Ep. 148: Entrepreneurial Raconteur John Edelman

Former CEO of Design Within Reach and business consultant, John Edelman grew up on a horse farm in Connecticut. The youngest of 6, his childhood was filled with love, surrounded by his parents’ big dreams, in a home filled with visitors, from Andy Warhol to fashion executives. A hustler and daredevil from an early age, he excelled at flipping cars and riding dirt bikes but struggled in school. After college, John joined the family leather business, sorting buffalo skins in Thailand, worked for his brother at Esprit, and lived in Brazil to work in the shoe business. From 2010 - 2019 John served as CEO of Design Within Reach, during his tenure he pulled the company out of a downward spiral, transformed it into the world leader in authentic design, and led a highly publicized sale to Herman Miller. Now, Co-Founder of Fourth & Pride vodka, John’s life has been one great story after another - from adventure to romance, hardships to triumph, and a future that looks just as thrilling. 

Read the episode transcript here.

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Read the Transcript

John Edelman: You can’t be half pregnant, my mother always said. So either you’re the world leader on authentic modern design or you’re not. I preach this to this day. One knock off in the mix, you’re done.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today, I’m talking to John Edelman. John Edelman is a respected leader in the design community with decades of experience in all aspects of the business of design. From 2010- 2019 he was the CEO of Design Within Reach. During his tenure at Design Within Reach, John transformed the business from a struggling money-losing purveyor of both authentic and knock-off goods to the world leader in authentic modern design. John’s visionary collaborations with some of today’s most talented designers resulted in scores of successful collections of modern furniture. Subsequently, Design Within Reach became a highly respected business resulting in an internationally publicized sale to Herman Miller. John also serves as executive chairman of the board for Crypton, sits on the board of trustees for Design Industry ‘s Foundations Fighting AIDS and on the board of directors Be Original Americas. He’s currently cofounder of beverage brand Fourth and Pride vodka which donates 5% of profits to LGBTQ+ organizations, combining Edelman’s business acumen with his lifelong advocacy work. Plus, he’s got a famous watch collection and stories galore. This is just the tip fo the iceberg. Here’s John.

JE: Hello, my name is John Edelman. I live and work currently in Westport, Connecticut and I’m involved in a few different projects, all of which I find pretty exciting at the moment. I am the executive chairman of Crypton Fabrics, which is an interesting part-time gig where I go to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and I do that because I have a long history with Crypton. They believe that my skillset can help them out at this stage of their growth. 

I’m working on a television show, which I can’t talk about too much, but regards design and a design competition out of Brooklyn and it’s with people that I adore and I believe it’ll bring a spotlight to young designers and young designers really, really need any attention they can possibly get. And my most full time job at the moment is co-founder of Fourth & Pride vodka and I love that project because it’s doing well by doing good and we give a portion of our proceeds to support LGBTQ+ organizations. 

And I am a true blue vodka lover as well. Those are the three projects that are keeping me occupied the most. 

AD: Well, that’s quite a catalogue, it’s a cocktail of opportunities and endeavours. So, I can’t wait to get into all of them. But before we get into that I really always like to go way back to the beginning so I can understand how you became the person you are by tracing the steps from day one. It’s so interesting. I’ve always considered myself one of the luckiest people out there because everybody says they complain about their childhood, they had this and that. I truly did love my childhood and I’m the youngest child of six children. The youngest by 15 years between the oldest and myself and five years younger than the second closest. And I grew up, born in Manhattan in the West Village. So when I was born, six kids was enough to have in a brown stone, my parents couldn’t survive there anymore, so they moved to Connecticut. 

And went from being city people to country people. We bought 50 acres in the corner of a town called Ridgefield, Connecticut, in horse country. And so where the older kids were raised in the city, I was raised on a horse farm. By the time I was three years old, the oldest three kids had gone off to college, so it was really just three of us on this 50 acres with horses and dogs and all this kind of stuff. So I had almost the opposite experience of my older siblings. 

The house was pretty amazing. My parents were big dreamers and they found two barns four miles away, took them apart and had them rebuilt on our property as our home. 

AD: Wow!

JE: So we had soaring ceilings and they took the exterior barn wood and installed it on the interior of the house. And I thought it was normal to live in a place like that [laughs]. It was pretty cool. We had a mixture of old masters paintings on the walls with dogs ripping apart cows and blood and meat next to Tiffany lamps, next to Warhol sketches, next to a Saarinen Womb chair -

AD: Wow. 

JE: With a huge Flos light in the middle -

AD: It sounds like my subconscious! [Laughter]

JE: I know, it sounds like a weird dream! [Laughter] I was lucky enough to really grow up in this home and have all these influences. I didn’t understand how they affected me, but they did. My parents had basically all gay friends from the design industry and I thought that was normal, I didn’t understand that was rare. And we had collectors, we had a designer named Ken Scott who was a fabric designer that I think Prada or Chanel is bringing back his fabrics right now. He’d come to the house and he’d be flamboyant and he’d cook dinner for the family in like a barrel because we were so many people and tell crazy stories about the gay bars in New York from the night before and make my mother laugh. 

We had Italians stay with us, always the kids of whatever company my parents were involved with at the time, from Italy coming over and living with us for the summer.

AD: We should mention that the Italians were coming over as part of the leather business that your business were running

JE: Well, well originally it was different; it was the shoe business that my father started. Their background was interesting and I can go that… That affects my life a lot. My father was from the Bronx, kosher upbringing. His father lost all of his money in the Great Depression. They went from being wealthy to not wealthy. My father was also the youngest, also by 15 years, also loved like crazy as a baby. And when he graduated from high school, he went into the navy in WWII. He knew he didn’t like the navy, when he got out he had a choice, and, to choose a college on the GI Bill. And he had a brother-in-law who was this interesting composer named George Kleinsinger, he wrote Tubby the Tuba and he lived in the Chelsea Hotel. 

And he took my dad aside and said, “Listen Arthur, this is your chance to change your life. Pick a school that does something you never thought you’d do.” So he chose Sarah Lawrence College. He was the first class ever of men to ever go there, four men, to an all-girls college. And then my father’s description, he got some fucking education. [Laughter] Which was very much my father! And he met my mother there my parents have passed on, but I can tell this part. 

That he said, when he goosed her, she was the one who made the loudest noise. [Laughter] And he fell in love with her. And so my father studied acting, he was an actor, six foot six. My mother studied social work, became a social worker, true old school, Sarah Lawrence liberals. When they graduated, my father became a professional actor and did one off Broadway traveling show with Earl Jones, James Earl Jones father; it was called The Little People. And then soon after that he was an unemployed actor and my mother was a social worker. 

They married three days after graduating college and in four years had the first of the six kids, three kids. So they joined my mother’s father’s business. He was a Russian immigrant who had gone into the reptile business in New York. Reptile skins for shoes and handbags. 

And my parents took that business over, over time; my father used his skills as a storyteller and actor. My mother used her innate ability with color and growing up in that business, to eventually take over the business called Fleming-Joffe, and they were dreamers. And my father was at Fogar, Bazaar, some place pitching his leathers and he said, “I need a graphic designer,” and the woman said, “Arthur, you’ll get this guy, he doesn’t talk much, but I think you’ll like him.”

And they brought this guy in who didn’t say a word, with white, straight hair and my father said, “Oh, I like you, you’re interesting.” He said, “Yeah, my name is Andy Warhol, it’ll be interesting.” So my father said, “Okay, but I got to be home because all the kids, it’s dinner time, so come home with me to the brown stone.” So he brought Andy Warhol to meet my mom. The kids were there and again, he never spoke and they gave him a project and they built this relationship. 

And Andy Warhol did all their graphic design, he painted the awning of their 5th Avenue showroom, he painted the lights inside, he did everything. They were doing a chrome leather collection, he did the entire booth in chrome, brought in a Harley and painted everything out and they had this amazing connection. It was a right time, right place thing. My parents knew enough to embrace this unknown and make the best of it. They went to Italy to buy leathers and they fell in love with a young designer named Piero Fornasetti and my father said, “You know, Fornasetti, your plates are amazing, you should come to New York,” and he introduced him to the department store I. Magnin and that’s where Fornasetti drew the ‘I’ for I. Magnin. 

And so the gifts every year for Fleming-Joffe were either an Andy Warhol coloring book or custom Fornasetti plates. And my father found Ogden Nash, with Ogden Nash prose on the plates and they had a great success with this company, Fleming-Joffe. But reptiles, unfortunately a little bit because of my parents, became endangered species, most of the ones they used. 

Simandi queer was this fantastic week of leather in Paris and my father knew this great shoe shop that had a store in the airport, and I think two more stores in the best areas and he went over and he met with the people there and gave them this snakeskin that he had too much of. And they made shoes out of the snakeskins and put them in all of the windows of the stores in Paris. So by the time Simandi Queer came in, there was this outrageous demand for this snakeskin from India that my folks were selling. 

And they got so feverish that they bought all of the snakeskins they could buy from this area of India and they sold them. So unfortunately those snakes ate the rats and kept them out of the crops and created a small issue, when the lack of rats - 

AD: Oh. 

JE: Which you know, nobody knew about in those days. 

AD: Right. But they disturbed the ecosystem!

JE: They disturbed the ecosystem with fashion shoes. 

AD: Oh my gosh! [Laughs] To think of how often that’s occurred in how many different industries, wow. 

JE: So then there was a demand for the look and my parents created together the first embossed leathers to look like reptile called Corfam. And that was the biggest success in those days that they had had. Corfam became huge. It made for the first time affordable fashion that looked like snake, looked like crocodile and those kinds of things. And they ended up selling that company to DuPont and having their first big success. 

AD: And this was a leather product? 

JE: It was embossed leathers, hand rubbed usually and then to look like reptiles or snakes. 

AD: Okay. 

JE: So as a way to get the look without hurting the ecosystem. And my father, you know, after selling so much stuff to the shoe industry, said, “I’m going to open up a shoe business.” My brother Sam was then graduating from Sarah Lawrence, just like my father and they went into the shoe business together in a company called Lighthouse Footwear. Sam was a day out of school, my father had never been in the shoe business and at the same time my mother took a job with Jack Larsen, learning the fabric industry. My mother always described Jack as the world’s greatest weaver. 

You know, Cranbrook educated, an icon, he loved my mother. So long story short, it took about 10 years tthat company went down, it didn’t last. They bought a shoe factory, they couldn’t make the different kinds of shoes and my mother said, “Listen, there’s this industry we haven’t really worked with too much called the ‘interior design industry,’ and no one is making fantastic leather for interior design. We should figure out how to do that and come back together and work as a couple, like we work best. And in 1981 they sold their classic Mercedes and invented Edelman Leather. 

Those years in the shoe business did a couple of things. My mother learned interior design, it let my oldest brother learn shoes, which he went on to a great career in shoes. So that’s 1981. I’m jumping around because my parent’s story was interesting. 

AD: It’s fascinating and it sets the foundation because in 1981 you’re - 

JE: Ninth grader. I’m a teenager, living on this far in rural Connecticut with parents who have been all over the world and I’m really just this country kid, learning to drive tractors. I bought my first car when I was 12 down the street [laughter] -

AD: Were you a tinkerer?

JE: I’m super not mechanical, but I like buying and selling things. And I love cars, yeah, that, who knew at that point, you know, I was a terrible student. At that time I hadn’t gone through a growth spurt so I was like fat and I was made fun of as a kid [laughs] for being fat and all those kinds of things. Down the street was another horse farm and they had this old BMW out in the field and so I rode my bike over and I said to them, “That car is just sitting there, I think I could just take it away,” and I think I tried to get them to pay me to take it away, a little Tom Sawyer stuff, but I gave them $25 for this old car. I knew it was a BMW and my middle brother, David, who was nine years older, came back with a tractor, little chains up to the car and we towed it home. I’m not mechanical, so I tried to free the motor up with oil and this and that, it didn’t work. So I polished it and that I could do. And I took this $25 heap in the field and cleaned it up and sold it for $600 in about a month. 

AD: Wow. 

JE: And so by the time I was 16 I probably had seven or eight cars I was trading as a kid. 

AD: You little hustler. 

JE: Yeah, I was a hustler man, but I loved it. I loved cars and so I got to, if they ran, I got to run them around the farm and have fun, I never learned how to drive, I just kinda knew how to drive, I don’t know how that happened. I guess the tractors and lawnmowers and weird cars, and motorcycles. At the same time I had a dirt bike, I wanted to be a stuntman, I practiced every single day to be a stuntman, doing wheelies for miles at a time, jumping over time, riding over rock walls and things that country kids do. I wasn’t a city kid. 

AD: Were you a natural daredevil, did you like the thrill or -

JE: Yeah, that I loved. I was really good, you know, I wasn’t an athlete at all, so I didn’t have success in school on those fronts, but I was a really good motorcycle rider and that was my thing. I did two things, I rode motorcycles and I could throw a Frisbee and as my wife, I can tell you later, but she said, “Oh, Frisbee,” when we met, “You play ultimate?” I’m like, “No, I play Frisbee.” [Laughs] That was my thing. 

My parents started the leather company in ’81 in Danbury, Connecticut; I spent every summer working there, every Christmas break working there. I learned the value of what overtime meant. I tried to get as much overtime as I could, that was incredible, I was an hourly employee. And I started like that, and you know, it was different then. I finished high school, I could barely get through, I went to a private school nearby and I was a terrible student. 

I never believed that the kid who got an A learned any more than I learned getting a C. It just never made sense to me, but then when it came time for college, in those days parents really weren’t involved. I don’t think I went on any college visits, my GPA was terrible, so I ended up… And the funny story is. I was in summer school every year [laughs] for failing or whatever. 

This one summer I had failed French and I was taking French to make up the credit in summer school and I met this really cool guy in my class who was taking French to get ahead, and that was Peter Sallick actually, who I ended up working with for years at Waterworks and now I’m on the board of Design Leadership Network that he runs and he’s always been such a leader and such an overachiever. We made friends in 10th grade and stayed friends for all these years. 

AD: So did your not being a good student, did that ever take a toll on your confidence or were you just kind of convinced that, I’m learning just as much, I just don’t need to do it with these rules and these protocols that are kind of arbitrary. 

JE: I’m learning just as much, I sold a Jeep pickup truck to my English teacher, senior year and went to London with the money, with my girlfriend [** 0.17.08]. My girlfriend was five years older. 

AD: Not only are you learning just as much, but you’re kind of like, eh, I think I got the answers here. 

JE: Yeah, like I don’t know what these people are working so hard for, it doesn’t seem that hard. And I had great exposure, so I had an older girlfriend, so I thought I was all that. I sold a car and went to London and at the time, I remember we saw Cats [in the round?] in London, I was like 17. But when it was time to go to college I got rejected everywhere. Like I literally couldn’t get into college I was such a bad student. So the college counsellor had a friend at Manhattanville College, again, a girls school, which was kind of fun. And they got me in. I entered at the college on probation, that’s how bad of a student I was. I struggled; I didn’t understand how to learn in school. 

I still don’t really learn the same way as others. But was great for me were the other things. So my father had to go to Thailand to inspect water buffalo when I was, sophomore or something. It was going to be hot there, and he was getting older. I said, “Pops, can I come help you and I’ll sort,” so he said yes. And I went to Thailand with my dad and sorted buffalo skins in a tannery in 105 degree temperatures and had the best time of my life with my dad and learning leather. 

AD: Yeah. 

JE: I spent one summer where I drove cross country and went to work for my brother at Esprit and this was a pretty big deal. My brother Sam had started this shoe division for Esprit and welcomed me to come spend the summer and work. So I spent 10 days working in the Esprit outlet store and then someone got sick or had to leave in customer service and Sam is like, put John on there, it’s New York, he’ll do it. And so with zero training [laughs] I did customer service for the New York region for Esprit shoes for two and a half months and survived. But there was one key weekend where they were having a sales meeting and my brother brought in all these high powered shoe salesmen and I knew what they made. They made tons of money, they were all wearing like gaudy Armani and I don’t know what kind of cars they had and they were high level shoe salesmen, doing millions of dollars a year in sales. And since they had the meeting all weekend and I wasn’t working, I spent every minute at every meeting with these guys. 

And on Monday I took my brother aside and said, “Sam, I’ve spent a couple of days with these guys, I can do their jobs better than they can, when I graduate, can I work for you and do that?” Because I want to make a lot of money and I can sell shoes. And over a period of time he said yes. So I finished Manhattanville, nothing great. I forgot one thing, when I did graduate from high school, I was voted most likely to succeed by my peers. Even though I couldn’t pass anything, there was something going on. 

AD: Yeah and it sounds like your bad grades, like you never earned the ‘black sheep narrative,’ or the ‘loser’ narrative in any way. 

JE: No, I was friends with my teachers, I’d hang out with them and I was socially popular, or whatever, I had friends. I was super functional, I didn’t hide in a corner, I was a class clown, I was doing deals. So it ended up, it was very positive. So again, I go to college, I struggle through college, I can barely pass French and Sam said I could work for him. So I graduate from college on a Saturday and no exaggeration, Sunday, I flew to Brazil to work in the shoe business. [Laughter]

AD: Your life is so exciting already. 

JE: I know! [Laughter]

AD: I love, I love all these characters, I love your confidence, I love your hustler energy. [Laughs]

JE: It’s funny, I was very, very loved, when you’re the baby of six, by a lot, and your parents are older, the rules are extremely relaxed, you’re on your own, but you have that nurturing around you, right? Not doting, but you have a confidence knowing that you have that many people that care about you, and that was a big deal for me, without knowing. So I’m in the airport by myself in New York. I had been overseas alone during college one time, to the South of France for summer school, which was a good scam I hooked up. [Laughs]

So it wasn’t the first time, but I go to the airport and I’d gone through some sort of customs clearing and this little guy comes over to me in a very, like he must have been 5’2, 5’3, in a very expensive Italian suit, he looked like a mafia or so. And he says, with an accent, “Are you John Edelman, Sam Edelman’s brother?” And I said, “Yes sir.” And he goes, “Give me your passport.” And I did, “And your ticket,” and I did, what do I know? 

And he comes back in like 30 minutes, I’m sweating, I know I’m going to be in trouble, something terrible, but he gives me a taped up shoe box and he upgraded me to first class. And I’m like oh my god, I’m bringing in drugs. 

AD: Yeah. 

JE: I’m a dead man, but then I thought to myself, who brings drugs to Brazil? [Laughter]

AD: But still, this is all so mysterious. 

JE: Oh my goodness, it’s so mysterious, no one told me anything, there’s no cellphones, 1988 and I had never been to Brazil, so I take the box, I hand carry it on the airplane and then when I arrive in Brazil, some guy meets me coming off the plane and walks me around customs. 

AD: Whoa!

JE: And I’m like, here I am, my brother is going to kill me, I’m a drug dealer. [Laughs] It turned out I was doing a favor for Nine West shoe company, bringing a shoe last, hand ferrying a shoe last to Brazil, they had to get there quickly. So it wasn’t anything too scary, but it started off scary. 

AD: But why would they have to walk that around customs? 

JE: Because they could in those days, they wanted to make everything a VIP experience; I thought it was criminal, like it was normal for the time.

AD: Man, the school of life is teaching you fast. 

JE: Oh, real fast, I mean this is, this is my MBA starting now. So I arrive in Brazil, I don’t speak the language, my brother, we have an apartment down there, I’m allowed to go to the apartment, shower quickly and then he’s like, okay, we’re going to the office, you drive. So I jump in the car, he gives me directions to drive through these windy roads in the south of Brazil, Novo Hamburgo, New Hamburg, where the Brazilians are all blonde, as you can imagine, from Germany. And we get to the office and he goes, “Oh, I forgot my Filofax, go get it.” So he goes to the office, and I have no sense of direction, my life, still to this day, I’ve stayed in hotel rooms every other week since 1988 and I still don’t know which way the elevator is in the morning, ever. 

So I have to navigate these streets of Brazil, find the way back to the apartment, find the stupid Filofax and get back again. A little rough start between the airport and this and no sleep. And what turned out down there, Sam stayed for two days and he left. And no one spoke English, for the most part. The guy who ran the office spoke English, but if I wanted to learn about stuff, I was down there to learn about shoe making and they quickly put me in charge of the sample room. And then I was able to go with the inspectors in the morning to the shoe factories and then I became in charge of quality control. This is within three weeks of graduating college right? 

But I learned, one of my biggest things is that I have an ear for languages. So from feeling poorly about always failing French, I learnt conversational Portuguese by ear in six weeks and was fluent pretty soon. 

AD: What that says to me is you’re learning in the field, in relationships, in context and when 

AD: It’s abstracted and fed to you through books and rules, it’s too hard to focus, it doesn’t matter and it feels unconnected. 

JE: Totally, and also I had a reason to learn. Like I wanted to be successful down there and plus, I had just finished college, Brazil was famous for beautiful women [laughter] and we were in a great position. So I was the only American in the area, except for one guy of like 100s of people that spoke the language. And so I could go out at night, I had car, I had total freedom down there -

AD: Wow, this sounds so fun!

JE: It was so fun! It was the time of my life. So I was down in Brazil, between Brazil and New York and the company was based in California, it was Sam & Libby then, for almost three months before I visited the corporate office in California and moved. And I’ll never forget, my father had this landscaper guy named Manuelle, but he worked for my family for more than 20 years, he was a farmer from Portugal who literally after all those years in the United States, he knew machine shop, period. That’s all he could speak in English. 

And I came home for a holiday and I visited him out in the gardens and I started to speak to him in Portuguese. I thought he was going to die! Like it was so incomprehensible, he started to laugh, [I thought?] he was an evil guy, he never laughed. I thought he was going to die laughing. He couldn’t comprehend that I learned Portuguese, it almost broke him! [Laughter] I don’t know, it’s in my mind like yesterday; he was just a real farmer guy. 

So I learned Portuguese, I learned shoe making, Sam said, “John, you’re a natural seller, so you’re not allowed to sell for a while, you’ve got to learn the business.” So I came home from one of the trips and they hired this old school, we used to call them ‘shoe dogs.’ And he’s a legend, his name was Terry Anderson. And like we said, not the hostage. And Terry was an interesting guy, he had survived Vietnam, so he had survivors guilt and he was wound up, but he was a famous shoe salesman. 

And he said, “John, go with Terry to go see JCPenney’s, they need a factory just to back them up and we’re going to start a private label division.” I go with Terry to JCPenney’s, we do a presentation, we come back and Sam said, “Oh, the people from Penney’s called, they loved it. The only thing they said was, sorry Terry, they want John to manage the account.”

AD: [Gasps]

JE: So I went from the factory guy to the sales guy and I started the private label division for Sam & Libby, I don’t know, maybe that was a year after graduating college, a year and a quarter, something like that. I turned JCPenney’s from zero volume with us, to over $15 million in a year and then started this great division for the business. So I started with JCPenney’s, there was a company called Mervin’s, I ended up putting the first shoes in The Limited with the sandal collection. I cold called them. 

And then we moved the company to New York and Sam wanted to be in J.Crew. 

AD: At this point I understand how you’ve already sort of got a love of fine objects, but is your fashion sense really part of this as well? 

JE: No, and to my brothers credit, he tortured me. So I would arrive to work and if my tie didn’t match right, I’d literally be sent home. 

AD: Okay, so your ability to sell sandals really didn’t have to do with knowing what was coming down the pike in terms of fashion? 

JE: Well, I was told. So Sam said we had presentations and you know, just in the vein of my father, fashion is about storytelling. So I eventually went to St. Tropez and shopped sandals in St. Tropez eventually, I knew it, but I could tell the story that you know, the team just got back from St. Tropez and the Tropezians are happening all over Europe and this kind of strap is better and blah-blah-blah. And I could tell all those stories. You know, fake it til you make it, then eventually I ended up learning all that. And my mother had been fashion director of shoes for Macy’s, as a random job to support Edelman Leather in their early days. 

So she worked directly for Ed Finkelstein who was the chairman and she ran fashion direction for shoes. We had it in the family. I mean my father was in Fashion of the Times 

AD: Yeah, it’s in your DNA, it’s in your osmosis and you’re only one degree of separation, one phone call away from somebody who is already in it. 

JE: Yeah, these shoe salesmen didn’t know anything, right? They were just programmed, so I was able to learn that stuff. You know, $15 million in shoes that retailed for $19.99 is a lot of shoes. I think I sold 1.3 million pair, in one year one time, so it’s pretty amazing. 

AD: Oh man, I think of the ecosystems you’re disrupting. [Laughter]

JE: Well, people have to wear shoes. 

AD: Yes, that’s true, that’s true. 

JE: And I opened up J.Crew and I opened up The Limited and all these kinds of things. And I was lucky enough; my brother always gave me huge opportunities. So during that time in California I also met a young guy named John McPhee who invited me to dinner, maybe a year in. He had joined a little later. Went to dinner and he brought his wife and he was a couple of years old, like three/four years older than me, and their newborn baby, Anna. And they put Anna in the basket under the table; we had this amazing dinner and became friends. 

I had no idea that he’d be my best friend today from then, but we track our friendship by how old Anna is because she was at the table weeks old, when we met. Anna is 30. Anna is our measuring stick. And then we moved the company to New York and for a period of time Sam, we’d just gone public and Sam kind of stayed off in California for a while and John and I were on our own. But we stepped in and kind of ran Sam & Libby for a few months. We didn’t plan it, and we didn’t rehearse it, but we did it. 

And it was like magic. It just worked. We had different strengths. We could go about things from different directions but come to the same conclusion. We had the guts to question each other. We didn’t want to do each other’s jobs. And we knew at that point that we would be a team forever. We knew that we’d be a team forever in some way. During that time, after New York, my parents had Edelman Leather, it was tiny. My father had been asking me almost every day to come back and work in Edelman Leather and I never wanted to do that right after school because you don’t know anything and all you end up knowing is how they teach you. So you don’t bring value and so I always tell people with family businesses. It’s great to have your kids come in, but send them away for a while, let them work somewhere else so they have a value when they come in, they can challenge you from a different perspective. 

And Sam had given me this amazing opportunity. I travelled the world. I was selling, I was production, international and so I thought I had something to bring. And my dad’s 70th birthday he had a heart attack at the house which scared the daylights out of my family, right? You can imagine six foot people crying hysterically and he was fine. He ended up being fine. In typical Arthur fashion, they put a stent in and he goes, “I feel wonderful now, I feel so much better.” He came out a day later dancing for the most part, although he never danced, but feeling great. 

And after that heart attack I said, okay, I don’t own any of the shoe business, let’s go back and let’s do something that is the best of the best and I joined Edelman Leather. Just before that, I had met my wife, my future wife. She was working at Seventeen magazine as an assistant editor, basically her first job. And my brother Sam was friends with the fashion director and met her at a shoot and set us up on a blind date. I had never met a girl 6’ 2, he was a New York City girl and I certainly was loving being single. And you meet somebody at the right time and things change. 

And we fell in love. And she had said to me, you know, she had encouraged me to join the family business, Edelman Leather. She had said, you know, they’re making the best quality in the world, you don’t own this business blah-blah-blah, so I listened to her and joined Edelman Leather. 

AD: So, what I love about this story is, two really powerful partnerships kind of came into your life in the last few minutes of the story and - that’s pretty cool. 

JE: And without them I would not be where I am today, like 100% would be drifting, I think. So, Bonnie went from Seventeen to Glamor and then she ended up being one of two people running Sports Illustrated Swimsuit. 

AD: Wow.

JE: She was the assistant to the editor and there was literally only two people and she, at that time, was lucky enough to discover Heidi Klum, from a tiny picture in the back of Victoria’s Secret and got Heidi Klum in that first Sports Illustrated, which was… And if you watch the Heidi Klum VH1 behind the whatever, Bonnie is interviewed through half the thing. She actually gets credit for it, which is nice. And Heidi Klum became our good friend and came to our wedding in Connecticut. We got married a year into Edelman Leather etc. etc. So that was a fun mixture of people and of the time. 

JE: So I’m at Edelman Leather, I told my parents and my sister when I came in, I’ll come in, but I need ownership and I want to learn this but I think we can all make money, we have to make equal. And I had to learn a little bit. So I knew leather because I’d sorted hides half my life, but I didn’t know furniture, which we sold for, right? Edelman Leather, we sold hides to go onto furniture. I was calling on Gensler, without knowing stuff, so I started to collect… My parents had a great friend named Dr Alvin Friedman-Kien, and he was one of the world’s leading dermatologists. 

He discovered the skin sarcoma that is AIDS. He was under president’s council for AIDS and he was a gay advocate, phenomenal man, he became a mentor to me. And he was a collector, a real collector from decoys, you know, duck decoys to narwhal tusks, to old masters paintings, to sculpture, he knew everything. But his passion was the 26th Street Flea Market. My wife and I, we had just met and I was moving to the new industry, we started going with him early on Sunday mornings to the flea market and meeting all those crazy vendors. And I fell in love with the modern furniture. So, of all the stuff at the flea market, Bonnie and I learned that we had a shared aesthetic, we fell in love over that, you know, to the next level. And I started collecting modern. So I was working in Connecticut at Edelman Leather, we had an empty warehouse in the back and I started filling it with collections of Saarinen executive chairs, Time Life chairs were my favorite thing in the whole world. Heywood-Wakefield at the time was hot and I bought too much and I filled up an entire warehouse with my obsessive collecting. 

But I learned about the background of every designers, about Cranbrook, about the Royal Danish Academy, about Saarinen and Eames and all the different stories and I became an expert. Again, I really never could have learned that in school but when I called on Gensler and they said they needed the right texture for a Barcelona chair, I knew what they were talking about. And if you think about all those great design firms, they’re putting some of the… At the time they were putting some of the iconic modern pieces on every job and I became a person that they could speak to about that. 

The company is growing okay, I’m four years in and I come to the family with a plan. I said it’s taken me four years to learn this and I think we should do this. My mother and father said that’s great, my sister didn’t agree, so I ended up having to buy her out of the business, unfortunately, which was, I love my sister to death and she was one of the great sellers of all time, but she didn’t want to do this plan, and it was okay. She ended up having a great life. So I had to buy her out of the business Sam & Libby had closed and John McPhee was working for Candy’s and I said, “John, we’re gonna work together again, your worst day in the leather business can be better than your best day in the shoe business, let’s work together.”

And he believed me and I didn’t want him to be an employee, we needed to be partners. So I worked with my mom and dad, we gave him a discount to buy in, he bought into the family business. Very few people can bring someone into a family business. My father was always like, “What’s he gonna do?” Well, he does all the stuff that we’re not good at. And so John McPhee joined. We were doing somewhere around $6.5 - $7 million a year. 

And I told him the plan, right? We need to get rid of all multiline sales reps, we need to create our own sales force to tell the story and we can be the only leather company in existence that takes care of every aspect of a certain client’s life. We can do the headboard they wake up in bed on, we can do. Their breakfast room in their house, the leather for their private jet when they fly to work, the corporate interior when they get there, the Le Cirque when they have dinner there, and then the Four Seasons when they go to bed will have our leather as well. 

We can be all four parts of the industry and not just one. So if you think about it [** 0.40.46] was contract, Townsend was aircraft, Cortina and many others were hospitality and there were a million other people doing a million different things, but no one had focused on the lifestyle of that consumer, of the best. And Edelman Leather is and was the best leather in the world and I was able to say that with confidence. And we did it. And we grew the company from somewhere around $7 million to $70 million in those ensuing, eight years. 

So you can imagine we travelled all the time. My father was creating new product for us with great romantic stories. My mother was a colorist and she was amazing, but their health was deteriorating quick. So almost within the first year of McPhee joining, my dad lost his leg in an accident on the farm while we were at Neocot and my mother had consecutive back operations. 

So again, without really planning it, the two of us were running a business, totally. And that’s how that real growth happened. We got graded into Herman Miller; we were the first leather company ever to get graded into Herman Miller. I had to present to Eames Demetrios at the Case Study House in Southern California. 

JE: To get his approval and can you imagine, I’d just started collecting, it’s my favorite thing in the whole world, I get to go to the Case Study House and present to Eames Demetrios. And I’ll never forget, he left me alone in the kitchen of the Case Study House and he left me for a while and I got bored and I was about to clear the table off to throw leather on it and he goes, “No, no, no, no one has touched that for 50 years.”

AD: Oh my god. 

JE: Move away from the table. So he took me outside [laughter] and I ended up presenting to Eames Demetrios and his whole staff on the lawn. And then he gave us the blessing and I went to Miller and presented there with his blessing and ended up getting graded in. And it was truly the collecting, one of those patterns that brought us to Miller and it worked. We got every NetJet, airplane, we established a relationship with this company I’m with now called Crypton and got the exclusive rights to Crypton for leather and got standardized at Starboard Hotels, NetJets, everywhere they needed a little bit of cleanability, we were able to leverage that and really do well. I mentioned that I learned Portuguese in Brazil -

 The company was based in New Milford, Connecticut, there were 25,000 Brazilians living in the neighboring town. I sponsored 11 Brazilians to work in the warehouse and grow to other jobs at Edelman Leather and so when I was sorting hides every day, which even as I was president of the company, I sorted hides for a period every day. I’d speak Portuguese and practice with the Brazilians. They would practice English and I would speak Portuguese and they were all telling me how they were buying these expensive homes. 

I’m like guys; I don’t know how you can do that, I know what you make. Oh, there’s these new mortgages, I said, oh my god, when are they due? They’re like, in a year, I called a family meeting, John McPhee, my mother and father and me, and I’d say guys, we’re going to have a financial collapse. And my parents were getting older and needed a lot of care at the house, very, very expensive and I didn’t know we could afford that if we didn’t do something. And we literally started a sale process 

AD: So wait, what you’re telling me is through speaking Portuguese and having an ear to the ground with your Brazilian workers, you anticipated the financial collapse and prepared to sell the business before that happened? 

JE: Yes. 

AD: Holy shit!

JE: I know and I’m not that smart, that was pure luck. If I was that smart I would have shorted the stock market or done something even more intelligent, but we started the process and my mom and dad and McPhee believed me, you know, like who does that? John McPhee my best friend, he lived in Darien, Connecticut and he had a little mafia on his street of right financial guys. Peter Sallick, who I was friends with from 10th grade had invited me a year earlier to join YPO, Young Presidents Organization, which I did, changed my life because I was able to meet all these great entrepreneurs and they helped guide this process along with McPhee’s mafia of hiring a great investment bank, a phenomenal lawyer and not just selling quickly but going through the whole process, which we did. 

We ended up selling the company, I always thought it would sell to Miller, but it sold to Knoll. Knoll bought our company. We closed on the deal October 1st, 2007, which was literally within weeks of the peak of the economy. And then we stayed on and managed that business for two years for Knoll before moving on. So yeah, everything is interconnected, right? Like collecting 26th Street Flea Market, learning Portuguese, finding a good partner, a wife that encourages you to do the right things, all those things kind of led to a moment, right? 

And that really worked. And so my parents had never had money in the bank although they lived like kings. I’d always spent more than I made and so we all made our first hit. It was nice to have money. My wife had discovered that she was a photographer. She was in the fashion business, all those kinds of things, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, but never had developed her own art. And we’re out in the country, I would travel at time and strand her on this farm and a New York City girl, so she was angry at me for that a lot. 

But she did discover that she was a great photographer. And my mother said, “Bonnie, forget all these other things, the magazines, do photography, you’re amazing.” And she did and developed a series at that time of Uruguayan horses, that’s another long story, but an amazing horse series. And so I said, “Bonnie, when we sell Edelman Leather, I’ll have time and I’ll be more around the family and I’ll help you develop your photography business.” We published a book and she was so happy, finally I was going to pay attention and do the right thing. 

So [laughs] we sold the business, we’re ending the two year relationship, Knoll says they don’t want to hire us, whatever, and McPhee and I take a meeting with a friend of mine, we’re a management team, we can do this and that, and he says, “You ever heard of this company called Design Within Reach?”

AD: Oh!

JE: And I’m like, oh yeah, I love Design Within Reach, I’m a modern furniture collector and they sell modern and I go in there and I talk to the sales people and I try to get graded in through Herman Miller, I love that company. He goes, “Well, a friend of mine just acquired them, and you should meet him.” Like okay, that sounds cool. A couple of weeks go by, I don’t hear from them, I call up my friend Billy, Billy, oh my god, I can’t believe you called me, you’ve got to be in New York tomorrow morning 9:00 to meet with this guy, Glenn Krevlin. You’ve got to go to the city, okay, that’s cool. 

So we go to the city, we meet with Glenn Krevlin. He is an investor who ended up owning Design Within Reach. Long story, by chance in many ways, and a second meeting I had with him on a Saturday, I took him to the Edelman Leather showroom, we took a taxi down to Restoration Hardware and the flatiron and he’d owned Resto before and explained to him what McPhee and I thought we could do to Design Within Reach to save the business. It was in a terrible situation. 

AD: It’s kind of in a death spiral then, right? 

JE: It was a death spiral, it was doing $120 million a year, losing $25 million a year, layoffs, knockoffs, etc. etc. And I told him what we wanted to do and he said, “Cool, I believe in this.” We had known retail from the shoe business; we knew interior design from the leather business. John had been a retailer with his parents at Jumping Jacks and we were not the perfect fit for what had to be done, but it seemed like we were a perfect fit. And rather than taking six months off and being a better father and husband and supporting my wife’s photography business, McPhee and I took six days off, there was a New York Times article that I took the job during those six days when we were in Mexico, saying John Edelman, new CEO of Design Within Reach, big article. 

A huge picture of Alan Heller because he had sued everybody over knock-offs and we started commuting to San Francisco every week for eight months. And I [abandoned?] the family, the worst thing I ever did, in all honesty, it’s not even funny. No one should ever do that, especially after you promised to be home more. And so the family, I had to survive and earn my way back into the good graces of my wife and children after that. 

AD: Wait, I want to thank you for sharing that because you know, you were sort of joking and apologizing, but I think it’s very helpful for people to hear some of the tolls it can take on the fullness of life when you give yourself over to something.

JE: I mean it leads me to today, eventually. But you can’t do that and you know, no one ever says on their death bed, “Oh gee, I wish I’d worked more overtime,” or skipped more birthdays or those kinds of things. And it’s not healthy. And we were still living on the farm, so I was travelling every week and she was out there in the middle of nowhere and you know.I realize now how much work goes into kids every day, just the management, trying to have your own life. You’re lonely out there. That was a bad time. 

That I would not do again, right. I use those parameters now in guiding my future. What’s my priority, what’s good for me, what’s good for the family and mostly what’s good for the family, obviously. So we commute to California for eight months, my daughter would make me wake her up at 4:00am Monday morning before I left and kiss her goodbye whilst she was crying, like every Monday morning. Terrible! 

AD: Oh! You abandoned her every week!

JE: Yeah, every week was the same thing, my beautiful little girl, who is 20 now and still giving me shit about it. But we learned this business and we just started making decisions. Oh, and by the way, we invested alongside Glenn, and owned the business with him, which was the key. 

AD: Yeah, it’s all in. 

JE: All in and so they’re doing knock-offs -

AD: Oh. 

JE: There’s no one running the company. They had laid off all kinds of people and not even kept track of what jobs they did. 

AD: Oh!

JE: They had killed the catalogue. The website was seven versions behind. They were doing very little product development, we had a demoralized staff. 

AD: Oh dear!

JE: So we started January 4th, 2010, we had to walk out there and introduce ourselves. We’d call a company meeting and I still to this day, I do run hot and I’ll sweat in certain public presentations, which is fine, I’ve lived through it, I’ve survived it and I’ve been successful so I’m okay with it, but I do. People think, oh, you’re okay; I’m just, I run hot man, it’s okay. So I go out there and everybody looks at us with just disapproval, I’m not used to that. No one believed in us yet, they’d been screwed over. We have to win these people over and we tell them some of the plan and we just go to work. 

The office is in a skyscraper, like overlooking the city and the CEOs office is in the corner, plaque with an alley, all the views were with IT and they had covered all the windows with like whiteboards. So it was just this weird place. Design was on the other side of the building from my office, which I couldn’t take. And McPhee and I just started making decisions. There were 72 stores, 35 of which lost money. Those 35 and the last 35, they opened within two years. 

We had a board in the office that listed all the stores in, the ones that lost the most money down to the ones that made the most money. And we said, okay, we have to close these stores. We closed stores without even going to visit them. We were haemorrhaging; we had to save this business. And unlike many retailers who work with malls and such, they may have 50 stores, but they probably have two landlords, we were mom and pop, so every single store had a different landlord and McPhee had to go and negotiate a deal with every single one of them to close those stores. 

AD: Wow. 

JE: On the design side, we had to get rid of all knock-offs. We did that within a month, we dumped them all to the outlet store and took them all off the website and the catalogue and Alan Heller became a good friend. 

AD: You’ve got to save your soul with that too, because knock-offs are not, that’s not how you’re gonna build a brand with any sort of integrity. 

JE: You can’t be half pregnant, my mother always said. So either you’re the world leader on authentic modern design or you’re not. And I preach this to this day, if there’s one fake, one knock-off in the mix, you’re done.I’m also, was the president of Be Original Americas, and now the ambassador, things come full circle, right? So I really believe in that cause and that saved the business. So we closed the stores. We brought back the catalogue. We updated the website and then, this is over a period of time, about six months in we hold a company meeting and said, “Listen people, we’ve had a good six months, we’re on the right track, but we’re moving the company to Connecticut.” 

And you know, I’m like tearing when I tell these people. These people that love the business. Oh, one more important thing, we asked every current employee when we first got there what was broken. 

AD: Oh, that’s key. 

JE: And took all those reports and used that as part of our guideline as well. They knew, they wanted to do the right thing and they weren’t allowed to. They didn’t want to do knock-offs, they were forced to. And we used that as part of our guideline on how to fix the business. So we had this meeting and we’re gonna move the company to Connecticut. Anybody who would like to come with us, you are welcome. We don’t have any money. 

As an example of not having any money, all the travel the company did for those first two years were on my Starwood points. We paid every bill with my Starwood Amex and used that so we could afford travel because we had no money for travels. We did trade shows and the regional managers would do all their visits, all on my Starwood points. [Laughs] It was so funny. I ended up being a Starwood ambassador because we used so many roads, they thought I was traveling myself 300 nights a year. 

We played every trick to save that business. We had this amazing meeting to tell people we’re moving and we said, we don’t have any money to give you big bonuses for moving, but what we suggest you do is, since most of your furniture is Design Within Reach, most of you are single and don’t have kids or married with no kids, sell all your furniture, it’s all modern classics, you can make some money, we’ll give you 80 off at the outlet store to buy new furniture in the East Coast and we’ll pay, like 1,500 bucks for your move. 

Which is not an appealing package. And to this day, one of the things that makes me the most emotional when I tell the story is 50% of our employees moved with us. 

AD: Wow!

JE: You know? It was a big deal. And they did, they came out with U-Haul, or they just flew and they started new lives in Brooklyn and New York and Connecticut and they believed. And then we went to Stamford, Connecticut, there was, John McPhee and I were shopping for real estate, a place to go and a guy from YPO, again, back to Peter Sallick, long-time friend, put me in YPO, a guy from YPO had got the rights to this development district in Stamford, Connecticut and we wanted to have a place in Connecticut but close to a train station so the people from New York could make it there easily. 

So within walking distance to the Stamford train station was this amazing, old, brick warehouse. It was the former Yale lock factory and we saw it and it had survived like a few fires. So it was completely burned out, no windows, but this very beautiful, rectangular, classic, brick structure and I’m such an idiot, I’m like, “I love it!” And McPhee is like, shhh, shhh [laughs]. And a friend of ours, a guy named Karl Cleaner gave us free rent across the street and built out the brick building for us and we moved everybody into this cool bring, former Yale lock factor in Stamford, Connecticut and we started the business. 

And in that place, the average size of a Design Within Reach store, when we bought the company, was around 1,500 square feet. It’s very hard to show people how to live with modern, bedroom, living room, home office etc. in 1,500 square feet. So we built our first store in that building that I had designed in what we thought was huge, it was 6,000 feet. And we used that as the model to go from, and it worked. We started hiring designers from all over the world, like Norm Architects and David Weeks, who I’m a huge fan of, he’s so talented. And so we hired designers from all over the world. We moved to a bigger format, we started doing more, what you call ‘private label,’ but we never called it that. It was the Norm lounge chair; it was the Jeffrey Burnett recliner, whatever it was. We never said it was ‘private label.’ It was always telling the story of the designer first. Telling repeatable, memorable story about the designer and then telling them the details about the furniture and that was a huge change. 

AD: Yeah. You put the human before the product and I think that’s huge. 

JE: Yes, and the designers needed the exposure because if you think back to the days when Charles and ‘Ray’ Eames won the design contest at the MoMA and the key to winning that was, Bloomingdales would be the retailer and Herman Miller would be the manufacturer. There was nobody filling that role anymore, so Design Within Reach filled in. And we gave people these great opportunities, a collective. You know, they were known in the couture market, we made them known as a household name. And you can go through the list of designers we worked with, from Cleaner Atlas to whomever, we changed their lives.

 So designers wanted to work with us, which you know, I went from Felix Stark ditching me in Milan to being invited to every cocktail party that he was at. You know Milan year one, 2010, we weren’t invited to a dinner, we had no money, we had to beg all of our vendors to come back to us. The top 10 vendors left us, Casina etc. everybody had left us. We had 40 meetings in that first Milan week, the first time I’d ever been to the Salone, to beg everybody to come back and work with us. And what we learned in that first week was, no one had more than three stores that did authentic modern. So they actually needed us. And we learned the power that we had if we used it properly in the industry and got them all back. That was really exciting. So we’re in Connecticut, we opened up the flagship on 57th Street. We’d had an Edelman Leather showroom for 20 something years in the D&D. I knew the value of that little area, probably the most important design area on the planet in terms of doing business, the D&D Building in New York. And we were walking by, John McPhee was walking by a dig on 57th and 3rd that was going to be a building and we contacted the people that were doing it and got that amazing flagship on 57th and 3rd.  

To prove out our concept of the bigger stores that we started in Stamford. And at that time Glenn Krevlin, who was our investor, our partner, it was time for him to kind of role out of the fund, right? And so we started a sale process then. So we had taken the company from 110/120 million, losing the 25 million to 225 million, making 25 million and we started another roadshow sales process. We showed it to all the big players and there was a man named Brian Walker who had been the CEO of Herman Miller, and just a great guy.

And from every Monday at Neocon, since we bought the company, Brian had taken us out to lunch, left that insane showroom, probably 25,000 people a day in his showroom and he would take us to lunch and never look at his watch and never look at his phone for the lunch, to understand how we were doing Design Within Reach, how was the progress because we were a huge retailer of Herman Miller product and really their face to the consumer if you think about it. How else would you buy Miller for the most part? 

AD: Right, ‘cause they’re contract. 

JE: Exactly. And at the end of the sales process Brian Walker and Herman Miller bought Design Within Reach, it was a big deal, it was a really big deal. 

AD: I remember that. It was a really big deal and I kinda have a question about you personally. As you’re preparing this business that you’ve nurtured into thriving, for sale, what, is that a thrill for you? Is that riding like a motorcycle or is that bitter-sweet?

JE: Well, the sales process, it’s like when you’re riding a motorcycle, as fast as you possibly can with no helmet. 

AD: Okay [laughs]. 

JE: It’s so intense and you have to get your rhythm. I always tell the story that we were in LA with the bankers, part of the roadshow, doing these huge investment companies that owned J.Crew, The Gap, they owned Starbucks, all these big firms that had huge investments the first night we get there, we use a discount code to stay at the Four Seasons on Doheny for like $200 a night. We’re always trying to save. I love cars and for some reason I had this thing for minivans. 

So I’m driving us around in a minivan. So we go to the first presentation and there is no energy, it’s, we’re duds, and that’s not like us. John McPhee and I have never had a dud presentation. So we all go back to the hotel and I’m like, guys, I’ll see you in a little while. I take my minivan out to a Porsche dealership because they had a ’96 911 for sale. And I go by myself; he stays open to wait for me. We have fun. He ends up selling me a different car, which I still have, and I did that to just get some energy. 

And the next morning we get up and I’m like, we’re following the investment bankers to the first presentation and again, we’re like, I feel duddy. And so every stop sign they’re in front of us. I hit the back of their car with my van [laughter] and then on the third stop sign I hit the car and I kind of push them through the red light. And by the time we get to the place right, everybody is loose, we’re dying laughing and we ended up having an amazing day of presentations. I had the Porsche in the back of my mind, I had my best friend next to me in the car, we’re just fucking around to a certain extent. Because your future depends on a process going well when you sell a company. The numbers are very big and you’ve worked tirelessly to get there and you have people that depend upon you and you need to do a good deal. But it ended up being Herman Miller. They really made the best offer. They’re the people I wanted to sell to. I had actually wanted to sell Edelman Leather to them years ago, and it worked out. We became retail arm of Herman Miller, under Brian Walker and that was a thrill. So then we created a separate entity, they gave us hermanmiller.com, we rolled up together, McPhee and I rolled over a very large portion of our proceeds into this new hold co. company with Miller and we got to grow Design Within Reach and hermanmiller.com for the next five years alongside them, with a time to exit at the end. 

And we did it. It was really, really, really hard. Retail is hard; furniture is hard, delivering furniture to someone’s house is hard. Seven days a week with being ready to have a flooding store here or a sick sales person there or whatever it was going to be. It was a real aggressive 10 years and those last couple were just, the pinnacle. We also were always growing, so it was great. We bought HAY during that time. 

AD: Right, yes. 

JE: Which was exciting and really McPhee handled that on his own, so if we were both putting too much energy somewhere or someplace, they all would suffer, so we were able to divide and conquer and that ended up being a great acquisition in all that. So, John McPhee stayed on a little longer, but we sold the business this final time, I’m gonna take some time off and I did. This time I did. 

AD: Thank you! [Laughs] I’m glad to hear that part of the story -

JE: I know, because I’m exhausted just telling you the story [laughter]. 

AD: I need some time off!

JE: And you know, during that time, just as an aside, we talk about, I have a passion for collecting and I started collecting watches, probably at the end of high school. And then as I had more money, I got nicer watches and really tuned in the collection. Every day on the way to work, for about six months, every week I put on a different watch from the collection and I’d photograph it as I was driving to work. And post it on Instagram and put #hodinkee. Hodinkee is a watch guys watch guys log and now it’s a website. I have a small investment with them. 

They do all kinds of things. They were the authority on watches and I wanted them to notice me, and talk about my watches [laughter]. And I could have called somebody who knew somebody and met them, but I really wanted to do it organically. And they reached out to me. We did this amazing video where they came to the house, called Talking Watches. 

And I got to have the authority on watches watches, like give me the stamp of approval on something I did as a hobby. I know it sounds shallow, but it really meant a lot to me. And I’m not exaggerating, I’d be in Milan with McPhee and some other people and people come to the table, “Hey, I watcha your video.” [Laughter] People who love watches saw the video. The one before me was John Mayer and the one after me was Jack Nicholas, so I was in great company and I ended up falling in love with Hodinkee. I think it’s important to have other hobbies because you can’t be a furniture collector when you’re in a furniture business, you have to switch and I did, I switched to watches and it was recognized, it was quite nice. 

So, June 1st, 2019, my phone stopped. I stopped work at Design Within Reach and Herman Miller and overnight I went from seven days a week, full speed, aggressive, every single second to crickets. 

AD: What’s that like? It’s a shock to the system. 

JE: Yeah, because your body doesn’t stop creating all that energy. So I get to work and usually I get to work, I get to work with the marketing department and then product and then we have… Whatever it’s going to be, I’m emitting leadership energy, I’m out there, I’m the guy, right? Alongside McPhee, I had the front man role. Then I wake up, it’s summer time and there’s no messages on my phone and stuff and I have all this energy bursting out of me. And so I wasn’t prepared. So I started exercising, walking five miles a day on these hilly roads -

AD: It can be a really sort of disconcerting feeling to have undirected energy. 

JE: It’s not good!

AD: [Laughs] Yeah, thank gosh you didn’t have any hostile, inclinations or else. 

JE: I guess, I’m not an angry person, so I’m a happy drunk [laughter]. 

AD: Me too, I just get real lovey!

JE: I get lovey too -

AD: You’re so great….

JE: Two drinks and I’m like to my wife, “You’re so beautiful.” So yes, I drank a lot because it’s like, just to end the day. My parents, my father was still alive and then he passed during that time, I was able to spend time with the family and meditated, I read, trained in transcendental meditation and I said no to everything. Now most of it I didn’t do it because I had to but we were building a house in Westport, Connecticut, we’re moving, so we’re renovating, it was a gut renovation with an addition, so that kept my attention. 

I refocused on collecting, I did some car stuff, but I got smarter. I was able to let my brain think clearly for the first time in my adult life. It had been a rollercoaster, an exciting, fantastic, wouldn’t change a thing rollercoaster, except for abandoning the family [laughter], but in general, it was great. But I never had time to think without the weight of the world on my shoulders, for whatever business I was in. And I was able to look at other people’s businesses and analyze them and I did a little consulting and I started evolving. Be Original Americas kept me involved in the design world -

 DIFFA kept me involved in the design world and my passion for DIFFA, I actually at that time, I did, before the move we did an auction of a warehouse full of my collection and we raised like $80,000 for DIFFA, which was great. And then we moved, January 4th and then Covid hit two months later. Thank god, I learned how to boat, I was still using my time [laughs], I’m on the water, I’d never been on a boat, and the sound that scared the hell out of me, so I learned how to do that. 

And family time and everybody is home because it’s Covid, but I would find, on a rainy day I’m like argh, I should be doing something, I really should be doing something. So we made an interesting investment in Washington State, in the marijuana business. Which I never would have been able to do when I was working because we went out there and it’s like three hours from any place and we toured the facility and all this kind of stuff. 

And I’ve been a small advisor there. My friends were doing a beauty business and I got to study that and invest in this beauty business which is a great product which we’ll have in a year or so. And then I had, one of the last lunches I had, and I don’t know if I can talk about the TV show, but I had lunch with these two women that I just adore and respect. And they were asking me to be a judge at a design contest they’re gonna run in Brooklyn. They told me the whole story about it, I’m like wow, I’ll be a judge, but I really think it’s a great TV show. 

Let’s make a TV show. And they said, “Yeah!” So we formed a little entity, I hired my niece to help us buildo formalize the idea a little bit. And I think Heidi Klum, from that last relationship, will be the executive producer of the show, and we’ll see what happens. So I think we have a good chance of that show happening because of Heidi, and it’s a good concept. 

AD: Wow. 

JE: So that was one project. 

AD: As someone with a background in the TV industry. And design, I am very interested in this. I hope you will keep me posted. 

JE: I will,. and then I got contacted by Craig Rubin who was the founder of, with his wife Randy, of Crypton Fabrics. Years ago I had the exclusive for them in leather. And they had been sold to private equity and they weren’t doing as well as they thought they could and then Covid hit, which hurt the contract markets and the private equity company, along with the Rubin’s said, “Would you come in as chairman and just work with the CEO and help executive the vision.” And I did, it was the first thing I’d say yes to. So I became executive chairman of Crypton, which is a cool, I call it a ‘part time job.’ There’s a great [American?] team, so it makes it easy. I’m here in Michigan today working with them and it keeps me, again, a large, of my size 13 foot, inside the design industry. 

And then I met [laughs] randomly, this amazing young guy and his friend. This young guy’s father had owned, still owns, a bar in the East Village called The Boiler Room, the East Village in New York. The Boiler Room has been an iconic gay bar for more than 30 years, always owned by this guy. And his son watched this kind of loyal clientele, like me sorting hides, he would clean glasses or work whatever in the bar, he always had exposure. And he said to his dad, we’ve been watching these nice people come in, we have regular customers for 20 years and once a year all these brands jump on a bandwagon and do Pride Month, they give something to the people to keep them happy and then leave. Why don’t we start a brand that gives back all year long to this community?

AD: Oh, I like this, yeah. 

JE: Right, they went to their neighbor and the neighbor is an amazing guy who was a serial entrepreneur, a real estate developer, but also a graphic designer and he helped them formalize this idea into a brand. The brand called Fourth & Pride. The bar is on 4th and 2nd, every city has the address, Fourth & Pride, and everybody is proud of something, so it was a genius concept. They brought in a beer called Fourth & Pride, within three weeks 85% of beer sales were Fourth & Pride and they had something. 

So that’s when I meet them and I meet them and I’m like guys, I’ve been on the board of DIFFA for I don’t know how many years, I’ve been a supporter of the gay community forever, through all different types of methods, I could join your company. And we decided to ditch the beer for a period of time and use the brand, Fourth & Pride, which can be used for other things going forward, maybe even, I think a marijuana license soon, and let’s do a vodka. 

And we worked during Covid and we developed what I believe is the smoothest vodka in the world. 

AD: Well, I can attest to it, it is -

JE: Oh yay!

AD: I don’t want to mess with it, like I just like it neat. 

JE: So I didn’t understand why if you bought, like an 18 year old McCallin or Clase Azul tequila that you drink it on the rocks and you’re proud of it. Why does everybody have to mix the vodka? So we thought, you know, having a mission is great, but a mission without a phenomenal product, you know, it’s kind of hollow. So we decided to set out and make the smoothest vodka ever that didn’t have to mix. Of course you could mix it, whatever, but in terms of, what we call a ‘naked martini’ which is cold glass, cold vodka, nothing compares. 

And we had to work on the formula for months and we mixed, for the first time, corn and grape. A brand like CÎROC is great, a brand like Tito’s and most other vodkas are corn, but CÎROC is, to me it’s too sweet and the other one’s always had this weird bite at the end. Because when it’s just corn, you have to add some kind of sugar and the sugar is what gives you a hangover and provides that kind of weird aftertaste, a bite. 

JE: So we sweetened it with distilled grape. So that you have just a hint of a bouquet when you raise it to your nose. You have a creamy mouth when you have it, because it’s smooth and then there’s no shock at the end because it’s rounded with the grape rather than sugar. And we did it. Like we did it. Guys that had never done this before, you know, three guys trying to do something, we actually make, I think with this vodka, and everybody who tastes it says, you know, I’m a scotch drinker, but I love this, or I drink tequila, but I like this, or I usually drink vodka tonic, but this is the first one I can drink straight. 

AD: Well, I’m a Mezcal person and I was always like, vodka just either tastes like rubbing alcohol or nothing. But you’ve changed my mind with this one. 

JE: So a new drink we just came out with that I worked on with the guys who own this fantastic Mexican restaurant in Connecticut is, you do a stirred vodka, chilled glass and when you’re stirring the vodka, put like three tiers of a smoking Mezcal into it. 

AD: Ooh!

JE: And it’s a fantastic, winter martini or Mexican martini, whatever you want to call it, it’s amazing. It’s like my new favorite drink, I love Mezcal too. 

AD: Well let’s have a few of those and then we can all be like, damn, you’re so great [laughter], oh my, the design world, I just love you! [Laughter]

JE: My dad and I got to travel the world together, Edelman Leather and most, not the world, we went to Italy. My father and I went to Italy to buy leather. We took maybe six trips a year and we’re both drinkers. And, because he was older, we’d take always one night at the beginning where he had to rest and since the leather area is near Vicenza, you fly to Venice. We’d always fly to Venice, go into the city and spend the night to relax. And we’d go to Harry’s Bar and drink Harry’s Bar martinis, which are the frozen glass and frozen vodka. 

AD: Ooh. 

JE: And that’s how I was raised, we bought those same glasses, we both had them in our freezers and it was that experience, part of it, that inspired how to have a clean vodka and those kinds of things.

AD: I love this whole story, it is the story of a very rich and resilient and charmed life full of characters and kismet and full circle situations and deep connections and long relationships and collaborative partnerships and wow! [Laughter] You’ve taken me on a journey and I feel like it wasn’t quite a motorcycle ride, because that probably would have been a little too intense for me, but it was a sports car for sure. 

JE: Fair enough, I love it! Sure, I pissed some people off and forgot some things, but that’s how it goes. 

AD: [Laughs] Well, I have loved this conversation and just to wrap it up I feel like I have a couple of really important questions that I need to harvest some wisdom from you before I let you go. 

JE: I hope I don’t let you down, but I’ll try. 

AD: In terms of how you operate, I mean you already said you’re not really a good student, you learned in the field when you had a sort of contextual motivation for learning. But in terms of making some of these risky decisions, do you think that was a sort of analytical weighing of pros and cons or more of a gut instinct? 

JE: Well, I think like most great decisions, it’s both. In my opinion; you can’t make a gut decision until you have the data. I know that doesn’t sound natural.

AD: No, it does because the data informs the gut. 

JE: And having someone to argue with helps, a lot. So we made a lot of decisions and I think the benefit of not having time is helpful sometimes. I think you can overthink things and question yourself too much; otherwise you make a decision and go with it. And employees, and your followship would prefer to have you make the wrong decision than not have a decision. 

AD: Right, because they feel the uncertainty as a sort of on we and directionlessness. 

JE: Exactly and you can always pivot if you make the wrong decision. Until you start working you don’t know if it’s right or wrong. And it’s great to be wrong, you know, sometimes, as long as you catch it early, it’s great to be wrong. 

AD: Yeah, wrong is information, wrong is really valuable information. 

JE: Yeah, discovering you’re wrong is important. 

AD: That’s really helpful and then since you’ve been so instrumental in telling the stories of designers, making careers and giving people their start, I wonder if you have any advice for designers and entrepreneurs that are emerging from school or just getting their career started, right now, in this weird time with the pandemic when there’s climate crisis and racial justice crises happening, what do you think is kind of important for them to know or how to calibrate their compass?

JE: I think it’s an amazing time for design, just like the Great Recession was. During the Great Recession people didn’t have a choice to go work for Gensler or these great design firms, there were no jobs. So they went to their cheap lofts in Brooklyn and birthed all these companies. If you remember, from[Roland Hill to David Weeks etc. etc. they were all born during the Great Recession. I think that same thing is going to happen now. So you know, if you’re  living at home if you’re living at home, you know, don’t watch TV, create. And so I always say, be creative, do what you love, but say, and also, what I tell everybody is, say yes, just say yes to stuff, stop saying now. [Laughs] Just say yes, if it doesn’t work out, you can change it. [Laughs] Take a risk and just say yes and if you have to take the garbage out, take the fucking garbage out, you know? 

I don’t think it’s happening so much anywhere, people think they’re entitled, that certain jobs are below them or above them, it’s such horseshit today. I think you have to do what has to be done when it has to get done and make yourself that kind of person. 

AD: I totally agree and I also think there is something and someone to learn from in absolutely every situation. 

JE: Oh my goodness, I couldn’t agree more. From the guy that works in the landscaping to one of the greatest designers in the world, you take something from everybody. My father always said, “What did you learn today?” And you had to come up with something and you did, wherever you were. 

AD: Oh, this has been so wonderful, thank you for sharing your story with me and with our listeners and for painting such a colorful and storied picture and inspiring us all with your trajectory. 

JE: Thank you, you make it every easy. 

AD: Thank you for listening! To see John’s fun images and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would please rate and review, we love it. We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is part of the Airwave podcast network. Visit Aarwavemedia.com to discover more great shows. they curate the best of them, so you don’t have to! Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.

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Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor:

Dunn-Edwards

The Dunn-Edwards Emerging Professionals Design Competition is calling all emerging professionals, currently enrolled students of architecture and interior design! This is the time to practice your developing skills in commercial and residential design categories and get rewarded. Two grand prize winners will each receive $3,000 cash. Beginner and advanced levels are encouraged to apply. Submit now through August 6 at emergingprofessionalsprogram.com to earn your bragging rights!

What is your earliest memory?

Playing with the dogs at my parent’s house, called “Alligator Farm”. 

How do you feel about democratic design? 

I believe in the concept. However, the implementation is often quite difficult. Sometimes great design is expensive and sometimes it’s not. As long as you can weave in authenticity to democratic design it’s a fantastic philosophy. 

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

Whoever asks the most questions wins.

How do you record your ideas?

I have a series of disorganized notebooks. 

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

Unfortunately, I am not a designer. My favorite tool to work with is my iphone. 

What book is on your nightstand?

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Why is authenticity in design important?

Authenticity, to me, is everything in design. Without authenticity, design has no future. 

Favorite restaurant in your city?

The Whelk in Westport, CT. Important to order a Fourth & Pride martini when you go.

What might we find on your desk right now?

Multiple notebooks, 3 pairs of reading glasses, one pair of sunglasses, an iMac, 20 pens (random), a portable Flos light, and an orchid.

Who do you look up to and why?

I look up to a lot of people. There are so many people that know so much more about just about everything than I do. I look up to my friends, my colleagues, and especially my family. 

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

As I said, I am not a designer. I am very proud of what we accomplished at Edelman Leather and Design Within Reach. The collaborations with the world’s greatest designers consistently humbled me. 

What are the last five songs you listened to?

Big Audio Dynamite - Medicine Show
Toots and the Maytals - Pressure Drop
Macklemore - Glorious
Arrested Development - Everyday People
Bob Marley - Trenchtown Rock- live at the Roxy

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

www.fourthandpride.com 
Hodinkee, “Talking Watches”
@johnedelman

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Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Production assistance from Ilana Nevins and music by El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.

Clever is a proud member of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows.

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