My (long) story (short):

I am fortunate to have been born and raised in Marin County, California where I learned to be adventurous enough to study at the Rhode Island School of Design and settle in New York City where I currently live. While art school helped me build a conceptual framework for a graphic design practice, I learned the true tools of the trade on the job in the bullpens of Manhattan design firms – and at the helm of some famous brands.

I became a founding designer at Wechsler & Partners creating luxe print work for some of Wall Street’s marquis names. While the world of finance was ripe with opportunity, I grew to feel as a stranger in a foreign land; inspired (gobsmacked) by a talk given by Tibor Kalman and crew, I saw a different, path and I vowed to find work in a firm that ran in the M&Co. lane – with clients I could relate to and whose stories I could better tell.

By some stroke of synchronicity I was hired as a senior designer and thrived for over 5 years co-creating a wild range of things from album covers to wristwatches.

Then came the haircut.
Hairdresser Howard McLaren, now co-founder of R+Co products sat me in his chair at a midtown hairdressing salon called Bumble + Bumble and bumble long before the namesake products existed. Fond of collecting creatives to join his orbit, he added me to his comp list and I returned the favor with some t-shirt designs memorable for including hedge clippers.

It was a gift that would keep on giving: After M&Co., I launched my own firm and shared a studio with designer Marco Pasanella, with whom I collaborated on a line of home accessories, and took on an eclectic bunch of clients, among them Bumble and bumble., which I changed to the sentence form, period.

I was hired to re-create the brand and position it for the launch of a product line that, in the words of a vaunted colleague, “changed everything: the way products could look, could speak, and be shown in salons – and people’s showers.”

The Ebony Tower
A crowning achievement: The House of Bumble, a 6-floor beauty mecca dubbed “The Harvard of Hair” by the press when describing Bumble and bumble University where we educated thousands of hairdressers in both business and design.

The ebony-clad building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District contained 2 salons for both clients and training, company headquarters, a theater, library, classrooms and gallery created the ultimate in-house experience for artists of all kinds and an exuberant expression of a rich and storied culture. I freely invited the design community inside while serving as a board member of AIGA/NY.

I was a vice-president when the brand became one of The Estée Lauder Companies, a long journey from the first bottle of Thickening Spray sold in that midtown salon to a product line sold in over 3000 salons with over $100,000,000 in annual sales – and one design-focused employee (me) to a team of 20.

Bumble was a hard act to follow.
But we tried anyway.
If You Knew was established as a consulting collective and product development incubator with Bumble and bumble founder Michael Gordon. There we wrestled with our conscience: the Inconvenient Truth about all those products we made over all those years.

No matter how beautiful they were, and no matter how well they worked, they were flooding the world in plastic waste and chemicals. To build another product company would have to mean doing it differently.

Creating less toxic products with more sustainable packaging is a complex, expensive, and often frustrating proposition that many companies are trying to tackle.

It’s no accident that most who make liquid products have opted for some sort of flexible package intended to be dispensed into a durable, refillable container, and this is the method we put our money on when launching Hairstory, a haircare line that asks us to adopt a new way to wash and ditch detergent – which means using fewer products to have beautiful hair and a thriving scalp.

We adopted ‘Less is More’ as a familiar but timely mantra.

And now?
I left Hairstory in the hands of the next generation of strivers to take the company to new heights, having been a staunch yet nimble steward of its growth from zero to $30,000,000 in sales over a 7-year period. My hope is to share all that this story has taught me and champion the role of creativity for any individual or organization.

Thanks for reading. Let’s talk.