckily, we're quite good at that, you know, because my background is tailoring, you know. You have some iconic prints. For Christmas one year, I got a men's Paul Smith scarf that had the stripes on it. Oh, yeah. Which I guarantee you was from Avery Rowe because I can't imagine anybody spent full price on me. And that print is really iconic. How do you think about sort of reimagining that or repurposing that every year?
Yeah, I mean, that came completely by chance in the early 90s where I just made this stripe. We designed our stripes in quite an interesting way because we take a piece of card, white card, and then we take yarn. We have drawers of...
all different colours of yarn. And then we wrap the yarn around the white card in little groups of stripes and then see which works out and what we like. So one day in the early 90s, I did this one with many, many colours in it. And we turned it into a shirt and a scarf. And we thought it was just for one season. Yeah. And then I think it was Harrods, you know, the department store in London came around
the following season and just said, oh, where's this stripe? And I said, oh, no, I only did it for spring. And they said, no, no, no, no. We want it again. We want it again. And then 30, 35 years later, it's still there. And the challenge has been always nudging it.
you know, always just making the stripes wider or narrower, sometimes slightly more calm in color, slightly more bright in color, sometimes using texture or so just always playing with the stripe. And luckily,
The longevity of the stripe has been phenomenal. I mean, absolutely crazy. So I suppose it's like other brands have a famous logo that's on the chest of their polo shirt and ours is somewhere you'll find a little stripe in the cuff of a piece of knitwear or hidden under a cuff of a shirt, you know.
You know, when I talk to a lot of designers, it seems like the pace of production has really sped up. Like there's just so many more collections. Is that the case for you? Or do you sort of take a more measured approach?
I mean, because we have Paul Smith and then we have a label called PS. And then we do what we call pre-deliveries and we do main deliveries. So basically it ends up with 16 collections a year. Wow. So, I mean, that is absolutely crazy in comparison to when I first started, which was literally two collections a year. But, you know, if you want to be part of the game and you're selling in bigger...
Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, etc., you know, Bon Marché in Paris, Rinascente, you know, all the big stores around the world, then they expect this sort of flow of goods coming into the store and always having a point of view, always being able to find something new to show to their customers, their loyal customers, you know.
Now, I want to come back to the Melrose store and talk about the redesign of the interior. Yeah. So first of all, you never considered changing that exterior, right? No, I mean, no, never. They asked me that question.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, when we're reimagining the inside, which is just, as you know, recently been done and it looks lovely. But the outside, you know, do you want to do anything with the outside? I said, no, absolutely. We did paint it black once. You know, we did all the clothes for Men in Black, you
one of the movies. And then I think a few days, I can't remember, we painted it black and then it's back to pink. Now, I mean, I think there'd be an outcry, you know, there'd be a, there'd all be these people saying, what have you done? You're mad. A lot of angry influencers. Yeah, exactly. Well, tell me about the sort of modernist, it's a modernist redesign on the interior. Is that fair to say?
Yeah. Now, when you walk through the door, there's almost like a little corridor just to start the journey because previously you just walked in and you're in this quite big, high volume, big volume of space. So I wanted to sort of make it a bit more surprising or a bit more exciting. And so there's just this little corridor. And then when you go inside, it's divided into little vignettes of people.
for the various collections. A lot of lovely mid-sensory furniture, very nice quality floor. Just very modern, really. But probably the biggest thing is that we have quite an important studio business.
obviously because we're in West Hollywood. We've got a very beautiful VIP room now in the building with a separate entrance and the room is very comfortable, very private. And that works really well because, you know, we've recently been working with Cillian Murphy and Jeffrey Wright and, you know, various people that have done well in the Oscars recently and
Kugan, Matt Smith, lovely people. Yeah. And so we've got this secret, this secret room for them now. Who were some of the inspirations behind the kind of modernist design? Well,
Well, I mean, my shop in London, of many shops, I think, in London, I'm sure I do. Yeah. Anyway, the main shop, which is in the area of London called Mayfair, it's next to Bond Street. And in that particular shop, we sell ceramics, art, drawings, furniture. Yeah, we've got one of your angle poised lamps. Well, my husband does. That's nice. Thank you.
Now, I've always been interested in that world because you probably know, but I've worked with MINI, the car company, with bicycles, with angle poise, with Leica cameras. And so I've done lots of collaborations. I work with the lovely upholstery company in America called...
maharam which makes fabric for upholstery and so it's an actual natural mix really it wasn't really a surprise that I did that it just felt very normal
Now, my last two questions are, and this should be pretty fun. Who is your favorite celebrity to dress? And is there someone you're dying to dress? There's nobody I'm dying to dress because, you know, I always want my celebrity dressing to be because they like what I do. Right. As opposed to the modern way, which is different to that, as you know.
Do you do the kind of like, you know how like Gucci will have a contract with someone and dress them for like an entire season? No, you don't do that? No. Is that by design? No, the only time we've done something is with Matt Smith, who is a friend of ours anyway. And you say he did that during the fall. The person I enjoyed dressing the most, who is somebody who's not acting anymore, who's a very good mate of mine, Daniel Day-Lewis. Oh, that's cool. And I dressed him for...
For many years, he wore our clothes for the Oscars and many, many things. And he was a personal friend. So the why I liked the way he dressed was because he would have a bespoke, a custom suit made because we do. I'm not sure if you know, but we do ready to wear and we do made to measure and then we do custom as well.
So he used to have custom, but he loved British tweeds, which hardly anybody wears anymore because of air conditioning and central heating. But he loved that. But he always wore it with, you know, like a beautiful suit.
so well cut with motorbike boots and like a work shirt. And I adored that mix, you know. Yeah. I just love that mix of irreverence and contrast and things, you know, putting things together in a way that you shouldn't really put them together. Because he used to come for supper and he'd arrive on his big yellow Triumph motorbike, you know, in his Paul Smith custom suit, but with motorbike boots and lovely clothes.
You know, it's hard these days as we talked about how seemingly every celebrity has sort of contracts with a brand or they hire, you know, there's like a bunch of stylists that dress sort of everyone famous. Who do you think really has style to your mind right now? Who are you sort of excited about the way they dress?
Well, I mean, for me, I mean, I thought Cillian Murphy looked very relaxed. And he's always learned how to stand in that nice way. Well, both Barry as well, with hands in the pockets. And the suit looked completely believable on him. So it wasn't like something he wouldn't wear normally.
Because often you can see the red carpet is not really what people would wear on a day to day. Well, obviously they wouldn't because it's a red carpet, but you know what I mean? It felt natural, you know, on them. I mean, we work with Gary Oldman and yeah, lots of nice people who just like what we do for a living.
Okay, we are back with Nicole and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each of us shares a story, a trend, or a piece of pop culture we're following right now. And Nicole, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on?
So I've been following the Beyonce hair situation. She washed her hair on social media. Oh, I did hear about this. I'm just sort of fascinated by hair and the cultural nuances around it. My family's from Central America, so my mom is always like, how's your hair? She always wants to know what's going on with my hair, what conditioner am I using? Yeah, what's your hair care routine? Drop the hair care routine.
I mean, it's pretty minimal now at this point. I mean, it's like I go to Target, buy a couple of products and call it a day. But when I was a kid, like in my stocking at Christmas, my mom would give me conditioner. It was like a big deal. She like was very specific about it. And so I'm sort of fascinated. Beyonce washed her hair, which is beautiful hair. But now it's like everybody's so like...
oh, that's not really her hair. She has extensions and she's obviously trying to promote her line sacred. And I get that, but it also just seems like really, you really think she's wearing fake hair while she's just washing her hair. It's really not bad. I just, it's so funny to me how deep people go about it. And it's like, leave the poor woman alone. Let her wash her hair and promote her product. And also,
Her mom had a hair salon when she was a kid, so... Yeah, I was going to say, it's not on brand. It's not going to be a fool and come on here and wear a wig and wash a wig, play it off as real hair. And even if she did, why do you care? Why? What? Yeah. Who cares? Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? This is not really a keeping tabs, but I have no other place to vent about this. But I just have to say...
So I live in Inwood, New York. The way people park in Inwood, New York drives me insane. Not just double parked. You have a lot of driving gripes. I have a lot of driving gripes. It's because I made the mistake of owning a car in the city. You played yourself. Which is nice sometimes, but then I have to deal with like the roads, like triple parking, double like Dykeman Street. People will park to the point where it's down to like a one lane road.
Not one lane each way. One lane on a major street. It drives me crazy every single time I have to drive around here. Nobody respects the rules of parking up here. And I'm so over it.
That's my, I don't know how I can tie this into Jojo Siwa or something like that or to make it a Keeping Tabs, but it's insane to me and New York City needs to do something about it. Forget a rat czar. I need a double parking czar. Double parking czar. I do think parking is a very passionate topic in New York. My mom actually, that same family that focuses on hair, they grew up, my mom lived in Washington Heights for her whole childhood and the parking situation is incredibly intense. Yeah.
It just gets worse as you go up through Upper Manhattan. Like I lived in Harlem for a long time and I had no problem parking around there. Like there would still be people double parking, but people like had a basic respect for human decency in Harlem. You move up past 155th Street and it's Mad Max Fury Road up here. It's insane.
Josh! But that's my old man, get off my lawn take, keeping tabs. Yes, what are you keeping tabs on? Yeah, I've been keeping tabs on Zendaya's Challenger Press Tour outfits. They've been incredible, very on theme, which is tennis. That's all Law Roach styled, right? It is. Yeah, I was going to say, so it's all styled by Law Roach, which is obviously a legendary stylist.
but she's been killing it. And I'm really excited for that movie. And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Josh and Yasmin. Our show is produced by Avery Miles, mix and sound designed by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.