Om Malik, Author at Pi.co: A Conversation Series!

Doug Weber

Om Malik: Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you end up in Japan?

Doug Weber: In college I had a scholarship to do ceramics in Japan. At the end of it, I had to make a decision between going back to find work in Silicon Valley or to stay in Japan and become a potter. [laughs]

It was a big choice at the time, but I decided to go back and work for Apple because I had received an offer from them about a year prior. It was an exciting time then. It was before the beginning of the iPod. When I had interned there previously, I worked on the old iMac that had the articulating display and the G3 tower — things that seem old now, but at the time they were exciting. When I returned to Apple, I started working on the first generations of the iPod. I was lucky enough to have been there when it was still small, when there was one industrial designer, one mechanical designer, one EE guy, and one software person designing a product.

I did the first couple generations of the iPod Nano and had started to work on the first generation of the iPhone when I decided that I wanted to do something in my career that brought me back to Japan. I started the product design team of Asia, which originally was just in Japan but eventually grew to include Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. I did that for about eight years before leaving Apple in 2014 to do the stuff that I’m doing now.

Om: Were you able to apply some of the skills you picked up in your ceramics‑related exploration into your industrial design work?

Doug: Definitely. When I was doing ceramics, I was very much a wheel‑based person. Bodies of rotation is something that I think about a lot.

Ever since high school, I used to draw a center line and then try to come up with symmetrical designs around the center line, things that could be thrown on the wheel. In manufacturing, I had always been particular to lathe‑based processes, which is also bodies of rotation. That also seems to be a pretty central part of what I think we’re doing right now, with Craig.

Om: So how does this guy who’s designing iPods and iPhones end up obsessed with coffee?

Doug: [laughs] Good question. I was lucky to be around in San Francisco when the [specialty] coffee scene was starting to take off. I remember when we were carpooling on the way into work at Apple. In the morning we’d often stop at Ritual Coffee Roasters to get what, at the time, was the best coffee in the city.

There were a couple of other people at Apple then, people who are on the Lyn Weber board now. [laughs] Every time we’d have a meeting, the first 5 to 10 minutes would be about making a cappuccino and talking about things that were wrong with the machine and how much better it could be, and then the next hour and a half would be talking about the iPod, the iPhone, or something else.

Coffee became a good punctuation in the busy days, a five‑minute pause for enjoyment, and it’s always been my vice of choice. It’s one that helps keep you going, and it’s fundamentally delicious. Also, you get to play with cool machines, and there’s a whole bunch of process tuning involved to make it better. All of those aspects have resonated with me from the beginning.

Om: I was in Japan last year around this time and I went to a lot of places in Tokyo for coffee. People take their coffee very seriously there.

Doug: In a sense, almost too seriously. There’s a sternness to it that you don’t get from places in the Bay Area. There are definitely places to have fantastic coffee in and around Tokyo. It’s a different feel for the scene in this country versus in other places.

Om: So how did your company Lyn Weber come together?

Doug: Craig came from the film industry, but he is also a coffee nerd like us and had decided that there was no grinder on the market that suited his needs. He didn’t know about designing and manufacturing but decided to teach himself CAD and put together a product at the time that was called the HG‑1.

We still offer the HG-1 [coffee grinder], but the interesting thing is that I already had some plans in place for my own products, with the idea of making $1,000 hand grinders to start before getting into more niche products. He beat me to it. I remember thinking, “Ah, shit. This guy’s totally doing exactly what I was planning to do as my exit strategy from Apple.” [laughs]

I bought one and it was a nice object, but there were many small details in the materials and the manufacturing that I thought could make it better. I put together a 10- or 15‑page PDF with feedback and wished him good luck. Craig got the email, and while normally he would probably ignore that type of thing, he realized it came from a guy at Apple.

We started talking via email, then met up in San Francisco to talk about what we liked about existing coffee products and what we didn’t like. I think the what‑we‑didn’t‑like category was a lot bigger. We both had our sights set on bigger and more complex things but didn’t want to do it by ourselves in a bubble. It made a lot of sense with our core strengths to put them together.

Om: Why do you think so many people are trying to make better grinders?

Doug: It goes back to the fact that from an equipment standpoint, the quality of your coffee comes down to your grind and your extraction.

If you’re doing espresso, it’s about the quality of your grinder and the quality of your espresso machine and how they work together. It’s an often overlooked part of the process but equally important to everything that comes after it.

When Craig and I look at the incumbents of the industry — we call them the tractor manufacturers — one of the things that is interesting to us is, how can they have been doing this for 50 years and not changed a single thing? And why does the machine go together like this? Why is there crud stuck inside, why can’t you clean it? The list of problems has been there for so long and has stagnated for so long that people have started to accept the problems as the norm. We see these things as fixable problems.

Also, there’s our design ethos: It’s the complete opposite of designing for obsolescence or for a model upgrade in a couple of years. We both feel strongly about that. I felt especially strongly about that after coming from an industry that is focused around consumerism and upgrades every year and every two years.

We make things that are intended to last forever, stuff that will never break. Once you buy a grinder from us, we want it to be the last one you ever buy. We want you and your children to use it.

Om: It seems like this is an expression of your ideas and your designs. Is it also a reaction to all of these products you created at Apple that become obsolete in a couple of years and add to the world’s clutter. Is that right?

Doug: I can unequivocally say yes to that, 100 percent. I loved the stuff we designed and made at Apple. In that industry and in the industry of building cell phones and other things, we used better materials, we built better products, things that were meant to last. It’s an industry where the technology is refreshing so quickly that you have to make new versions every year just to stay up with the key functionality of it. I get it.

That said, the reality is that you’re making things that are meant to last, but people are refreshing every year, every two years. And with things like the cosmetic quality standards that go into creating an Apple product, the waste that’s developed as a result is astronomical.

Even with coffee products, people will happily spend a couple hundred dollars on a grinder that, realistically, is only going to last them a couple years. They’re probably better off buying one from us that will last them their lifetime, and that will create a lot less waste and eliminate the process of repurchasing and having to recycle or throw away. It’s an important part of what we do.

Om: The unfortunate part of electronics is that they were built to become obsolete. I have a wonderful Leica camera, and it may last five, seven years, but it will become obsolete in seven years. I can hold onto it in a more nostalgic fashion, but once you put a chip into something, it’s meant to be replaced. I think it just has a shelf life, which is the reality of our time. Everything is going to be like that.

Doug: When you go back 50 to 70 years ago, and you look at what people were enjoying from coffee then to people who are making coffee right now, has the microchip made the masters of the craft any better? Arguably not. There are ways that you can use silicon to make some things easier, more repeatable, or more convenient. But it’s not necessarily going to improve the quality of what’s in the cup.

We’re very aware of that. At every chance we have, we try to remove the technology and the barriers. We try to remove the things that are going to make our stuff need to be replaced or changed in seven to 10 years’ time. Stuff that we design does have electronics. We’re designing it so that a particular part of it is a module. Even if that blows a fuse in 10 years, it’s replaceable. The last thing we want to have is a high-quality product with the core mechanical bits still functioning well but there isn’t a chip to make it move.

Om: What does the grinder do, and how is it different from what’s out there?

Doug: We looked at what was out there, and the problems with existing grinders, which is that they’re extremely difficult to clean. Other things on the market will take you a good hour to clean, whereas with ours you can pop off a couple parts and clean it in about 20 seconds. We also knew that we wanted to basically get out everything that you put into it. If you put in 18.3 grams, you get out 18.3 grams. Both of these things make a big difference in the process.

Om: For the longest time there was no design in the coffee world. Everything was very Mr. Coffee. Now there is so much innovation. Why do you think that’s happening?

Doug: One thing I find a bit distracting is what’s happening in the coffee industry from an industrial design standpoint. You look at the machines and the products being developed and it’s closer to reskinning than it is to actual reengineering. When you look at reskinned products for, say, an espresso machine, it’s using the same concepts of the core mechanisms that have existed for half a century and putting it into a different shiny box or changing something small.

The design gets in the way of what the thing is supposed to do. We always start with the core of what we’re trying to do and let that drive the design. We start with the heart of the mechanism and then go outward and try to let that dictate the way that everything else falls into place.

Om: Is that the same way Apple designed its products, starting with the core and then going up to the top?

Doug: In a way I’d say yes. I was not sitting around drawing stuff and trying to figure out the look and shape. I was more focused on the technical details together with the [ideas from the] industrial designers at that time.

Apple is clear about that. You have your specific roles. Even though we were working side by side with the industrial designers at Apple, I was very much on the technical end of the spectrum. But, at the same time, I was influenced by the same process that drove the design of all the products at Apple.

Technologies, the parts design, manufacturing — those were closely tied together. The way that Craig and I are designing products, we’re fusing all of those things into a much smaller group. We’re two guys right now that make up the industrial design, the product design, the manufacturing engineering, the marketing. That’s not the long‑term plan, but it certainly enables quick decision-making at this stage.

Om: Your new grinder, the EG-1, is it for professionals, or is it for nerds like me who want it at home?

Doug: [laughs] Good question. From the beginning we’ve been calling the EG‑1 a commercial coffee grinder. We designed it with specific needs that we saw from how people are making single‑dose coffee in cafes.

That said, we can’t dictate who is going to buy our products. There’s been a pretty even mix. I think we have, luckily, a pretty good reputation from the HG‑1 that we’ve already had out on the market for a couple of years. A lot of people who own the HG‑1 and are happy with that at home, the extreme aficionados, have also purchased what we’ve been calling our commercial grinder (EG-1) for home use.

Om: What’s next for you? What other products are you guys going to make at Lyn Weber?

Doug: The first years has been defined by setting up the manufacturing chain, the sales channel, and automating as many things as possible to make the company more efficient. The future is going to be focused on product proliferation, not refreshing stuff that we already have but expanding. One of the obvious ones is espresso machines. That’s much within our sights, as well as products that aren’t limited to coffee.

We intentionally don’t have any references to coffee in the company name. It’s our core focus, especially for now, and something that’s always going to be at the heart of the company, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to that, because there are so many things we want to make.

Om: I’m excited to see what you make of it. Before you go, what are the best products on the market for a fellow coffee nerd? Also, what beans do you like?

Doug: I’ve always been particular to the Olympia Cremina espresso machine. Very old, very untouched, made in the hills in Switzerland. I’ve visited the factory. I own three vintage ones and one new one. It’s a simple and elegant design, and something that I respect.

From a bean perspective, I’m partial to one of my local roasters here in Japan called Honey Coffee. It’s a mom‑and‑pop place. Randomly, they happen to live less than a kilometer away from me. Their son was the World Barista Champion two years ago. That family has coffee running deeply in their veins, and we’ve used them as a sounding board for a lot of our concepts early on.

When it comes to the beans, I’ve had everything around the world. I’ve traveled to Copenhagen for coffee collecting, which I absolutely love, and all the stuff around San Francisco. I have an apartment around the corner from Four Barrel, so I’m partial to them. I love Blue Bottle. There’s a long list of good coffees.

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Ragnar Axelsson

Om Malik: How did you get into photography?

Ragnar Axelsson: My father was an amateur photographer. The magic of the pictures, that was kind of, wow, this is something I like. I started taking pictures when I lived on a farm as a kid, at 10 years old. The documentary became a common thing for me because I always felt like an old soul. I felt like that right away: I have to document it. Later on, I came to the newspaper as a photojournalist. That was the greatest job in the world. It was so much fun: traveling and seeing life on our planet. The camera became a part of me.

OM: You’ve been photographing the Arctic for a long time and have seen the climate change firsthand. What changes have you seen, especially recently?

RA: I went there over a span of 25 years before The Last Days of the Arctic book came out. Now it’s been more than 30 [years] and I’m doing the whole Arctic again. We have to support scientists by showing in pictures what they are saying.

First when I started photographing the Arctic, in Greenland, I read all the Arctic heroes, the explorers, and I wanted to go and see that kind of life and the Inuit. When I first came, I wasn’t thinking about climate change or anything. I was going to get pictures that I would like.

Through the years, I realized what was happening. The ice was getting thinner. It’s hard to show it sometimes in photographs, because you just see the surface. I managed to do that. You see it in the book here: There is a picture with 20 years in between, the same place. The fjord was frozen 20 years ago. Now it’s open water, and there’s only one hunter left in that village. There used to be 20.

When I look into my grandchildren’s eyes, when the question comes from them, “Grandfather, why didn’t your generation do anything?” I want to say, “Well, I tried. I tried by showing it in my photographs, because that’s my voice.”

OM: Human beings tend to destroy more than create. What about in Iceland? You have a million and a half people showing up every year, and that’s got to have an environmental impact. Can you see it with your naked eye?

RA: I can, because I’ve been going over and over again to certain places with hunters. I asked my friend a few years ago, “If you had one wish, what would it be?” At the time, we were on the ice, and it was very thin. He said, “Could you give me 25 years back in time, when the ice was safe?”

The ice is their hunting ground. It’s so hard for them. There are fewer and fewer people living as hunters. They will always go out and hunt seals, but that’s not the same as living there.

OM: What would they do now, if they were not doing that?

RA: That’s a problem. Some are not doing anything. Some are on welfare. Some get jobs in shops. It’s changing from being, if I may say so, one of the greatest hunters on the planet, because it’s a hard life, into being something…

OM: Passive consumers?

RA: Totally different from their original life. I understand the young generation, they don’t want to be hunters. They see James Bond on films, American films about different lives.

A lot of educated, talented people are changing this country, like Greenland, slowly into something they want to see, because they don’t want to live in a tent on the ice, hunting seals or narwhals or polar bears. The villages that I’ve been into, where there used to be 10, 12, 14 hunters, now these villages are closed down. When you see the houses, it’s like they left their knives and spoons on the table, and they left.

OM: I’m interested in knowing more about your photographer life and your camera. How did you arrive at your style?

RA: I don’t know whether I had a style or not. It happened. It’s like something in your head, from the heart, that you want to do it this way and not the other way.

I was so fond of Eugene Smith and Mary Ellen Mark as one of the greatest documentary photographers ever. She was a friend of mine. Eugene Smith was so great. I bought his book, and I was looking through his work. I wanted to see his real prints, so I flew to New York in the afternoon, went into a gallery in the morning to see his prints, and back home the next afternoon. My wife thought I was in the highlands. [laughs]

I wanted to see how he printed. [When I got home], I went straight into the darkroom and started to print and use the same technique as he does. It’s a big part of how I think in black and white today, actually. He was probably one of the greatest photographers ever and a great printer, a great inspiration.

I even was reading books by painters. I was looking at Caravaggio and the light in his paintings.

It takes 10,000 hours to be good in printing. You have to print and print and print, but you’re taking it in. It’s strange when you say this because when I take a photograph, it takes me a long time sometimes to accept it as a good one that I like or I don’t like. Sometimes you kill your darlings.

OM: You just have to work harder, though. I definitely know. Any other subjects you like to shoot, apart from the Arctic and people here?

RA: I’ve been all over the world. That’s the reason also why I started doing the Arctic as a photographer because I once wanted to go to Africa. There were problems, so I wanted to photograph them. Every photographer in the world was there taking the same pictures, so I thought, “I have to go the other direction.” That’s why I wanted to go to the Arctic, and there was nobody there. [laughs]

Then I realized what was happening. I passed an old man every morning when I was in a small town in Greenland. He was always looking up, talking to me, and I didn’t understand what he was saying. I asked the teacher in the school, “Can you translate?”

He said, “Well, there is something wrong. This shouldn’t be like this. The big ice is sick.” That was the moment, probably six years after I started, that I realized something was changing. They sensed it before everybody else. Then I realized, “Oh, I have to continue.”

Sometimes it takes 10 years, 15 years, to show the same spot and the difference, what’s really going on, like the ice. In this book, we couldn’t put more, but I thought maybe in a bigger book, in the next one.

OM: What is this book, Faces of the North, about?

RA: This is about Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. That was actually my first book. This is like two books in one because we added the old one, and then we added new pictures related to the older ones. The stories that I wrote, in the beginning, weren’t in the first one. I tell the story about everything, about the pictures.

OM: The thing I’ve always wanted to know from somebody like you, who started in film and printing, is, what do you make of the current disposability of photography, like with Instagram and Snapchat?

RA: [laughs] There are more photographs taken today, because of the phone and all that, than in the past 100 years, I think. My friends, they were crying, “It’s over.” I was saying, “No, it’s not over. You have to run faster. We have to be focused on what we’re doing. They must believe in what you’re doing.”

All my projects, I’ve done it myself. There’s no grant or anything here. There’s no support at all. I’ve been doing it all by myself, because I believe what I’m doing will one day matter — maybe.

I was in Siberia 20 years ago, and then I went back this winter, twice. I went on a reindeer sled, and they told me that the tundra has big holes in it, 80 meters deep. It’s like a big blast by a meteor or something. There was an old man living in a forest, in a cabin with his wife. I had a translator, and I asked him if he had seen any changes. He told me that his land used to all be flat. The tundra was all flat, the permafrost. Now it has holes everywhere.

The lakes are ice‑free two weeks earlier [in the spring] and later in the autumn. It’s freezing much later. It’s much warmer in the winter and lots of difference between days. It can be ‑20, ‑40, ‑50, ‑5 over the course of a few days. He said it used to be ‑35, ‑40, ‑50 all the time.

OM: Has it changed you in any way?

RA: It made me a little bit more aware. If we can do something, everybody should, because this is our only home.

I grew up underneath the glaciers, so I’ve seen it. I was measuring the Glacial River when I was 12, 14, 16 years old. I was riding on a horse. I had to pass the Glacial River on a horse just to measure the depth of it and how it was changing. I’ve seen them retreating. If you could flip the switch off today, you can’t stop the melting of those glaciers here. They will disappear in 150, 200 years. There’s no way of stopping it.

In the future, what will happen to those people? It’s something that’s not fair to ignore.

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Mark Cho

Om Malik: Tell me me a little bit about yourself: Where are you from and what do you do; what excites you; and what are a few of your favorite things that bring happiness to you? Does where you live influence what you like and what you care about?

Mark Cho: My name is Mark; I am Chinese and was born and raised in London. I work in menswear and own two brands, The Armoury and Drake’s. I love my work, which includes sourcing and developing great products and taking care of amazing customers, craftsmen and colleagues. I split my time between Hong Kong, London and New York as I have shops in all three cities. The frequent changes in scenery are welcome for me. I feel my thinking shifts a little bit in each city, London being a bit calmer and more contemplative, i.e. useful for planning and writing; New York being quite socially focused, i.e. building connections and relationships; and Hong Kong, being where my family lives, is my “roost” and gives me a feeling of relief.

OM: Tell me the last time you read a book and enjoyed the book. How did you find out about it and what was your process to read it? What do you do that makes book reading a unique experience? Do you have a schedule, a favorite spot or favorite place? Tell me more about the ritual of reading a book.

MC: I almost always read on the plane; I never really have any other time to do so. The last book I really enjoyed was The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis. I think I saw a review for it in the back of The Economist. I read it over the course of a few plane trips. I usually fly Cathay Pacific, which does not have onboard wifi, so the long haul from Hong Kong to New York is one of my most unreachable and peaceful periods, good for focusing on what’s on the page. If the book was enjoyable, I love to talk about it. It’s like eating, you have to chew the food to get a better sense of the taste. In the same way, talking about what I read is a necessary additional layer of enjoyment for me. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, so I like to think and talk about real situations and practical applications of what I read.

OM: When you are waiting for a friend at a coffee shop or are in between meetings, what do you read? How do you find it and how do you read it?

MC: In between meetings I read whatever’s new on The New York Times. I used to look at Instagram more but I prefer something a little more wordy.

OM: What are your two to three favorite blogs and why?

MC: Hodinkee, because I love watches. Engadget/Gizmodo, because new gadgets are always super interesting. DPreview, because I love cameras and they are truly the gold standard of camera reviews.

OM: Tell me about the three publications — magazines or newspaper you can’t live without — from a personal and a professional perspective.

MC: The New York Times, I generally like its reporting and some of its opinion pieces. The Economist, I grew up reading it during high school as part of economics class and it just stuck with me. I actually look at their book reviews carefully because they often have interesting nonfiction in there. Also, I find their special report sections are thorough and well researched. World of Interiors, because I love what they do. They never feature flashy or cookie-cutter type homes; they’re always places that have a lot of unique character. You get a sense of how much love went into putting those environments together. I think a lot about store design and I always try to design The Armoury’s stores with a warm, personal, homely feeling in mind.

OM: What are the top accounts you follow on social media that make you better informed and smarter about your work?

MC: Social media is fun for seeing what my friends are up to, but I can’t say any of them are particularly work related. There are some great furniture dealers on there, like @danskmobelkunst, and some awesome photographers like, of course, @om and @a_gaut.

OM: Who are you favorite writers and why?

MC: I can’t say I’m well read enough to have much of an opinion. A lot of my reading is directed more by interest in an area than by a writer necessarily. That been said, I do love Haruki Murakami and I also have a lot of (newfound) respect for Michael Lewis.

OM: What are you favorite reading apps? Tell me more about how you use them and when you use them.

MC: I use the Kindle app fairly often but I find myself usually buying both a paperback copy and the digital version of whatever I’m reading. I much prefer reading on paper but reading on your phone can be quite convenient.

OM: How do you find news and information? Tell us about your process — from finding, to reading, to sharing.

MC: I seem to have an interesting group of friends on Facebook; the things they share are quite varied and worthy of attention. I recently had a conversation with a younger colleague and was quite surprised to hear that she did not get anything out of her Facebook feed. For me, it is probably the best source of eclectic information, but I suppose it is completely reliant on who your Facebook friends are. I generally don’t friend anyone who I don’t know reasonably well and want to keep up with. I really dislike it when people who have just met me try to be my friend on Facebook. I purposely chose a ridiculous profile picture to try and put people off my scent. For finding information, Google is obviously a great help, but actually just reaching out to trustworthy and personally-known sources is the best.

I like the idea that sharing knowledge allows for it to be built upon.

OM: Why do you share? What do you share and who do you share information with?

MC: I think there are a lot of reasons. Sometimes it’s a nice ego boost; I’d be lying if I said my vanity was not a factor. Sometimes I want people to know about something that I’m interested in because I really think it’s worth paying attention to. Sometimes I try to share my own experiences with technology, books, restaurants, etcetera. I like the idea that sharing knowledge allows for it to be built upon. Maybe a little software bug that I found a workaround for could be the first steps to a longer-term solution. Being in fashion, I also share a lot of selfies. I think I die a little bit inside every time I make one, but looking back on them, I like having a record of what I wore, and they are of interest to some of my followers.

OM: What is your top tip for better media and news consumption you have for my readers?

MC: Read less and read better. Every time I find myself zoning out on Google News, going down a rabbit hole of content junk food, I later shake my head and feel like I wasted my time. Real, long-form writing is just so much more rewarding to absorb.

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Abe Burmeister

Om Malik: Tell us about the company and the brand for people who may not have heard about Outlier.

Abe Burmeister: What we do at Outlier is try and build the future of clothing, really. We’re an online-only company. We’ve been doing it for nine years now. Outlier was a very accidental project. I just couldn’t find clothes that met the quality standard and the performance standard that I personally thought should exist. I thought I could just go buy ’em, but I couldn’t. I had this moment about 10 years ago where I was like, if I can’t buy these clothes, if I can’t find these things, I have to learn how to make ’em.

I rolled into the Garment District in New York, which is a like an ancient technology center — you know, the Silicon Valley of the 1900s or really late 1800s, when the sewing machine was invented. Ninety percent of the clothes in America used to come out of the Garment District, and so very few of them do now. It’s much smaller than it used to be, but there’s still a lot of life there. It’s a couple blocks from Times Square, so you’re talking about the heart of the city.

I started asking questions and eventually I developed a pair of pants that I thought were just better [than what else was available]. And because I knew a lot more about making websites than about making clothes, I thought, what happens if I put these things online? Will people buy ’em? You know, like maybe that’ll work, and somehow it did. People started buying ’em.

With any business story, no matter what anyone tells you, there’s massive amounts of hard work, brutal hard work, but there’s always some crazy luck, too.

It’s not somehow. They were genuinely better than what was on the market. They were different. I was really focused on bike commuting at the time. I was trying to get healthier. It was lots of fun riding around the city, but if you ride a bike, there are a lot of obstacles you encounter. You sweat; you might get rained on; your clothes fall apart. I was going through a pair of jeans every couple months. I built something that was genuinely a better product for what I needed at the time and it resonated with people. So that’s Outlier.

I also got really lucky, of course. With any business story, no matter what anyone tells you, there’s massive amounts of hard work, brutal hard work, but there’s always some crazy luck, too. I met my business partner Tyler because I was carrying fabric around and my coffee shop [barista] was like, “What are you doing?” I said I was making pants. She said, “That guy over there’s making shirts.” That was 2008, and we’ve just been [rolling with it] ever since.

Om: So both of you were making similar products, which was essentially pants and shirts for people who wanted to ride bikes to work and not look like slobs and also not wear track pants?

Abe: Yeah, exactly. I was a graphic designer and I had some clients where I could wear whatever, and I had some clients where I had to dress up and look really sharp, and Tyler had the same thing. He lived in Brooklyn and worked right across the bridge. It was only like a 15-minute bike ride to work, but the bridge is just high enough that you always break out into a sweat. So he would need to bring a change of clothes every day just for a 15-minute bike ride. He thought, this is really silly. I should be able to find a shirt that can handle a 15-minute bike ride without getting soaked and still look sharp. So he was working on that when we met.

When we sat down, we realized we were working with very similar technologies. It was kind of crazy. We met in, I think it was March, and by June we had filed incorporation papers. We were like, wow, we’re doing exactly the same thing. Let’s do this. Let’s make it happen.

Om: Now when you talk about doing all of this, there’s no family history of making clothes or anything like that on your side of things, right?

Abe: No. I have one uncle or distant uncle who apparently had a factory at some point, but we never talked about clothes. But other than that, there was nothing. It wasn’t like, here’s a family factory that I can walk into, or a textile mill. It was a surprise to me. It was a surprise to everybody.

Om: Wow. So you were in the web design business, but you are from New York, right? You’re a native New Yorker.

Abe: Yeah, born and raised. Born and raised in Manhattan.

Om: But you live in Brooklyn now?

Abe: Yeah, I did the switch to Brooklyn. I miss Manhattan sometimes. It’s crazy now because I live and work within a 10 minute’s walk. So basically, a), I don’t ride bikes that much anymore because I don’t need to, and b), I spend a lot of time in Brooklyn and not very much time in Manhattan anymore.

Om: Cool.

Abe: But I still love Manhattan. It’s my home. It’s where I came from.

Om: Yeah, and you’ve been making these clothes for a while — you said almost 10 years now. What has changed in those 10 years, both from the perspective of your company and also from how the world perceives the clothes you guys make?

Outlier’s Formative Days: Then vs Now

Abe: Wow. I mean, at the beginning we were so bootstrapped. We started with $15,000 combined in capital that we had saved up and we’ve never raised money. Tyler and I own the whole thing, so there’s been a lot of growth from that initial $15,000 to where we are now. We’re at about 17 employees now. I don’t want to get too much into the numbers, but that’s all organic, bootstrapped growth basically. That’s a lot of change — a lot of turning around and being like, wow, wait… what happened?

But the industry’s changed a lot, too. It’s something that as a human, as a person, I’m super happy about. Some of the ideas that we had about clothing have been validated, not just by people buying our stuff but by other companies, very large companies, copying what we do in different ways. Some of them more blatant than others, but there’s definitely a sense of validation of the concept — without question. As a business person, it’s a little less fun, just because there’s more competition. We were in a very blue sky space for a while where nobody else did what we did.

It’s been a wild, wild time. We’re at this point now where billion-dollar corporations are basically releasing copies of Outlier clothes. You know, they put their own spin on it — especially when they’re that big and have legal departments and all that — but it’s been really interesting. When we started, there was very little technology in menswear in daily clothes. You know, the stuff that you could buy back then was very similar to what you could have bought 20, 30, 50 years ago, in terms of what it could do, right? The fabrics were the same.

Whereas, we take a lot from the outdoor industries — you know, a little bit from the military, or the equestrian industry. We are always looking for different angles into work wear — different places where people are thinking about how the clothing actually functions and how to make it better. Today, if you walk into, say, Banana Republic, or you go and buy a pair of Dockers or something, they’re going to have offerings that incorporate a lot of the things that we were doing seven, eight years ago. You know, making a pair of chino pants that has incredible freedom of movement, or making pants that dry quickly and resist stains.

There are ways to treat fabric that makes ’em a lot more resistant to stains, resistant to dirt, or water basically rolls off. That’s kind of transformative. You put that treatment on a shirt, and now, if you spill coffee on it, you can just kind of flick it off, right?

Om: Which is the great part about your journey — you’re seeing all of this become mainstream. And you’ve done it all in just nine years. You’ve become a big company compared to where you were when you started. What did you guys do to make it happen? I mean, a lot of people talk about bootstrapping their businesses. You guys have actually done it.

Abe: First off, we actually feel a lot smaller now than we did when we were tiny, when it was just the two of us and $15,000. You don’t have any sense of scale at that sort of level of naivety, which is actually kind of helpful for starting a company. Now we feel really small because we’re very aware that we’re surrounded by giants. But beyond that, yeah, I mean it’s a hard road. It’s a lot of 80-hour work weeks like you don’t stop. Every winter, because of the seasonal fluctuations, cash flow and stuff, we always go through these sort of traumatic periods, where we’re like, can we squeeze through? We know that the sales will come in the spring, or they should, but you’re in the middle of winter and nobody’s buying anything.

Still, you’ve got to buy everything for the next season, so it’s a lot of scraping by. Risk tolerance is really there. Without having a lot of capital, you don’t have that much of a buffer, right? But on the flip side, you can fix mistakes quicker, I think. It’s really easy to gloss things over with dollars.. When people get a big influx of capital, they start spending money. If they’re disciplined business people, then they spend it right, but it’s really hard not to get a windfall like that and not spend some of it on some dumb stuff. So [when you don’t have that sort of capital], you learn how to operate a profitable business — and that’s hard.

The Reality of Capital Investments in Apparel & Retail

Om: So when you look at all these companies raising tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, and trying to grow their businesses — Bonobos, for example, famously raised a shit ton of money and there have been a lot of others — do you look at them and just say, wow, that’s just an incredible amount of money. And then look for what they’re doing wrong, compared to what you guys are doing?

Abe: I wouldn’t say they’re doing anything wrong. So it’s funny because, from a tech valuation standpoint, Bonobos didn’t sell for a huge amount of money. I think their investors walked away slightly profitable, but from an apparel standpoint, they actually sold for a very nice multiple. They sold for about a 2x multiple, which is a very good valuation for an apparel company. The back-of-the-envelope valuation for an apparel company is 1x revenue. So actually, Bonobos did really well for themselves from that standpoint. I’m not going to say anything bad about them except that it was never my goal to sell my company to Walmart.

I don’t foresee that changing at any point in the future. But the interesting thing with watching these companies raise a lot of money is we’ve never actually known what we would do with that kind of money. Obviously, you can spend it on a lot of things: You can hire people; you can buy tons of advertising, buy machines; there’s a lot that you can do. But we never saw something so special that we were like, oh, we need millions of dollars to do x now, right? A little extra money always helps, but it was never like, wow, we need this.

I think about Apple, how they raised venture capital money very early on, but they had a very specific reason. Steve Jobs was like, “I need an injection molded case for a computer.” It’s really funny actually when you think about it. You know, computers came in metal cases back then that you could just whip up in a small machine shop, and he was like, “No, it needs to be an appliance. It needs to fit in the home.” It was a reference, right, and so they needed to cover the injection molding costs and that’s why they went and raised capital.

We never hit that point. We’re happy with the organic growth we have and the level of control we have.

We are always looking for different angles into work wear — different places where people are thinking about how the clothing actually functions and how to make it better

Om: Right. But when you look at venture-backed fashion startups and when there is this much money, what do you think they do right and what do you think they do wrong?

Abe: Okay, I can tell you very explicitly, there’s a lot of failure in the e-commerce space and venture capital. I think the first thing I would say is that if you’re on the VC side and you’re looking to invest in one of these companies, or you’re running one of these companies and are looking for investors, you cannot put venture capital into inventory. There are no exponential returns on inventory. Once it’s in inventory, it’s this physical thing, it’s sitting there. You’re never going to get venture returns from a physical product that you just bought with somebody’s money who’s looking for a 10x, 100x return, so you need to put the money towards something that can generate the kind of return that a VC needs, right?

Technology is obviously part of it; if you have a new way to get to market, a new way to make things, I think that kind of investment makes a lot of sense, from a venture capitalist’s standpoint. But the other thing is that there’s other money out there. Even some of these big ones, like Bonobos, yeah they raised some VC money, but they also raised money from investors that were looking for different types of returns. An apparel investor is never going to look for a 100x, 1,000x return, they are going to want 5x or 10x, in five years or something. Even doubling that is a pretty solid outcome for some of them.

The Rise of Technical Apparel

Om: Gotcha. Now, you’ve been in the business of what I would call technical clothing, and the world around it has changed. Suddenly, whenever I’m walking around Manhattan, I see that technical clothing is now part of people’s wardrobe, like the usual, or what I call the classic clothing. What happened? Why did these things become part of our daily consumption so quickly and so pervasively?

Abe: I think on one level it’s just generally better, and there was this lull in the industry because nobody was doing it. Menswear was so conservative. The difference between what was possible and what was available was quite large, so once you open that crack up, it’s very easy to be like, oh wow, this is actually a better shirt. This is a better pair of pants. And once you experience something like a four-way stretch in a pant, or you realize that your jeans don’t need to wear out that quickly, or that your clothes don’t need to get that dirty, you don’t really go back.

At first, we started trying to build apparel for bike commuting, but we weren’t really hardcore cyclists, so we were never really a bike brand. We were kind of uncomfortable with that, but what we loved was all this fabric that was out there. We realized that there was this technology that was just kind of sitting there unutilized, unused, and we built a use case for it. Some other people were involved as well, and once it was out there, it was kind of obvious.

It’s classic technology in that sense, where if you create something that genuinely performs better than what was there before, people are going to accept it. And once they accept it, why would they go back?

Om: So what other things are you seeing now as you look forward into the future? What should we be paying attention to as consumers and enthusiasts of technical clothing?

Abe: The thing that we’re super excited about — we pushed pretty hard this year and we’re really excited — is something called warp knit weft insertion fabric. It gets a little bit technical, but essentially, the core distinction in all fabric is that a fabric is either a knit or a woven. It’s radically different, the ways that they’re made, and they behave differently, too. It’s the difference between a t-shirt and a button-up — a t-shirt is knit, a button-up is woven, and they behave very differently because of the differences in how the fabric was made. With this warp knit weft insertion, you have technology that brings both worlds together. It’s technically a knit fabric, but it behaves a lot like a woven fabric.

We’re really excited about it and what’s amazing is that it makes dramatically more breathable clothing that’s still opaque. You could make very breathable knit apparel the old way, but it’s kind of sheer and transparent — like a super lightweight sheer top that might end up in a womenswear piece that’s layered or just as something you could see right through. We’re able to make opaque pants that are meant to be worn in the kind of weather where you’d normally wear shorts — they’re so open to the air but closed to the eye. It’s pretty remarkable material. As best I can tell, we’re the only people in the apparel side of the business using this material at all, so we’re first to market. The market’s huge, so maybe there’s somebody else who can make this claim too, but it’s something we’re really excited about. We’re calling it injected linen, and it’s pretty amazing.

The technology [behind this material] is crazy — we just saw demonstrations using the same technology to make carbon fiber concrete, which is a whole other universe. With this weft insertion technology, they’re able to make carbon concrete that’s about 80% thinner and has the same strength, so it’s a really radical change in construction materials that may or may not take off. We’ll see, but that’s super exciting.

It’s pretty much inevitable at this point that China’s going to become one of the world’s main innovators within a very short time period.

Om: That’s pretty cool. Where is this innovation coming from? Is it coming from the US? Is it people in China trying to invent new things? Is it coming from Europe? I’ve always been fascinated by all this innovation in fabrics, technical fabrics and such, and I have literally no idea where it’s all coming from.

Abe: It’s global. It’s superglobal. This warp knit weft insertion technology I’m talking about, the company that makes the machines is German, but the company that we work with that developed an apparel-grade fabric is based in Japan. So you’re having innovation just flying around the world, essentially. The Germans are super at it, the Italians are super at it, America has pushed super hard in certain things. America’s really good with cotton because there’s a huge cotton industry, so cotton gets a lot of attention in America. Did you know America’s the second largest fabric maker in the world? Nobody knows it, because the fabrics being produced here don’t really go into apparel. They are the kind of fabrics that cover farms and make mile-long conveyor belts, things like that or for the military.

Japan is super innovative and there are interesting developments happening in China, too. Traditionally, China has been focused on production, on the cheaper side, but that’s changing very, very rapidly. We’ve seen some really innovative stuff coming out of certain Chinese-European partnerships, where it might be a European scientist paired with a Chinese production facility, and the funding is coming from who knows where probably from both parts of the world. It’s pretty much inevitable at this point that China’s going to become one of the world’s main innovators within a very short time period.

Fabrics of The Future

Om: There’s one material I’ve been extremely fascinated by, the stuff you use for your bags and your backpacks. Tell me more about that.

Abe: So Dyneema is the world’s strongest fiber, and it’s super light, too. It’s used to tie up Panamax cargo ships, the biggest boats in the world. It’s 15 times stronger than steel and it floats on the water, so if you want to tie a boat up and anchor it, you use Dyneema.

What we use is actually a Dyneema composite, so it’s Dyneema combined with a few other materials. It was developed in the ’90s to win the America’s Cup [sailing race]. They wanted to make the best sails that they could; there’s a lot of technology that goes into winning America’s Cup. This fabric came out of it. They built a better sail that was, lighter, stronger, stiffer. The company that made it stayed in the sailing world for almost two decades and eventually sold the rights to make sails out of it to a big sail company, but kept the rights to make the material for any other use. They had realized that it could be used to make bags when we stumbled upon them. I guess it was seven or eight years ago when they were starting this process.

Nobody was using it except for these really, really niche hiking companies focusing on ultra-light gear. It’s a super intriguing material. It’s incredibly light and it’s quite strong. Because it’s so light, it’s comparable to most typical bag fabrics in durability. It’s not necessarily more durable. If you use lots of Dyneema you can make an indestructible bag. It’s very stable and it takes on character, so we were really fascinated by it. It took us a long time to be able to work with it because it requires a lot of construction. It’s not like you need to build a whole new process for making it, but every time you cut it, when you sew it, when you want to tape it — you know, when you want to seal the seams — every little process behaves differently. So it took finding the right partner and really learning the ins and outs of this material to get it there, but it’s fascinating. It makes these really light and stable bags that kind of pack up into nothing and feel like nothing when they’re empty, and then you fill them and they actually carry quite well.

Om: Man, I’m obsessed with those things. I know you guys make them. I have a friend, Jan Chipchase, he’s nuts about these bags, so I have one of his company’s duffel bags. I carry it around whenever I travel into the cold places I go. What fascinates me about the material is its lack of weight, adaptability and the strength. I think manmade materials are coming into their own. I’m pretty sure there are more out there that will have an influence.

Abe: Oh, definitely. One of the things that we’re really fascinated about is when natural and the manmade materials come together, and we’re actually doing a denim experiment this spring. We’re calling it “end of the world denim.” We’re using Dyneema fibers and also cotton, so we’re trying to get the best of both worlds. It’s really interesting because the early uses of synthetics — the basic polyesters and nylons that you’re familiar with — are not very sophisticated. When you look at them under a microscope, you’re talking about very simple fiber constructions, whereas cotton is a plant. Things have evolved; there is much more going on.

We’re at this point with synthetics where people are starting to use them in much more sophisticated ways rather than just the straightforward, we’re gonna take this nylon, this plastic, this polyamide, and just stretch it out until it’s a yarn. That’s your basic nylon, and it’s strong, but it’s not exciting beyond that. But when you start working with it and treating it and trying to figure out what happens when you shoot hot air at it in a rhythmic pattern, what happens when you chop it up into little pieces and then twist it back together, you end up with much more sophisticated materials. They wear nicer, they feel nicer. It’s a fascinating world.

We’re also looking at a lot of blends of nylon and wool, where the nylon is chopped up into little pieces and twisted together with the wool, and you end up creating something that amplifies the good characteristics of wool but is a lot stronger.

Om: Do you feel that because of climate change and all of the other things happening around us that we might actually have to go in the direction of technical clothing, as cotton and other fabrics become more difficult to grow and water is increasingly a precious commodity?

Abe: Wow. That’s a tough one. I mean, traditional cotton and even organic cotton tends to need more water, and cotton also grows where food crops are grown, so cotton’s a really tough one when you look at it from an environmental perspective. Something like wool is sort of the opposite. You might look at wool and think, wow, the wool production uses so much land, it’s really intensive, but it’s land that almost nothing else can use. Sheep will graze on the side of a mountain. You can’t really turn that into cropland or harvest anything from it. So you’ve actually got a very efficient transformation of the sun’s energy into this beautiful fabric, just by sheep hanging out on the side of a mountain, eating some grass and living their lives.

But, yeah, cotton could hit a crisis one day, there’s no question about it. It’s grown in the same sort of soil that you can grow food. It uses a lot of water, and when you take the chemicals away, the water use tends to increase. There are people working on rain-fed cotton, so in theory, you could set up an entire cotton system that doesn’t require any irrigation, but where you can do that is limited, and how far they can take it, and how much they can scale, is in question.

Om: I definitely think about all of these things. I think that culturally we need to shift away from mass consumption towards buying fewer things, but things that last longer. I don’t think our planet can keep supporting this kind of excessive consumption. Fast fashion may be interesting and nice, but in the end, the cost of fast fashion is being borne by the planet. We may pay less, but it’s still coming out of our pockets, we just don’t know it yet. If I could basically put my entire wardrobe in a duffel bag, and look good and be elegant and still be comfortable, to me that is the ideal. That would be my utopia. So back to your process. All of these new fabrics and materials, how do you find out about them? Do you go study them, or do people come to you? Have you invented some of your own hybrid materials?

Abe: We’re developing quite a few materials now, which is amazing. That’s a new thing in the last few years. But yeah, we also hunt, which is fun. I’m actually flying to Paris tomorrow to go to a European fabric show, called Premiere Vision, which is actually more for the high fashion side of the business. So when we go to a show like this one, we’re looking for things that might have a technical edge. We’re also going into the outdoor industry and looking through their supply chains, looking for the stuff those vendors might make that already looks and feels the way it needs to be to operate in an urban context. And then we go deep into places where it’s much more technical, and people are making really industrial fabrics.

Once we stumbled upon a fabric that was really fascinating. When we asked the rep what it was used for, he was like, “Well, yeah. They use it to make suits for cleaning out the inside of nuclear power plants.” Crazy, right? We didn’t actually end up using it, but it was fascinating. It’s these edge cases where the needs get really powerful, so you go to these shows to discover very specific and fascinating fabrics. We look in history books too — we’re not just purely about the newest thing. We actually use some of the world’s oldest fibers too, and sometimes, in the right use case, they’re actually better.

For example, there’s something called ramie, which is possibly the world’s oldest fiber. It’s very similar to linen, but it comes through Southeast Asia and it’s amazing in the humidity. It sucks the moisture away from your body and you’re completely dry and comfortable, even though the air around you is really super humid. There’s no advanced technology here at all.

In Good Company

Om: Tell me more about what brands you think are doing interesting work and why we should be keeping an eye on them. I mean, of course, Outlier is at the forefront of a lot of these things, but who’s making great t-shirts? Who’s making other great clothing? I’m talking about independent brands, not the big giants.

Abe: I mean, we don’t discriminate in that kind of way. There are people that do really interesting stuff and there are people that don’t. There are some obvious companies that we get compared with — you probably know Arc’teryx in the outdoor space. They’re master craftsmen and they still own one of their factories. They use a lot of other factories too, but now they have their own factory and they have a level of expertise where they can do things with certain fabrics that nobody else can do. Stone Island is another one that we look at a lot. It’s an Italian outdoor company that’s built very involved processes to work with technical materials, but also has a lot of interesting visual techniques. They do all of their own dyeing and really push the technical aesthetic level in fascinating ways.

There’s also stuff in the womenswear space that I think is actually more impressive technically, something like Spanx, you know? That’s patented like crazy, right? That’s technical advancement right there. Victoria’s Secret actually does like lots and lots of technical development. Nobody ever knows it. And then there’s a couture designer I love, Iris van Herpen, who does just stunning work. It’s art, right. It’s couture, it’s fashion, it’s amazing work with new technologies, working with scientists at MIT to develop ways to 3D print garments in wild computer-generated patterns, and working with new materials and new techniques. In terms of basics, you know best cotton tee. I’m a big fan of Dave’s Army Navy in New York City. That’s the first place I’d go.

Om: Yeah, man, those places are vanishing fast these days. Kind of sucks.

Abe: But there are still brands like Carhartt. We have huge amounts of respect for those companies that are in the space where performance still matters but price matters a lot, too, and they’re able to generate really high-value clothing that’s durable and works, right? It does what you need it to do and it’s not going to break.

Parting Words of Advice

Om: Before we go, I have to ask you, what’s your advice to other people who are, let’s say, thinking about starting a company, like a clothing company, or are trying to grow as the bootstrap business? What are the things they should be doing or paying attention to?

Abe: The first thing you have to know is why you want to be bootstrapped. I’m very happy that we’ve taken that path, and the reason we did it, really, is control. We thought that part of the reason other people weren’t doing it, and why some of those materials were available, is because they were getting too much pressure from their investors. We made a very conscious choice that we were going to try not to get capital and keep that level of control. On the flip side, if your company needs capital, it needs capital. You can’t be too stubborn about these things.

But if you want to [start a business], and you’re bootstrapped, you’ve got to be profitable. There has to be more money coming in at the end that is going out because it’s going to go right back out. It won’t feel like you’re profitable because it’s all going back into inventory and salary and different places, but you’ve got to make sure that there’s enough money in the bank. Everything you make has to sell, essentially. You don’t want to sit on inventory. Inventory is death. That’s one of the hardest things about running a clothing company. You need enough inventory so people can buy stuff, but if you have too much, you’re basically going to go out of business, because all of your money’s sitting in a very illiquid asset. It’s trying to figure out how much you can do in a day while still getting enough sleep to stay alive.

Om: Well, I think you’ve done a great job of staying alive and making great clothes. I hope to speak to you again soon, and please keep doing what you are doing.

Abe: Thanks, I appreciate it.

Credits: Photos (from top to bottom) 1, 3, 7 by Emiliano Granado. 5 by Naveen Selvadurai. Others courtesy of Outlier NYC

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