I’m a builder and a merchant, not a theorist.
The thread through everything I’ve done is a single gift: reading closely for what’s present and what’s absent, and working in the gap between them. I don’t notice problems the way some people do, as things that annoy me. I notice the gap between what something is and the more beautiful version of it I can already see — and that distance is what I can’t leave alone.
For eleven years I built Olivers, a men’s activewear brand, from a Kickstarter campaign into a category-leading business — fifty-plus products, partnerships with the likes of Equinox and Four Seasons, and ownership of all of it: brand, product, and the whole customer experience. Before that, I underwrote real estate — development and redevelopment at Westfield, a billion-dollar portfolio at Gramercy Capital — which taught me to read the logic and the numbers beneath a thing, not just its surface. And the last two years I spent in Jerusalem, learning to study sacred texts closely, line by line — the same gift, turned on the oldest material we have.
What ties it together is a conviction that there’s a right version of a thing, and that the work worth doing is composing something whole toward it — its design, its experience, its story, as a single act. Olivers was one expression of that. I want to build that way again — composing places and brands into their right version.
“Beauty will save the world.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
An essay that’s shaped my thinking: