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

Matt MacInnis

Om Malik: How would you describe yourself and what your company does?

Matt MacInnis: I think the word “book” is the tricky word. We are a publishing platform, and sometimes the thing that people create with Inkling Habitat and Inkling is a book, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s much more flexible in new categories like learning platforms, where people take assessment and get re-mediated using Inkling content. I don’t think we call that a book, but I don’t know what we do call it. That’s the problem of the people who are creating those things using our technology.

OM: We always look at the formats of the past and try to apply them to new mediums. For example, we put the old radio show format on television and taught that it was —

MM: That was TV.

OM: So are we seeing something like that in the idea of what the book is?

MM: I think we are seeing that, for good reasons and bad reasons. One of the good reasons that we’re seeing books mimicked on digital devices is that the world’s most valuable content today lives in books. You don’t start from scratch and have the world’s knowledge recreated from the ground up overnight. You have to start from somewhere, and so you start with books. That’s a good reason for there to be this middle ground, this transition period.

Then there are bad reasons like a lack of imagination. With publishers, the most difficult thing that we deal with is that they are so trained to work within the constraints of that old medium. They’re so used to the page, so used to not having the ability to reorder things or use media beyond text and images. Those are bad reasons that a book is mimicked on these digital devices.

But this is a transitionary period. It’s remarkable that the iPad has only been here for about 3 years. I think this is a 10-year transition.

OM: So when you think about books, how do you think about them?

MM: I think about the book as a hardware device, just like I think about the iPad as a hardware device. It’s a much more mature technology than what we’re working with in the digital era. It’s a hardware device that by itself is useless unless you put some software into it. And the software you put into a book is the content.

When we map this transition, we don’t think about the book as mapping to e-books. We think about the book as coming unbound and being put into all these different use cases.

What do you use a book for today? You use a book to read a novel to entertain yourself. You use a book to learn how to be a better gardener. If you’re having your first kid and you want to learn how to swaddle a newborn, you go to a book. If you’re a physician and you want to look up some information on how to diagnose a patient, you use a book as reference content. You can go down a long list that even includes things like pornography. That’s what lived in books for the longest time.

Now all those different use cases — entertaining yourself, educating yourself, giving yourself a reference manual — are going to come apart and go into different kinds of products, some of which are going to be e-books. I think Kindle and the novel are e-books, and I think that format is going to stick around for a long time. I don’t think that the idea that you take a medical reference book and dump it into an e-book reader is — that’s not sustainable, for lots of different reasons.

[topic]Has Connectedness Changed Us as People?[/topic]

OM: I often think about how we as people have changed because of connectedness. I remember growing up in India and not having any network: no television, maybe some radio. As a result, I read a lot. I would beg, borrow, do whatever it took to read, whether it was magazines or books. That brought me different experiences. I learned about different places. It also stoked some kind of imagination. Today we don’t have that constraint in terms of access to information. Do you think this modifies the role of the book in society?

MM: There are a whole bunch of different axes that you can look at this through. One of them is — you think about growing up in India and not having access to a network, which is another way of saying not having as many connections to other people. Not as many channels to communicate with people.

Radio is fascinating. I love radio as a medium. It is instantaneous, but it’s unidirectional: Radio puts one person in front of a huge audience, and everything goes from that person or that CD player to a lot of people at once. The internet has given us bidirectional connectivity.

The telephone gave us what the radio gave us but in two directions and one-to-one. The telephone and radio are virtually latency-free, which means that the minute somebody says something, you hear it; literally at the speed of light, you hear it. Books are like radio in that they are unidirectional, but they’re unlike radio in that the latency is really long. You can write a book and then someone can read it a hundred years later and have exactly what you wrote in that book a hundred years prior. That’s the other thing about radio and books. Radio is ephemeral. You can record it, but typically the radio broadcast goes away the minute it’s broadcast. Whereas the book is permanent, and it’s a record that survives generations of people. All of these different media have all of these different characteristics in terms of latency and permanence.

LibraryofAlexandria — Library of Alexandria

It’s fascinating when you study those different axes to look at what this new medium gives us. It gives us that same degree of permanence, but now it gives us something we’ve never had before: mutability. When a book was published you couldn’t change it; if there were errors in that book, they were propagated indefinitely, and they were never changed.

Now you can actually update a book after it’s been published, which is pretty remarkable, because a book becomes a living document. The latency is now shortened to zero, if you want it to be. The minute you hit “publish,” everybody everywhere can see it. But it also has the characteristic of permanence, because someone a hundred years from now can, at least in theory, look at the stuff that you’ve created today. I know that’s abstract or maybe philosophical, but what we’ve got on our hands is in fact a new medium, because we’ve changed a bunch of these parameters around the kind of content that we’ve created.

That’s where these use cases differ, like, a doctor who wants to reference something versus somebody who wants to read a copy of Great Expectations. If you read Great Expectations, you do not want it changed; you want to read the classic. But there’s nothing useful about a medical reference text that’s out of date. You want the latest version, and so the demands that are placed on technology to accommodate those expectations are vastly different from — going back to my point about publishers — operating within the constraints of the printed book. Changing their mindset to adapt their work flows for these new capabilities is the big barrier facing forward motion in the new medium.

[topic]Book Experience & Publishing Industry[/topic]

OM: You said a lot of things there. The biggest barrier I feel is not from the publishers. It is from the creators, the imagination required to think about a non-book experience. What is the book experience? I look at things like Snapguide, which is essentially the how-to version of those reference points. Medical books can be completely reinvented, but we haven’t seen textbooks being reinvented per se. It’s still in a lot of the old way of thinking. So who pushes the envelope, the creators or the publishers? The publishers, it seems like, have less interest in changing the status quo, because they already have so much invested in the current way of doing things.

Library of Congress (Photo courtesy of LOC)

MM: I could talk for two hours about the textbook world, and I won’t. I would bore you. But I’ve had some interesting insights. I’ve gone super deep, and I spend time with individual contributors, editors and authors at textbook publishers. I spend time with the senior management, the executives, the CEOs. I even spend time with the private equity firms that now seem to own most of the textbook publishers. I don’t know — Apollo owns McGraw-Hill, and Providence owns Jones & Bartlett. You know there’s a big transition coming in an industry when the private-equity guys have gone through and bought all these companies. They’re expecting these big transformations and a little bit of blood and some sort of economic boom afterward.

The problem is not a lack of vision. If you go into any of these publishers and you talk to anybody in the executive ranks, everybody has a common vision for what replaces the textbook. It’s not an e-textbook. It’s idiotic to think we’re going to take a textbook, which is a static compendium of some knowledge framed a certain way, and dump it on a digital device. That’s a classic radio-on-television mistake. They don’t want to make that mistake.

The problem is not vision; the problem is execution. And there are so many different things in these organizations that get in the way of execution. When you run a mature business, the way that these guys have been running a mature business for the last 20 years, the finance guys get out in front. They build a model, and they understand it, that if they invest in this product for this many dollars, they’re going to get that many dollars out the other end. They have a spreadsheet. You propose a project, and that project goes into the spreadsheet. If it looks like it’s going to be profitable, you can do it, and if it doesn’t, you can’t. That’s it. That’s how you build a textbook business.

Any mature business operates that way. Car manufacturers that have been doing combustion engines for 75 years didn’t know how to do electric, because their models all broke. Tesla had to come along and do something different. It’s the same thing in the textbook industry.

So what do you do? How do you propose a project that doesn’t fit neatly inside that spreadsheet? Because the finance guys won’t give you any money to experiment. That’s one of the huge issues that people on the outside don’t recognize: The protection of the income, business and the inability of the finance guys to get out of the way is one huge barrier to these companies doing new things.

The second barrier is that the people who create this content don’t understand the underlying technology. They totally understand books: They understand the design, they understand page layout, they understand all the technologies that go into building a book. But they have no understanding of software and the constraints. The idea that you ship a minimum viable product and you iterate from there — it’s just not what they’ve done.

I blame a lot of that on how the system is built. “Blame” is probably a hard word. Maybe we just need to re-teach people about the process. The current systems don’t let you imagine what the technology and process look like. You need to understand so many things to create a new kind of media format: design, video, words, how people are going to interact with it. You can’t be one guy sitting in your bedroom writing a great story. Instead it’s one guy collaborating with 50 other people, trying to create something more collaborative. And that’s what the web is built for, a more-collaborative experience. That may be a bigger problem than just the tools and the finance guys.

If I were to boil down my view on this to just a few words, I’d say the problem is not vision; the problem is execution. Your point about no longer dealing with a simple set of media but having to now incorporate video and interactives is yet another layer of complexity.

Kindle: The Big Thing in Book Publishing?

It’s fun to think about what is going to replace the textbook. I think that’s actually pretty clear, or at least clear enough for us to try and execute on it. You don’t want a student to sit down in front of a device to consume information. That’s not modern learning. Modern learning is synthesis; modern learning is the idea that somebody sits and thinks about something, demonstrates mastery of a concept and in the process of demonstrating mastery further understands that concept.

So how do you do that in software? Well, first you have to have the student take assessments like a quiz to demonstrate their stronger points and their weaker points. Then they consume some knowledge: They watch a video, they interact with an experiment, they read some text. And then they do it over again: They take another set of questions. There’s a ton of data there. You can see how much time they’re spending with it, and you can identify specific areas of knowledge deficit and understanding deficit. You can target those deficits with specific pieces of content. The instructor, whether it is a K–12 teacher or a university professor, can get that data and use it to help that individual human being rather than thinking about a class of 200 students in a lecture as some sort of average. That’s powerful. That’s actually going to change the way people learn.

But the amount of stuff that needs to be built to make that happen? We’re just beginning to build it. And in the meantime, what do we do? Nobody’s going to invest in some middling technology like a bunch of dumb e-books. So we have people still buying physical textbooks until more products come on the market that treat students as individuals and use software to better help them learn.

OM: I agree with you on that. I was a chemistry major, and trying to remember all the elements on the periodic table [chuckle] was always an interesting challenge. Now there’s an app, the periodic table app on the iPad. It is so much more fun. If my professors taught me like that, I’d probably be working in some lab [laughter]. That’s definitely powerful. I cannot imagine how fun it would be to learn from this interactive environment. I think there is a role for a traditional book in this world; there is some information that we need constantly, and a traditional book may make sense from that perspective. But from a learning perspective, interactivity is going to be more fun, especially, say, for math.

MM: The issue with math is that most of the concepts in math are abstract. If you use language to describe those concepts, then you’re using abstractions to describe abstractions. How do you expect a 15-year-old to take two layers of abstraction in understanding the notion of polynomial equations?

The more specific you can make it, the better. And that means letting them tinker. Lets somebody come in and literally put their hands on it and start manipulating, because for thousands of years people learned by doing. You grabbed a stick, you hit a squirrel over the head with it and you ate it. Somebody else watched you do that and they said, “I can do that too,” and they took a stick and killed something and ate it. That’s how the human brain acquires knowledge. They didn’t read some funny set of letters on paper to acquire the skill of killing something to eat it. We’re not wired for that abstraction, and the written human language is a terrible way for someone to learn a complex concept. It’s so much easier to pattern-match and manipulate it directly.

But think about the challenge here. Inside one heading — organic chemistry, history, physics, economics — are thousands of other topics. Where are we going to get the resources and time to build interactive elements and software to target each of those use cases? We need thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars to go in and rebuild all of that content and all of this software. There is commonality across these things, but you’d be surprised at how hard it is to repurpose an engine targeting at someone learning the supply and demand curve for someone learning what happened during the Civil War. I’m optimistic about this software that’s going to replace the textbook, and I’m also pragmatic about the degree of work that still needs to happen to make it better than what we have today.

[topic]Who becomes Tesla of book industry?[/topic]

OM: You brought up the example of Tesla. It was a pretty different way of approaching the problem, and they got it done. I think something like that needs to happen. Who becomes the Tesla of the book industry?

MM: There’s an arms race right now. There aren’t many companies that do this today. In the higher-education world in the U.S., you’ve got McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Cengage Learning as the top three. Pearson is still a publicly trading company going through an insane reorganization as a corporation right now. They sold off Penguin to Random House; they’re probably going to ditch the Financial Times, which is also owned by Pearson; and they’re going to focus entirely on education. You’ve got McGraw-Hill, which was just acquired by a private equity firm. You’ve got Cengage, which has been owned by a private equity firm for seven years and just went bankrupt after acquiring seven billion dollars in debt in pursuit of this stuff.

You can go on and on down the list, and you can see that there is a horrible transformation taking place within these companies. Nonetheless, I think they’re the guys who are going to pull this off. I actually think a few of these guys are going to pull out in front. When I say there’s an arms race, what’s happening is they are either acquiring or partnering with startups that have interesting pieces of the puzzle solved. These guys are pulling together those different pieces.

I’ll give you a specific example. MacMillan, which has a whole higher-ed group, just partnered with Newton. Newton is a company that has been around for about five years. They have an interesting learning-analytics platform that does some of this stuff that can help a student assess where they stand. Pearson did a deal with Newton, and they also did a deal with Inkling to start building the little modular components of content that they want to put into these platforms. They also have a big engineering team that’s trying to plug all these pieces into a common solution. No idea if it’s going to be a “Mr. Potato Head” or whether it’s going to be super elegant. It could go either way. But everyone is placing bets on technology right now to try to make this happen.

(c)Wakely911301 — Inkling offices (Photo courtesy of Inkling)

OM: I wrote a blog post about this website that I came across called Forty Days of Dating. When I was reading it, I thought, “Wait, this is like reality TV meets magazine writing meets e-book.” I was like, “I’m going there every day to read about these two people and their dating life.” And I would happily pay for it [chuckle], because on day 27 — there is no update on day 27, and I’m freaking the hell out. It’s like, Why isn’t there an update?!

MM: It’s called “Forty Days of Dating”? And it’s a diary of two people dating?

OM: Yes, they’re two friends who were dating other people but couldn’t find people they really wanted. They did an experiment, that they will date each other and write about it on the web. There’s a video, there’s some pictures, there’s some nice graphics. It’s a pretty intense experience, but I’m hooked. It’s like an internet addiction of the worse kind and the best kind at the same time.

I was thinking about that, and I said, “This is exactly what we need for this tablet age. It’s a new way of thinking about what a magazine story should look like, or what a book should look like. Why does it all have to come out at the same time?” It would be great to have deeply reported, daily reports of the Tour De France, for example. Like, all the historical background of where the tour went, told through graphics and all of those things. Like the town, the stories of that specific leg of racing. And yet it’s based on the news of the day. The news of the day just becomes what you and I talk about, the notification for the real experience. News is what brings you in, but you get this enriched data behind it.

MM: You’re describing the mixture of — I look at content through another axis, which is its longevity. If you look at the scale of how long something lasts, a Tweet can have a shelf life of minutes. There are exceptions, but in general a blog post might have a shelf life of a few weeks, sometimes months. If you look at news articles, they tend to have a shelf life of a day. Nobody wants to pick up the New York Times from a week ago and read it for the news. Monthly magazines with long-form feature pieces are interesting on the span of months. And then you get into things like nonfiction and textbooks, which have shelf lives of years. Travel guides have the shelf life of about a year.

You’re talking about taking content that has a long shelf life, things like facts that don’t change, data about the history of something that informs the present, and using it to inform the news article that has a shelf life of a few days. You watch the Tour De France and you want to know who won yesterday. That information that was reported about who got where in the interim period is useless to you once somebody wins the Tour De France. You don’t care much, unless you’re a statistician, about the interim steps that got someone to the win. But throughout the whole experience, the data about the history of the event or the terrain through which they’re biking or the history of the place where the event is taking place — that’s relevant through the event and afterward.

That hasn’t been done before, because you almost always tailor the product to the shelf life of the content. If you start mixing those two different things, you actually have, in my opinion, a new thing. It hasn’t been done much before.

The other layer is the economic reality. If we wanted to have flying cars tomorrow, we could have flying cars. We could! The economics would be ludicrous. We settled on private jets for the ultra rich, and even there the economics are nonetheless ludicrous. What is possible in the world of publishing, and what is possible for what can replace the book? The sky is the limit, and the technology is there to do it today. The problem is, there is no economic story to be told around some of these crazy ideas.

[topic]Attention-o-nomics[/topic]

OM: I disagree with you. I think the economic reality is that if somebody doesn’t tinker and experiment with new things, they don’t have a business going forward. We’re all trying to do one thing. All media, whether it is my company, your company, big publishers, small publishers. We are all in the business of attention, 100 percent. There are only 24 hours in a day. Those 24 hours are getting sliced thinner and thinner, and people don’t seem to understand that’s the reality. That’s the economic reality. The more books lose to —

MM: Something else.

OM: The less opportunity there is to sell the people. From that standpoint, all the companies — including mine — have to experiment with these new formats. And the rest of the time we need to constantly look at where is the attention going. Right now BuzzFeed has all the attention, more so than Huffington Post. Good or bad, they have the attention. Medium has the attention, and LinkedIn has the attention. It’s good that we’re thinking about it, but we’re essentially repurposing the old style of attention to a new style, a new container. That’s about it. Unless someone experiments with this new way of thinking about information content and attention, we don’t really go anywhere in this connected reality.

MM: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t experiment or that we shouldn’t take risk in that we shouldn’t spend capital failing. Of course I think we should do that; I’m a fan of any entrepreneurial endeavor. My point is more that consumers have expectations of flying cars at times, and we need to walk people back into the economic realities of what we can actually do within the constraint of money.

That being said, I do think these holy grails of, for example, the travel guide that is always updated or the textbook that responds to your individual learning needs — those are possible, and we’ll get there. It just takes time.

The travel guide is another interesting thing that we sometimes don’t— you can turn this around and say, “Why do we need books when we have user-generated content? Why do I need travel guides? If I can just use TripAdvisor, why do I need Zagat? Why do I need Zagat if I have Yelp?”

The reality is that people crave a point of view. This is why they listen to your podcast or why they read blog posts from individuals. Human beings want the world told through the lens of a story, through a single human being.

With a travel guide, people love going through Europe and listening to Rick Steve’s perspective, for example, because they happen to also be nerdy and they love the history and they want his point of view on the world. You can’t get that from user-generated content, because what you get in user-generated content is the average of a lot of people. And sometimes the average sucks. Sometimes the average is as boring as hell. Or it’s useless. Take the Four Seasons Hotel: One person thinks it’s a rip-off, one person thinks it’s divine and one person thinks that it’s completely down-market because last month he stayed at his own private villa. If you know of someone, as a brand, that speaks to you, then you want that information. And that belongs in a book, not on a platform like TripAdvisor.

inkling5 — Matt MacInnis, talking about books! (Photo courtesy of Inkling)

OM: Why do you know so much about books?

MM: I don’t think I know much about books. I don’t think about books. I think about how human beings are connected with one another in the context of expertise. A textbook, a reference book, a travel book, a parenting book: All of those things have in common the connection between a consumer of expertise and knowledge or a consumer of a point of view and the provider of that expertise, knowledge or point of view. And that’s done through the book.

It’s been done through the book for hundreds of years, and now it’s being done through something else. In many cases it’s being done through Inkling, but there are lots of different ways that people connect with one another. And to your point at the beginning of the conversation about connectedness, I think more about how we connect people than I do about the book, because the book is just one kind of highway for that connection.

OM: You were talking a few minutes ago about how in the past a mistake in a book was permanent, that it would get replicated.

MM: Well, there are different kinds of replication. Different types of propagation of error.

[topic]Trust in media[/topic]

OM: Now we have a different kind of problem. Today we make a mistake and it gets amplified so fast that the perception becomes reality.

MM: Yes [chuckle]. This comes back to the trustworthiness of the source. Publishers have been selling products on the basis of their authoritative and trustworthy nature, and we need that. We have to have somebody defending the truth, and the truth doesn’t get defended well in the comments on a blog post. In the comments, whoever’s loudest becomes the rightest. That’s silly, because there’s probably no correlation — probably negative correlation — between how loud you are and how right you are. The idea of error propagation is fascinating to me. I learned this from Nate Silver, the guy who did the FiveThirtyEight political blog. He must be a boring guy to have dinner with to a degree, because he is so dry. But he’s usually right, which is great.

We used to have scrolls and manuscripts that were hand-copied. You had the Chinese-whispers problem, where every subsequent copy of a document had additional errors introduced. If you were to look at the first and the one-hundredth copy of what was ostensibly supposed to be the same document, you’d have something radically different at the end of the one-hundredth replication. That was a certain kind of error process. It’s like analog tapes being copied over and over again. At the end of the hundredth copy, it sounds like crap.

Then we had the printing press, which was able to propagate infinitely, perfectly. But if there was an error in that original copy, that same error was propagated perfectly everywhere. That introduced a different kind of problem in society.

The problem we have now is that you propagate an error instantly. However, you can fix that error instantly, if you discover it. But then you’ve lost a record of the original error. You have to start asking the question, How do we manage versions and track the errata that were introduced over time? So that you can go back and say, “Well, if my primary source a year ago was X and now the primary source has changed, how do I go back and reference what this author was saying in the original version?” This is a problem on the web, but it’s an evermore troublesome problem in publishing, as real vetted, trustworthy content is now editable ex post facto.

[I grimace.] It seems like it bothers you a lot. I see this as, “OK, there is a mistake. It can be fixed fast.”

OM: That’s the good side, and 90 percent of it is good. But I also think about other content. Today I ended up on a website called Dark Rye or something like that. It’s like a site for Detroit, it’s a magazine online. I was reading it: beautiful publication, high-end graphics, just beautiful, just lovely. Then I realized it was published by Whole Foods. I suddenly felt cheated.

MM: This is the question. Do you trust Whole Foods’ point of view on Detroit?

OM: I don’t trust anybody’s point of view on Detroit. I just read everybody’s point of view and make my own judgement. But I am an outlier like that, because this is my business. Not everybody would notice that this was put out by Whole Foods. One thing that starts to bug me is that the lines are blurring between what is marketing and advertising and content. In the past, with magazines, at least we had the veneer that editorials were separate from marketing and advertising, even though we all knew that one helped the other.

MM: I’m not sure I buy that, because everything looks rosier in the lens of history. I was in Brooks Brothers yesterday, and on the wall they had this print from a newspaper from the 1940s, 1950s, maybe even in the 1960s. It was a picture of a woman asleep on a bed wearing a Brooks Brothers’ shirt. It was about how as women are getting more rights, they are stealing the shirts off the backs of men. It was a pun, because she was wearing the man’s shirt as a nightgown. It looked just like a magazine piece, almost like a Playboy article, but it was an advertisement. Nowhere in that piece did it say that it was an advertisement, even though it was clearly a Brooks Brothers ad. This idea of advertorial, the mixture of commercial interest with some sort of objective third-party point of view is — they certainly had no scruples about it in the 1960s, and that was a long time ago. It’s been there from the beginning.

OM: You make a fair point. But the point I’m making is that in a print publication, you could tell the difference between what was an advertorial and what wasn’t. At least when I was working for magazines, in the 1990s, you could tell the difference. Now there is some good stuff being put out by people like Whole Foods and American Express, and they have their own magazine. But it’s not clear as to who is behind the content. If that was a little bit more clear, at least you could make your own judgment call.

MM: Sure. I think about that stuff less than anyone else, because I deal so little in the world of advertising and entertainment in my work. You ask me why I think so much about the book. Again, I think less about the book and more about how people consume knowledge. Luckily for me, advertising and that problem don’t crop up as much.

OM: When did you come up with the idea of starting Inkling?

MM: I had known about this thing that was coming from Apple [the iPad] in advance, and I knew it was going to change the way knowledge was published. My general thesis is that where there is change, there is opportunity. If you can jump into the deep end of a market that’s about to be blown up, jump in. Because if you have a little bit of foresight, the odds that you are going to survive and thrive are better than the odds you’re going to fail.

The idea came from the frustration of dealing with schools. I had been deploying laptops in K–12 schools and watching them fail because there was no good content. I was really excited about the idea of changing how people learned. Not just in a classroom but generally how we make the world a smarter place.

We started it with that notion. We then came across so many technical challenges and so many obstacles in the market and so many barriers to success that we swam around in that knowledge and found our way to a strategy that worked for our company, for our business. But it was always with the end game of improving the way people consume knowledge.

Frank Clegg

Om Malik: I was reading your bio, and I didn’t know that you had done an MBA and you’re not from a leather‑goods family. So what’s the obsession with leather and making leather goods? How did that come about?

Frank Clegg: One year for Christmas, my girlfriend, who happens to be my wife now, bought me a handful of leather tools. I always liked working with my hands. I always made things out of wood, metal, glass, whatever. Plastic. Anything.

When I was in Boy Scouts, I made leather belts and things like that. I always enjoyed that. All through college, all through graduate school, I did that. When I was in graduate school, I had a briefcase that I made. A lot of people said, “Where’d you get that?” Not too many kids carried briefcases, although I was in business school, so it wasn’t totally unusual. But it was rarer than at most colleges. They’d have a backpack or something.

When I graduated, I was going to job interviews. I remember going to two job interviews in one day. I think it was IBM that offered me a little as a consultant for them. When I walked out I said, “I said stuff in there just to try to get the job, but I didn’t mean it.” I said to myself, “Am I going to have to do that my whole life?” It felt weird. I knew I was saying it because I was trying to sell myself, but I said, “I don’t want to go through my whole life doing that. I don’t want to be trying to make somebody believe something that’s not true.”

I threw my resume in the trash that day, on the way out. I said, “I’m going to do this for one year and see what happens.” I did it. I thought, “I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll get a job. I don’t know.”

I’ve been very lucky, but I’ve worked very hard. I’m a good designer, and I worked at a lot of companies and with a lot of people. That’s one of my strong points.

I also like to make a nice product. I like people to be happy with our product. That drives me more than anything, when someone says, “I just got your bag. I’m in heaven, I’m in bag heaven.”

They make these comments, and you can’t buy that. You can have all the money in the world, but comments mean more because that’s something you can’t buy. That little response from somebody like that, that’s so special for us. Sometimes I try to share it with everybody that works with them. I say, “Hey, this guy called up and he just loves that bag that you did the other day.” I think they feel good, too, about that.

It’s more than just the job. We’re making stuff that people love. I know, like, when the president bought a bag from us, everybody was entertained about that. I couldn’t say anything at the time that he did, because he didn’t endorse us or anything like that. Then they put the picture up and he sent me a note saying, “It’s public now so if you want to do something you can.” That’s when I showed it.

I thought that was very nice of him to buy a piece from us, and I like knowing that he was buying American, supporting what we’re trying to build up in this country again.

OM: The current president? That’s cool.

FC: Yeah, Mr. Obama. He wanted a bag, I guess, and they called me about it, and we made one. They bought it. I didn’t give it to them. I pay taxes [laughs]. I’ve done things for him before through other companies. I’ve made products that represented him and a bag for Mrs. Obama, too. That was in the beginning of their first term. We made a few pieces.

But this one he uses, because we have a couple of pictures on our Instagram—there’s a black-and-white and a color photo. The color one came out first, and the black-and-white one came out about a month ago. I really like the black-and-white one because he’s alone in that photo and the briefcase is on the floor right in front of him. It’s so nice. It’s almost like an ad.

OM: I have one of your old bags, which I bought from eBay a while ago. I still use it every time I go on a short trip. What I like about your products is the ability to last forever. That said, people can easily buy stuff from Italy and France and England, and of course, there is Chinese‑manufactured stuff. Who makes decent stuff from those places? These days the hot item seems to be the iPad covers more than the bags.

FC: Buying products all over the world, there are some good ones and there are some bad ones, and also some that are in between.

In Italy, primarily, there are some very good craftsmen out there, the technicians. France, some very good technicians for products. In Spain, there are good ones. I’m sure every country has its share. We’re one of the few countries that has kind of let that go. We seem to have given up everything. Everybody’s capable, everybody in every country is smart and can do stuff. They have to have the mentality that they want to make the best, or they just want to make a product and sell it. That’s the difference. I’m sure every country has that ability to do something.

OM: I see a lot of uniformity in designs and how products look. I am always amazed by that.

FC: Some people say, “Why don’t you just not do it as nice and sell it for less?” I say, “Then I would be doing what everyone else does.” I don’t really want to do that. Somebody else already does it. Let them do it, and let me do what makes me happy and what makes my customer happy.

I’ve always tried to be cutting‑edge in everything that we do. I try to be ahead of the competition. I like to think I’m a forward-thinker. I’m never satisfied with what I do. I’m always looking to be better. Last year we invested in this antique cutting machine. For us, it’s very good, because I can rate a lot of designs. I’m continuously designing.

We might make 15 designs a year. I don’t have to like cutting guides, but we have to digitize, and that’s a little bit of a process. I can make a design in the morning, give it to my son, he digitizes it, and we’re cutting in a couple of hours. We could be making that bag that day. That, to me, is almost like what the internet does on the other end. But for a lot of people, the system wouldn’t be good, because it’s too complicated. They don’t get enough designs, so it’s cost‑prohibitive.

I don’t try to copy anyone else’s [design]. I never have. It doesn’t interest me. I figure, if I’m going to make something that looks like somebody else’s, all of a sudden I got all that competition. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

If I make something different, then I don’t really have any competition. Either people like what I do, or they don’t like what I do. If they like it, that’s great. I don’t have someone that’s directly doing what I do, and it’s something that’s nice at the same time. That works out well for us.

My goal in my business is always to make the best. We try to find the absolute finest leathers and then craft our bags, and we put as much time and effort into the bag as it takes.

Whatever the price is, that’s the price. If our bags were made by one of the giants, they’d be $3,000 for one of our $1,000 bags, easily.

I try to be as fair as possible. I look at the bags and I see the prices, and I think, “Wow. That’s a lot of money.” We have customers that bought bags from us 40 years ago—when we first started—and they still use them. When I first started making some of these cases, someone said, “You’re never going to sell them another one.” But I did. I sold them maybe two more for their kids. When they bought something that’s lasted that long, they said, “I want my kids to have the same pleasure in a bag.”

I’d rather make less product and make it better, so that my customers come back after 35, 40 years, as they are now. That’s a really nice feeling. There were some difficult times for all of us when everything went overseas, when everything went to China.

OM: It seems like technology helped automate a lot of industries and moved it overseas. Much of the artisanal work was pushed aside, but now we are seeing a resurgence, thanks to the internet. People are finding and reconnecting with folks like you and your neighbors at Alden shoes.

In a way, the internet has helped revive some of the traditional stuff that we were known for in this country. Do you think you benefit from the internet, and more and more young people are discovering the quality work you do?

FC: Absolutely. The thing about the internet is that it allows us to get some retail money. That, in turn, helps us to be able to continue to do the best we can and not ever have to try to compromise. If we had to do just wholesale, our prices would be higher, because it would cost us more to make everything. The internet definitely is so much easier than when we used to have to make the catalogs up and then the reps would be out there.

It works the same way. It’s just the vehicle is different. The fact that we can just take a product, make it in the morning, put it on Instagram, put it on our website, and we could be selling it the next day. Or we could sell it that day. It’s crazy.

It’s just so powerful. A lot of people, they’ve never experienced anything else. They say, “It’s so tough, the internet.” I think to myself, “It’s so easy compared to everything else that I’ve ever had to do.” Taking all the catalogs, printing them up, and sending them out. Waiting for responses.

The internet has really made a lot of people who wouldn’t be able to afford to get out there and market themselves to get exposure. I think that’s important, because I’ve always said, “We don’t know who the next guitarists are.” Like Clapton or whoever you can think of. We probably don’t know who they are because they haven’t been discovered.

You do have more of a chance of being discovered on the internet. Maybe you did a video and you played the guitar and someone says, “Wow, this guy’s better than anybody I’ve ever seen.” You may never be able to invite contracts to come your way, but YouTube blew it up for you. For us, now, instead of opening up stores, the door opens up all over the world. Customers don’t have to go to physical places.

OM: Has the internet helped you reach new audiences, or do you still mainly go through your traditional channels?

FC: Has the internet helped me in my sales and everything? Yeah, because the exposure’s so great. At any given time, you can be on Google Analytics, looking at sometimes five or six countries at one time, looking at your product.

It would be so hard to get that exposure on the ground. You’d have to have people representing you all over the world. That gets very costly, and only certain kinds of companies can afford to do that.

We love getting into social networking. We like meeting people. I get to talk to people. I get a lot of phone calls from Singapore. People from Singapore tend to call me, more so than most countries. It’s so interesting that they find such interest in what we do.

It makes me real proud that someone would take the time out to make a long‑distance call like that and want to chat about a product that they like. That makes me directly connected to that customer, pretty much forever, because when they email, they just call me Frank. That’s what it is. It’s that connection.

They feel good about it, and I feel good about it. It’s really nice. It’s like the relationships I used to have with my retailers, years ago. We had 100, 200—whatever accounts that we’ve had. We were friendly with everybody. We got along with everybody. It was fun.

OM: How much time do you spend on your social media? Do you do Instagram, or do your sons help you?

FC: I read emails and look at people’s sites. But my kids do a lot of that [social media] stuff. I think my son Andrew took a photo of a notebook or something today. He’ll probably put it up later or something. A work in progress.

My older son is here full-time now. He’s been learning to do the cutting right now. I’ll have him do that for about a year, and then I’ll bring him into the next phase of construction.

Next year my youngest son, Ian, is going to be coming into the company. He already does stuff for us. Ian took all the photographs on our new website. He used to watch me, and then one day, he picked the camera up and he started doing it. He Photoshops them. He does everything he has to do to clean them up.

People are very interested in how things are made. I know I am, when I go into the manufacturing facilities. Not leather companies but different things. I’m always interested in how something is made, because when I see that, it makes me think about what I do and how many of those things I can take advantage of in what I do. I look at people and what they do. I follow you on Instagram. I know you’re a fountain pen collector. I love that. I’m a big fountain pen collector.

OM: I didn’t know that.

FC: I buy them on eBay. I restore them. I buy new pens, too. I’ve had a fascination with that since I was a kid.

I never liked to write. My mother, somebody—we had a fountain pen in the house. I started to write with it. I said, “This is the best thing in the world.” I’ve always used fountain pens. I have tons of them. I buy a lot of the old ones: 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1800s. They’re all restored. They’re like brand-new. I buy some new ones, too, occasionally. I love that. I saw you had the Montblanc the other day.

OM: That’s the only pen I have, and it’s a very expensive pen. I just bought it for my 40th birthday. I turned 40, and I said, “I’m going to buy that.” I recently got one made from some folks in Japan, from Nakaya. It took a while to get that. That was something I really wanted handmade for me. I went for that as a little luxury, but why not?

FC: To me, my pens are more than just little trinkets. They’re like my friends. It’s kind of weird, but if someone likes pens, they realize that you can have a lot of fun with a tool. That’s what it is. It’s just a tool.

If you hold it a lot and you appreciate it, it’s no different than a nice watch or something like that. I love pens. I don’t have either one of those brands. I love the Japanese pens, too.

OM: When you look back over the 40 years or so that you’ve been in this industry, how have people’s relationships with bags and leather goods changed, especially men, from briefcases? What do you think is more in fashion or more trendy these days with guys?

FC: I find that young people want what their grandfathers had, not what their fathers had. They want classic, beautiful, traditional products that they’re going to keep forever. That’s the beauty of right now. They want to make a smart purchase, and they’re willing to spend the money on something that they like.

That [ethos] hasn’t been around since the seventies. When I started in the seventies, people went to a leather shop and there were no big-name brands. They bought what they wanted, and a lot of people still use some of those products today. Men definitely like heritage, high‑quality products. That’s why companies like Alden have done well, because they’ve stuck to their guns and they’ve already made a good product.

OM: Are people buying more messenger bags, briefcases? Do you have some concepts of what people want to carry today? Has that changed, or is it still the same?

FC: Things have changed. Years ago a lot of young guys didn’t really want to carry a traditional briefcase. They would carry a cloth briefcase, like a sports, hunting‑based product. Maybe an L.L. Bean–type briefcase or something. Now they want nice products: They want it for show, to look nice. It doesn’t have to be a briefcase that looks like it’s perfect all the time. Actually they like the way briefcases age. That’s why they like the leather that we use.

OM: It’s funny how all this technology today like the iPad and Kindle and iPhone are actually creating a demand for more organic stuff, or more analog stuff. The kind of stuff you make. We have so many more gadgets to carry, so many more gadgets to cover up with leather [laughs].

FC: What I’ve never done with my bags, or tried not to do, anyway, is never tried to make compartments for certain products. Now if you look inside one of those handbags, a younger person will say, “Hey, Ma, how come there’s a baby bottle pocket inside the bag?” It was a cell phone pocket. It’s from when cell phones were big. It’s so funny to see those pockets now.

Still, because our products last so long, I try not to date them by putting certain compartments in them. I try to just put useful compartments, and then I’ll make accessories that accommodate those high‑tech items, like an iPad case or little zipper pouches to carry the cords and the cables or whatever.Then they can change after a while and it’ll be a useful product, always.

OM: In your mind, outside of the U.S., which companies make good products?

FC: Shoes or leather goods?

OM: Either. What are the companies you respect that are small or independent but worth taking a look at?

FC: I’ve seen some products made by some smaller companies out of Japan that I liked. I relate to some of those products because I think they think like I do.

I’ve seen some products out of—I don’t know if it was out of Belgium or Austria, I saw a bag that was made by somebody that I liked. When I think back, the thought that comes to my mind is, “I wish I made that.”

When I say that to myself, that’s a really nice product, I think. Sometimes I might see a style I like but the quality is not there. There were some really good companies in England, although I think they’re not up to what they used to be. Italy always has good designers. Spain, France. There are some good people that might’ve worked for Hermes.

Hermes does some interesting things. I think they’re one of the better ones that are doing commercial products. They’re outrageously expensive, of course, so they should be very nice. But they have some interesting things, not so much their regular line but the oddball things that they come out with. It’s nice they do that.

It’s daring. They came out with a $15,000 baseball glove.

I don’t really care, but I think it’s interesting that they do it. They step out of the box more than most companies. I appreciate that they want to throw that stuff out there to get somebody’s attention. That’s a good way to be. We always try to do that, try to come up with things that nobody expects from us. We have a lot of new products coming out this next year, so it will be interesting.

Bradley Price

Om Malik: Tell me about where you come from. How did you fall in love with cars, especially since you live in New York, where there is no car culture?

Bradley Price: I grew up in Evanston, Illinois. My father is a car guy, and he had an old Austin-Healey when I was little, and then later on he sold that and got a Jaguar XK140. Those were the cars I remember from being little, and we used to go to a lot of British car events.

We lived on a busy street. I’d sit by the window and watch all the cars going by, and at a young age, I knew every brand of car. By the sound of them, I could identify different cars.

I was pretty much hooked on it from such an early age. I can’t even tell you where it actually started from, because it’s before I have any memory of it. My brother, incidentally, has no interest in cars, so don’t think it’s just because of my dad [laughs].

Anyway, my dad also loves vintage Bugattis. We used to build model cars together. One aspect to the watch that ties into my childhood is also that I love miniatures and models. We had a train layout as well. I love this idea, this little object that there’s a whole world inside of it and it’s all these details. You look at something from here, but then when you get closer to it, you have to be even more delighted by it rather than being let down by the lack of detail. Those are all ways that the watches tie back to my childhood.

I went to the University of Michigan after graduating from high school, and I studied the history of art and industrial design there.

OM: History and industrial design — oh my.

BP: Yeah, I have two degrees. It was a five-year program.

OM: That explains a lot.

BP: Yeah. My parents didn’t want me to do just the straight-up art school degree. I wanted to go to art school to be a car designer. My parents were totally right in the end. Learning how to do research, learning how to write — these are things that people don’t put enough value on, especially in the designer world. There are so many people that care about sketching but then can’t even talk about their work.

Then, through my twenties, I was an industrial designer, and I was obsessed with modernism. I am a modernist. I guess you could say I was even a futurist at that time. I was obsessed with pushing the boundaries of technology. I didn’t wear analog watches or any kind of traditional watches. I was wearing futuristic digital watches, if I wore a watch at all.

I was a technology and design person, but I always had a strong interest in the history of design, art deco, modernism, and also, of course, the history of racing. There is this combination of being obsessed with doing the next thing but also almost wishing I’d lived doing the next thing in the 1920s or 1930s. It’s looking backward to go forward.

[topic]Early days & roots in Industrial Design[/topic]
OM: What kind of industrial design did you do?

BP: Cell phones, appliances, and furniture. I used to work in a branding agency before; that where I was doing food concepts and branding concepts. But then the next job I had was much more production-oriented, so I learned a ton about engineering constraints and actual production techniques and process. Then my second phase of my work was in producing things, getting things made, working with engineers, working with factories, going to Asia. All that stuff has together informed my starting of this company.

I can’t be thankful enough for the training I had in my twenties of first working in this branding environment where it was all about creating a brand, creating a concept of the story.

OM: Those companies all go to design experts and designers. And then they design the device. This is so different from what Apple does, where engineering and design are in sync and ultimately guide the product. The design can leverage the gains from system-level engineering, and vice versa. I find they have a different view of thinking in products — of vertical integration.

BP: Then all these companies would be like, “We want to be like Apple” or “How can we even more be like Apple” or “We want a product like Apple’s.” I don’t know if it’s still like that, but this was five or eight years ago and Apple could do no wrong. But the thing was, they weren’t looking at the whole process. They were just looking at the end product. They weren’t looking at how that product got to be that way.

The key things that Apple does, aside from what you’ve mentioned, is that the decision-making is a lot more autocratic, and it’s a lot more direction given from specific important people that are tasteful, thoughtful people. That informs the whole world. It’s not just a bunch of middle managers and committees and stuff. You have one guy who was like “This is good or bad” and “I like this” or “I don’t like this.” That’s hard to replicate, but that’s what makes something great versus just OK. You need that person to be the arbiter.

OM: There are only a few watch people close to doing that vertical integration. The engineering, the user interface, the overall design.

BP: I agree. People focus so much on the movement, and they don’t think enough about the other aspects of why a watch is beautiful or special. People get so fixated on specs and not on what is special about these watches as a thing.

That frustrates me a little, because I put so much into the rest of the watch. I don’t have the wherewithal to develop my own movement, as many watch companies don’t. In fact, 98 percent of watch companies don’t have that wherewithal.

Let’s focus on the case finishing, the design of the case, the design of the dial, and the concept. What is the watch trying to say? What is the meaning of the watch? What’s the emotional content? I don’t ever see people internet forums discussing those types of things.

OM: Why don’t people pay attention to the emotional aspect of things we own? If you own a lot, like, there isn’t a lot of emotion around it. But if your ownership is restricted and constrained, it has a lot more emotion. I definitely agree with you that people don’t ask the question why as much as they should, like, “Why are you buying this? How does it make you feel?”

BP: They just snap it up. Having spoken with many of my customers, one thing that is special about this brand is that people get that there’s an emotional content to it and it resonates with specific people. It’s interesting to me, because it’s not just people from one economic background or another.

It could be the guy who has 10 Pateks and he bought one of our watches too, or it could be the college student that saved up for four months to buy the first watch he’s ever owned. Those two guys are from different worlds, but they are linked together on an emotional level about how they respond to this watch and what it says to them. I find that really gratifying to get feedback from customers.
[topic]Apple Watch: What is it good for[/topic]
OM: What do you think about the Apple watch, the concept of it?

BP: It’s beautiful. As someone who designs consumer electronics and watches, the more I looked at it the more impressed I was. It’s got Marc Newson’s fingerprints all over it.

It’s clearly something he designed rather than Jony Ive. It’s funny they announced he was working with them after the watch. But to me that was the Apple way of underhandedly giving him credit for the design without actually saying he designed it. But it seemed to me very Marc Newson.

OM: Why do you say that?

BP: The most obvious giveaway was that the rubber strap had the exact closure method that the Ikepod had. But the way the strap integrates with the case is so him, this sort of inflated square.

Now, obviously any designer could do an inflated square. But Marc Newson’s Ikepod watch is a really influential design. I certainly have been influenced by it. If you look at the Monoposto [Autodromo’s first automatic watch], they’re that sort of bowl-like case. There was a little bit of that Newson flavor in that watch, even though it’s not a modernist watch per se. The Apple watch certainly is in that idiom, a lot like his other work.

OM: Getting back to your path to making watches, how did you go from what you were doing at ECCO to what you’re doing now?

BP: It’s nothing against ECCO or anything. But after working in a studio environment for 10 years, I was getting the edge to do my own thing and was tired of following orders all the time. I wanted to express my own aesthetic sense.

Also, I’m a lifelong car nut, and I was starting to get upset about not having anything car-related in my life. I started a blog called Automobiliac around 2010, which was partially an outlet to talk about cars with people, because I didn’t know any car people in the city.

I had recently bought an Alfa Romeo from the 1980s. I was driving and I thought to myself, “I love the typeface on this gauge. It would be such a cool watch gauge.” Then I thought, “Why doesn’t someone make car-gauge-inspired watches?” You have Bell & Ross making aviation-gauge inspired watches. Then I started to research it, and I found no one was doing that well, if they were doing it at all. I feel, personally, that many of the big companies that do automotive-related watches — there is a complete lack of emotional content.
[topic]Products with Emotional Connection[/topic]
OM: I agree. Few watches are emotional. There are few people who make watches that you can actually have a connection with. I have one manual watch that is just basic. It suggests the hour and minute, and no seconds, no numbers, nothing.

BP: Just the essentials.

OM: The iPhone is like that. When it’s shut off and the screen is dark and I don’t have to see the software inside and can just look at it as an object — that’s beautiful. And then push of a button later, it is like magic.But when you look at it as a thing of beauty, it makes you think, How can you make something so amazing, so complex, and yet it is just one thing? It’s like a dark black screen and the metal body, and that’s all you see. It forces you to imagine the amount of work that engineers have put into it. That’s part of the emotional connection with this thing I have. I have emotional connection with a lot of things, mainly when I know who made them. Maybe that’s what we like about Apple — the magic of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive.

BP: Yes, I completely agree.

OM: So are you a one-man operation?

BP: I have a publicist that helps me, but he’s a consultant. My initial thing is that when I need help with stuff, I can hire consultants rather than taking on a staff member. My wife helps me as well if I’m swamped with stuff.

If I’m really behind, I have a friend who can come over and help me pack things. I am trying to keep it at a pared-down, simple level, and it’s working well. There will be a point to this in the future where I finally get an office space, because I would love to, for example, have people like you over in an office that’s not in my house.

But when you’re running a small business, you need to keep your overhead low. Right now, this is an appropriate site base for what I’m doing. The company is doing well, and we’re profitable, but wasting money can make a huge impact in your bottom line. I’ve had a lot of entrepreneurs say the best time for them was that early stage where they didn’t have the office yet or they didn’t have a whole bunch of people and they were just doing it. Once they started to structure things, it became less fun for them.

OM: The key to success in life, in my opinion, is not to measure yourself against how society measures success — you know, how famous you are, how rich you are, how big your company is, or how your movies do at the box office. My idea of success is about finding your level of greed. Then it is fairly easy to define. If you’re happy with a one-bedroom house and don’t need a lot of money, you don’t need to be running a $100 million company. There is a fine balance between the struggle of an early-stage company and being a gigantic operation. Finding that level is the most important thing. A lot of founders don’t think about that. They keep chasing this unreal dream without knowing what they are chasing.

BP: They keep chasing easy money. I don’t seek easy money. I own this company 100 percent. It’s completely funded through bootstrapping to cash flow. There’s no borrowed credit at this point. It’s 100 percent owned by me, and it is about being fairly priced. I like that, because I don’t have anyone that can tell me to do this or that. I don’t have anyone questioning me if something’s the best use of money. I can make all my own decisions.

When I go to meet with other entrepreneurs and stuff or whatever — they’re more obsessed about telling you how much capital they’ve raised instead of what the company’s actually producing. It’s like, “Yeah, we just got like $16 million in funding” and they want to have a bigger office and they want to hire more people. Then if they get it, they suddenly have 150 employees and God knows what they all do. That’s the opposite of what I want.

OM: You should do what makes you happy. If you own 100 percent of your company and you pay your bills and you live independently, as long as you don’t feel like you’re missing out or something, then it’s OK. Then you don’t have to worry about what other people think.

BP: I don’t worry about it too much. I mean, I’m a lucky man, to be honest. I’m happy with my life and my lifestyle. It would be nice to have an office, sure. Eventually that will come, though, so I just have to keep going.

[topic]So what’s your story?[/topic]
OM: How long ago did you actually start this?

BP: 2011, so this is my third year in business. It’ll be three years in November 2014.

OM: How did it all get rolling? Was it like, “I’m going to do this,” and you quit your job to chase the dream?

BP: No. That’s the ideal myth. You’re like, “Screw this. Bye!” And then you start your company.

No, I worked in secret for two years. My boss was nice about it when I finally told him what I was doing. He actually let me stay on part-time. I was making money, but I was still afraid to quit my job. He was kind to let me stay there. I went down to part-time at one point and took a bit of a pay cut, but I still had the stability of a paycheck. Eventually, after about six months, I left.

When I say 2011, that’s when the company launched. But I started this project in 2009. I was designing the stuff in secret and went to Asia, to Hong Kong, to the watch fair and all this other stuff. I was doing all that in the evenings. I didn’t tell many people I was doing it and then launched the company in November 2011 with Hodinkee. They wrote the first post about Autodromo ever.

The response was great right out of the door. Within six months, I had made back my initial investment. It’s been going well since then. During the first six months, there was money coming in, but I didn’t pay myself a penny. I was still living off my salary as a designer.

OM: What was your first month like?

BP: The first month was this giddiness of being like, “I can’t believe people like this.” As a designer, you always have this ego. Well, it’s not so much ego. It’s like you put your heart out there. When you design something you’re proud of, you want people to like it, because you’re an artist. You’re a creative person. You want an audience to respond to your work.

To put this work out there and have people buying them. The first holiday season, people bought the watches. It was this giddiness of feeling like, “Wow. I’m actually seeing money coming in. I’m actually seeing people excited about what I did.” That was a great feeling. Never before in my career had I ever gotten any public credit for anything I’d ever done, because I was working for other companies and other people. That was pretty exciting.

OM: How many watches did you sell in the first month or two?

BP: I’d have to go back and check. It was a couple hundred.

OM: Oh, wow.

BP: I think we did $50,000 of sales for the first holiday season or something. That was a lot of money to me. That made me realize I was onto something.

I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible in terms of reaching an audience. People know about us now, especially in the watch industry and, to an extent, within the vintage car world, but we’re still an open secret. There are people who know about us, and then there’s still a huge, vast number of people that have never heard of the company. I like it that way, though. I like being the brand you have to know about.

OM: It’s fun to be in that phase, where you’re actually trying to not live up to somebody else’s expectations of you.

BP: We don’t have a legacy to live up to [laughs]. We’re not like AP or something, where we have this whole heritage and anything we do could be a letdown. But I do have pressure now.

We have had a number of successful products, and there have been things that have sold out. When the Stradale [the 2014 model] came out, I felt a lot of pressure about making sure this watch was successful, making sure it would be well-received, doing things I hoped the customers would like.

It was a big investment to do this watch, and it’s our new flagship watch. I’m phasing out the original quartz collection in favor of these automatic watches. Even though it’s a small company, this is a big piece for me. I definitely felt pressure to make sure this watch would be something special.
[topic] Bradley & his Design Process[/topic]
OM: From concept to finished product, how long does it take you?

BP: It takes about nine months from start to finish to have the idea, design it and prototype it and then receive the merchandise after production. I only come out with one new watch a year. I can’t do more than that, because there’s too much and also the investment becomes burdensome. Now that I have more models, I come out with new colors periodically. We’re going to have a new color of protype coming out in November. Then we’re going to have a new special dish and another protype in the spring, which is going to be with another driver. That’s going to be awesome.

OM: What is your design process?

BP: It’s the opposite of the way I was taught to design things. I had always felt like the methodology that I was taught in design school didn’t suit my personality, but that’s how the professional world expected you to behave.

In the professional world, you want lots of options. You want to explore every possibility, and then you want to present all those options to the client. Then they pick one, whatever they think is the best, which may not be the one you thought was the best. Then you refine that from there, and then you go back and forth and finish it.

For me, I don’t do options. I ruminate over things. I don’t draw anything for a while, and I have it tumbling around in my head.

It’s almost like, you know in an old spy movie when there’s a lock tumblr? One tumbler clicks into place, and then the next tumbler clicks in. For months, it’s this thing spinning around, and then the tumbler will click over. I’ll be like, “That’s good.” Then, a while, and then another one clicks over. Finally, this [makes a clicking noise], and then the safe opens.

That’s how the design process is for me. It’s much more about ruminating until there’s this aha moment, and then it becomes easy. Then I start sketching on a theme, and I usually go fairly quickly into CAD from there, because I like to think in three dimensions. Sketches lie, especially with watches. You could have some detail you think is great, but then it doesn’t actually fit, physically, with the scale of the watch or where the movement has to be.

The sooner I go into 3D, the more I can be true to what the watch would eventually be, and from there, I refine the 3D. Then I go away from it again. You can fall in love with your idea, but you need to go away and come back and see, “Does it still excite me? Does it still hold true?”

Maybe I show it to a few people that I trust, to see their gut reaction. For example, I might show it to Ben Clymer [the founder of Hodinkee], or I might show it to a car friend of mine. Sometimes I’ve backed away from something and thrown it away, and then other times, I’m like, “OK.” Even if they say they don’t like it, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do it.

It’s information. It’s feedback I can use for my own purposes. It’s not necessarily like I want to know three out of four people like this. That’s not how I think. It’s just, “This person liked it for this reason. This person didn’t like it for that reason. Maybe the right answer is over here.”

OM: What’s the thought process behind Stradale? How did you come to this design?

BP: First, from a utilitarian perspective, I knew I wanted to do an automatic watch. I knew I wanted to do something that would be a new flagship watch, and I wanted something that would relate back to the Monoposto, which was my first automatic watch. That was a limited edition of 500 pieces, and it sold out in about seven months. That was the first piece that made a lot of people take us seriously as a watch company, because there was a certain level of refinement. All the things I had learned from the first collection improved the second watch.

With that one, I had so many customers saying, “Please make more of them!” I didn’t want to do another edition of the same watch. I knew I wanted to take elements of the Monoposto, though, that would flavor this new watch, but then I wanted to do something new.

I also wanted to do a gauge-inspired watch, because our previous watch, the Prototipo, was a 1970s racing chronograph, and I didn’t want to do another racing watch. I wanted to do a gauge watch again, because that’s the core of the brand.

I had those basic parameters to start with, and then, from there, it was like, “What time period do I love right now? What kind of cars am I excited about?” I kept thinking about these Berlinettas, which are from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s. It’s a fastback style of Italian sports car.

What’s cool about the Berlinetta is that it’s a car you could drive at high speed across the Continent, race it hard, then throw some water on it, drive it to the finest hotel in whatever town you were in, have dinner in a tuxedo, and drive home. That car represents this high point of sports car design for me and a level of sporting elegance. The Stradale comes out of the aura of that time period and that type of car.

I started looking at gauges from those types of cars. One of the salient features of that time period was these plastic rings that would have the numbers molded into them that floated over the dial. I always loved that three-dimensional effect, and it’s very, very period.

I thought to myself, “What if that was a crystal ring inside the watch? Instead of just printing those numbers on the dial, the ring floats over the dial.” I thought, “Wow. I haven’t seen that done before. I’ve seen watches that have sapphire crystal disks or something, but those are usually expensive watches, like a Harry Winston.”

I thought it would be cool to offer something at our price point that has this crystal ring that floats. That became a central focus of how to execute that, how to make that look the right way. Then there was the packaging. The packaging is always a way to complete the story. As the customer gets this package in the mail, I want there to be this pathway of discovery that you’re drawn into the story as you’re unwrapping the box.

Also, the name Stradale means “road-going.” What I like about that is it implies a road-going car, but it also implies a race car, because usually the name Stradale is given to a detuned race car that’s for the road. If you have a pure race car, then sometimes to homologate them, they would make a barely legal road version. I like the idea of the Stradale because it implies you’re driving around in this high-performance car.

I love the age of Gran Turismo, which we don’t have anymore, the idea that you would drive across Europe and every drive is an adventure. It was a romantic time.
[topic]What Is The Meaning of Time[/topic]

OM: New technologies like the internet, the network, airplane travel have accelerated time. All those things we are nostalgic about are essentially about slowing down time to have more meaningful interactions.

BP: Yes. On top of that, the impersonality that comes with the acceleration of time. There was this American who went to Modena in the 1960s. He showed up at the Maserati factory. They were giving him parts, and he started building his own sports car, in a barn, in the countryside, using parts that he would get from Maserati shelves. That would never happen today. I wanted to capture something about that in the watch.

When you start unwrapping the watch, the first thing you see is a vintage map of the city of Milan. I like the idea that you’re basically starting in a town. Then inside the box, you have the instruction booklet, which is now a road map of northern Italy and the French Riviera. The idea that you’re going on this road trip in this Berlinetta and you have this beautiful gauge—I wanted to create this atmosphere about the product.

OM: Of that time.

BP: Of the time and place and the spirit of what the watch means. On the back are maps that are all scanned from period maps, and then I put in my own fake ad, a period ad for Autodromo gloves and sunglasses. Then there’s also the actual instructions themselves. It’s a combination of new elements combined with vintage elements.

OM: Have you thought about starting maybe a website where people can do their own Stradale selfies? They’re driving, and they can upload two minutes of video.

BP: I would love that. I’ve definitely encouraged people to tag us on Instagram with their watches, and some people do. I have customers that send me photos, which we post on Facebook. I wish there was better way. One thing I lack is — I have this artistic side, but I’m not good with the technology. I wish I could make an amazing website that had this clubhouse aspect where customers could log in. It would be like a forum for customers to share stuff, privately. Sometimes when my customers get together in a physical room, it becomes like that.

OM: It seems you are a guy who likes to slow down time a little bit, whether it is working alone in your house or making products.

BP: Yeah. My parents always like to tease me that I like to take my time on everything, but it’s more of a sense of doing things right the first time.

I started racing this year. I have a vintage Alfa that I bought recently, that I’ve been campaigning in the Vintage Racing Series here in the East Coast. One of the things I’ve been doing is historic recreation. It’s not about “I’m going to buy a cool car and race it.” I like to try to live the history of what I’m interested in. I drive the car to the track and race it. A lot of the old-timers are like, “I remember in the ’70s, I used to do that. Then I got a trailer” [laughs].

But I like to put all my stuff in the trunk of the race car. It’s a street-legal car, and I drive it to the track. I drove it for five hours up to Vermont once for a hill climb, and the drive up there was as magical as driving the hill climb. A beautiful mid-summer with mild weather.

Those experiences inform the work I do. I wear the things I design. The driving gloves we make, I’m wearing them in a 1959 Alfa Romeo while driving to a hill climb, so I’m not making stuff because some marketing survey told me I should make driving gloves.

I make driving gloves that I want to wear in a vintage car. I know when someone else buys these gloves and they wear them, they’re going to love them, because they’re going to know someone made those for them.

Cole Rise

Om Malik: I’ve been fascinated by your work, and I don’t mean the Litely app or the presets. I often go to your website and look at your work. Goddamn, those pictures. Every single time I see them online and on Instagram, I’m like, “What is with this guy? How can one be so amazing?” Anyway, enough of the gushing. Let’s talk about photography.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the iPhone as a camera thing and wondering what it all means. Looking at it from my perspective, four years ago, I did not know how to take pictures. I thought I was just not a visual person. Instagram came and something clicked in me, and I figured out that I can express myself through photos. More recently I have been wondering if we are in the second phase of the phone and camera marriage.

Cole Rise: It’s a renaissance. In 2003, camera phones were just coming out. I forget which exact phone had it, but it was fascinating to see normal people suddenly have a camera with them all the time. Suddenly I was that person. I always had a camera, like a big DSLR. A $1,000 Sony DSC‑F707 five megapixels. Best camera you could have. It was in my hand, basically — it was always with me.

But I also had this little Sony phone for a while in college. I was photographing all the time with this little two megapixel — not even, like, a megapixel. I think it was 320 x 480: tiny, tiny photos. They were so pixelated. But they were gorgeous. They almost looked like a painting, because they were crappy.

Now when I’m at home at Christmas time, it’s like, Mom’s got her iPad out. She was always resistant to it. She’s the one who stuck to those 35 millimeter disposable cameras on trips, because that’s all she knew. Now she has her iPad, and she’s shooting only with that. Our family camera is a tablet. It doesn’t make sense. It’s fascinating to see that.

Going through the Instagram thing and making those filters was a learning experience, because — there’s a couple things there. First, it was giving away what was my signature — how I edited photos — to an app that I selfishly wanted to use to just post my photos on really easily. But then suddenly it became 200 million users using that same style. It’s no longer unique.

At the time phone cameras were crappy. They were five megapixels or three megapixels starting out and weren’t very high fidelity. You had to cover it to make it look good. Hipstamatic was the thing. They wanted to create this vintage feel. You just smattered it and made it look like something else, because the actual photo itself was nothing to marvel at.

It’s different now. The iPads shoot amazing photos. My phone shoots better than what my $1,000 camera did in 2003.

OM: I think 2010 is when I started taking pictures differently. Before that I had BlackBerry and Nokia smartphones and I would take a lot of pictures, but there was no depth to them. The photos were flat. You couldn’t be creative. It was just pictures.

Thanks to the iPhone, post-Instagram, people have started to think in terms of composition, color, and exposure. I think for a lot of people like me — who are not natural-born photographers — all of that was ambient learning. You didn’t know much about how to edit a picture, but you learned by playing with the apps. You saw what other people were doing and you tried to figure it out yourself. It was less about filters and more about changing one’s expectations of photography.

CR: That’s a good point. This renaissance is really the democratization of photography. Cameras are a commodity. They’re everywhere. For exactly that reason, it used to cost you a lot of money to get a decent camera to make art. For a long time having a camera in general was like, “What is that person doing? Who are they?” This whole Vivian Maier thing. Have you heard about her?

OM: No.

CR: She’s this undiscovered artist from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. She’d been shooting since the ’50s, but after she died they found 300,000 undeveloped negatives that she’d taken, totally unknown to anyone else. Now she’s being hailed as one of the top street photographers of the 20th century. She was always unique. People remembered her because she had a camera. That was rare at the time.

Now everyone has cameras. They’re all pulling out these phones and doing all these things. How do you stand out? How do you comprehend all that data? It’s mind-blowing. These are our memories. These are what people are using every day. We’re remembering more, first of all, because we’re taking more photos.

Also, as an artist, that’s conflicting, because now my little cousin can take a similar photo to mine and edit it like I used to. It would take me days. But she does it instantaneously on Instagram.

[topic]Are memories dead?[/topic]

Are Memories Dead?

OM: One thing I find distressing about the camera revolution is our ability to form memories with the photos, considering that we are always busy taking the picture and forgetting the life unfolding around the picture, which is what gives it so much context. Memories are in your heart and in your mind. I think we confuse photos on our smartphone as memories. The omnipresence of visual sensors has eliminated the idea of memories. There is a payload of emotion attached to memories. Today pictures have none of that. Even though they’re more beautiful, they’re more omnipresent. There are pictures everywhere. But there is little emotional payload to them.

There is a picture of me and my sister. I was five and she was three. Every time I look at that picture I’m taken back to that time. Not because of the picture but because all the stuff that happened that day is still somehow logged in my head. It is a emotional mile marker, and every time I see her, I am reminded of how far we have come. Whereas today we’re constantly taking digital pictures. We don’t have the metadata of emotion from the pictures.

CR: You’re describing the eternal struggle of a photographer.

Traditionally, a photographer’s job is to document and not partake. I’ve actually written a blog post about this, where I have days of photos and no actual memory of that day aside from the photos that I took. That’s because I’m so lost in the minutia of the camera and trying to get a photo that I’m not participating. I’m hiding behind this machine.

I was with my girlfriend in the Salt Flats in Utah. It was gorgeous. We had a fantastic day, I think, because she was smiling in the photos. But I have no memory of the day. It’s embarrassing. I wrote this blog post called “Don’t Forget the Salt,” because I forgot that day. It was because I was lost behind the camera. How do you balance that out?

One of the main reasons why I call my app Litely is because you can get in and out of the app quickly. I don’t want to spend a lot of time in that app. I don’t want it to be that my girlfriend is driving the car because I’m editing photos for an hour in the passenger’s seat, missing the trip. I’m missing the scenery that’s going by. How do I reconnect with that? So rather than having to send my photos to the [Adobe] Lightroom and bring them back to edit in the way I wanted to, I made an app that quickly applies the edits. And I made the interface easy enough where I don’t have to go, “Tap tap tap tap tap.” I can select it really easily and be done with it.

I actually have a gift for you. The last time we talked was through Twitter, because the iOS 7 camera app crashed on you three times. I felt really bad about that. We learned that iOS 7’s implementation of that camera, at least, if you look at Litely on the iPad, is crap. This is a 3D-printed logo of Litely from Shapeways. My girlfriend has one around her neck. I made three of them. One is on my desk, one is hers. You can have that one as well. I’m sorry that you missed those photos.

[topic]Are filters the new “film”[/topic]

OM: Wow, thanks! This is super cool.

ARE FILTERS THE NEW FILM?

OM: I’ve been using the app, but I still have not figured out how to get the most out of it. Could you write an FAQ or how‑to on what these things are useful for? They’re not all filters. They’re essentially —

CR: Film.

OM: It’d be cool to know what these presets are good for. The variations are subtle, and you have to spend hours trying to figure out what the variation is in many of these presets. Yes, you can see the variation from Whiny to Platinum, because it’s color versus black and white. But it helps to understand, “OK, this is my starting point. See if I like that look, or I don’t like that look.”

CR: You’re right. We tried to describe the Venice preset as, “These are warmer colors, and they’re good for skin tones and portraits.” But the presets are loose. It’s fun to hear you describe them, because it’s like a film stock. Why would you use Fuji versus Kodak?

I like to think of Litely as taking a century’s worth of film stock and putting it on your phone. That was impossible not too long ago. You’d choose one film stock, like [Kodak] Tri‑X. It was one of my favorite films ever. It was unique in its capabilities. People have shot it for that reason. Why Tri‑X? It’s one of those indescribable things. It’s the feeling that you get from it.

As you described it, they are Lightroom presets, and the adjustments that you have in the app are the top four adjustments that I use in Lightroom. As a professional photographer, everything that I need — those four adjustments and those filters — are the 99 percent case when I edit a photo.

OM: So if you understand film, you understand Litely better. If you don’t understand film, you don’t quite understand the nuance of the app.

CR: For most people who shot with Kodak, they didn’t really care too much. They just shot, like, “OK, I’m going to use Kodak,” and it became a favorite for certain photographers because of the results. Most people just stuck with it because they liked the result, and it was a trustworthy result. We’re actually building the store into that app now.

You can learn more about the apps and also buy presets, so you can preview the ones that you don’t own on top of your photo and go, “OK, why should I have that?” There are two more packs coming out. We have 12 new presets in the works, and we’re going to release them over time. We’re also adding push notifications to the app so that when we have a new one, you’ll see an alert.

OM: The whole thing is such a guessing game for me. I’ll keep trying. That is the most frustrating part and the most interesting part at the same time. I figured out everything about Camera Plus on my own. I could have emailed someone and they would have helped me, but I wanted to learn how to do it.

How did you get into photography and ended up starting Litely?

CR: I’ve been shooting photos professionally since 2005. Litely is, in a sense, the merging of my tech side and my photographer side. Photography always been this passionate hobby of mine. It was my diary when I was in high school. I always had a camera with me, and I was always taking photos. I was that weird guy with a bag in American Beauty.

That was me, basically. Everyone used to joke about that, because when that movie came out, it was very much an accurate description. It was my cardboard spaceship, I like to say. When I was little, I would look through the family camera and see through the lens. It would change everything. That was fascinating, and it was technical at the same time.

I started a web company in high school as well, just making websites. The design side happened. I worked at Yahoo doing mobile design in 2007. I was doing a lot of mobile design stuff in general. Finally all the mobile design and all the photography came to a head: I got to design my own photo app. It makes sense. The perfect blend.

It’s fascinating, because these are the presets that I’ve been using personally for a long time. These are the colors that I’ve since graduated from.

[topic]Rise of the Silicon Traveler[/topic]

The Rise of the Silicon Traveler

OM: You live here in San Francisco?

CR: Yeah, I live here currently. I haven’t really been back here too much, though. I’ve been traveling since leaving Apple, the last year and a half or so, pretty consistently. They talk about Silicon Valley or this whole Silicon Beach thing. I think that’s already outdated, because I was able to launch Litely and start an entire business remotely. I don’t really need to be here. I currently have guys in New York, building. I go visit them once in a while, but I like this idea of being a silicon traveler, where we’re always connected and where we need to be.

Looking at the work life, the Industrial Revolution, and Henry Ford, who dictated our five‑day work week, our nine-to-five, “Make sure you stamp out 20,000 parts today in your 8 hours” — I don’t think that applies anymore. Especially while trying to live this photographer’s life and doing tech at the same time.

OM: You would love my friend Matt Mullenweg. He’s a big proponent of the distributed workforce. Gigaom itself has always been distributed. We have so many people living in different places.

I think having a distributed company is essentially a mindset. If the founder doesn’t have the mindset, you can never have that. That ability to be flexible about things is important. I loved the idea so much that I started a website called Web Worker Daily, which is the idea of nomads. We used to call them “digital bedouins,” but now they call them “digital nomads.”

CR: “Digital nomads,” yeah.

OM: “Bedouin” is a more real kind of a phrase. You pitch your tent wherever, and you’re good.

CR: It’s fascinating. We have people in Seattle, in Texas, in New York, and here, and we don’t have an office. It’s kind of working. We try to do that, because I think it fuels creativity. Whatever keeps you inspired. For Litely, it’s integral to get out there and experience the world and to perpetuate that brand. We want to turn it into that. That’s what we’re working on right now — having that message out there, in general, and for people to unlock themselves from routine.

So many people ask, “How are you able to travel all the time?” For the most part, I was full-time at Apple. I was just taking photos on the weekends, because I put in the effort. Like, I’m going to drive three hours this morning, wake up a little bit earlier, and be somewhere cool in California and take some pictures. That’s all you need to do. If you can graduate from that, and even freelance a little bit on some level, then you can keep going.

OM: Sometimes I miss out on opportunities to take great pictures in the world around me. I was describing this to a friend of mine. It’s like, you go to a place — like I went to Italy for a few days — and suddenly photos start happening. Sure, they’re not important to other people, but to me, I have a picture of that moment and everything in my head. When I come here, suddenly after four or five days, everything becomes two‑dimensional. I don’t know why that happens. You would think the San Francisco Bay Area is not a place where things would become two‑dimensional.

[topic]Joy of Winging It[/topic]

The Joy of Winging It

CR: That’s interesting, and people do photo walks for that reason. Then suddenly you’re on a block you’ve never been on, looking at it in a different way. I struggle with that, too, living in a city, because I take pictures of the mountains. How do you stay inspired in someplace like San Francisco?

The way I’ve boiled it down for my own understanding is to trust in the idea of “winging it” and believe in that. You can’t plan a good photo. You have to let yourself find them. Going out and searching for a photo is the wrong way to think about it. You should just have an interesting life and tell the story through hitting a button.

Photos are stories. I don’t care about the visual. It’s more about what it says. If you open yourself up to that thinking and spend five more minutes just walking around and exploring a little bit more, you find things, find moments, that you wouldn’t have found normally.

For example, I got lucky one time. We had an office on the Embarcadero. I heard all these sirens, and I saw helicopters. What was going on? I had a busy day, but I was like, “You know what? Screw it. I’m going to go for a walk and figure out what this is.” I was just following helicopters, blindly.

We came to this area on the Embarcadero. I think it was Pier 19, and it was on fire. Burning like crazy, flames shooting out of the top of the roof. I could have stayed back with the crowd, but I decided to be a little more ballsy. I walked right up to it, as close as I could get.

I could feel the heat and the firefighters around me, it was so soon after it had started. I was supposed to be working. I was like, “I’m going to go just wing it.” I winged it and I got this photo, because I could see that things were starting to fall a little bit. I got it just as it collapsed.

There was a firefighter underneath. I can show you the photo. It was one of those pure moments where I could see everything happening. Ten minutes prior, I would have had no idea that this was going to happen if I hadn’t heard the helicopters. Suddenly I’m watching a building collapse in front of me, almost hitting a firefighter. Thank God he was okay — balls of steel.

That Pier 19 fire, it was the moment that told its own story. I was dumb enough and lucky enough to be close enough to take that picture. That was pure photography to me, because it simply told a story. It wasn’t about the photo. It was more about what was going on in it. The purest form of art is something that you’re not conscious of. You’re just living it, and I happened to have my phone with me, thankfully.

It was an iPhone photo, and it was nuts. It still gets me excited to think about it. I think it’s one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. I was so lucky to do it. It’s not because I’m a great photographer. It was just because I was able to push myself to go that extra five minutes and walk in that direction.

OM: Your tip on creativity is to be curious. Forget taking the best picture. Forget thinking about the light or the color. Just be curious about the world and keep going.

CR: There are painterly aspects of photography. It’s forced, and it takes a long time to get there. If you think about what photography’s done for human existence, it’s changed our perspective on war. It’s changed human history.

Since the invention of the camera, the first documented war was the Civil War. We went from this romanticized notion to “charge with our swords” and “war is a beautiful, glorious thing” to thinking, “Wow, war is actually terrible. People are dead, rotting in fields.”

People at home were suddenly witnesses to war. We weren’t oblivious. It wasn’t this big picture in our brains that was puffed up by media. It was a real view of war. Suddenly we see this antebellum movement happen around the same time. We didn’t like war after that, because we realized how horrific it was.

In the ’60s, our view of the earth changed when we saw Earth from the moon. That Earthrise photo changed history, and it started our environmentalist movement. We’re like, “Wow! This little teeny, tiny thing we’re on is fragile, and we’re small. We better preserve it, because it’s not that big.” We’re just looking back at that, the first time we’d ever seen the earth that way.

OM: With so many people taking so many photos, I wonder if we have lost that ability to contextualize.

CR: It’s like the whole Twitter versus Instagram thing. Twitter says you have 140 characters. If a photo’s worth 1,000 words, how many characters is that? A photo says so much more. I feel like Instagram has recently surpassed Twitter exactly for that reason. Psychologically, we get more through photos and Instagram. But we can also get desensitized to it.

I had this thought the other day while looking at these gorgeous photos of Washington, Vancouver, and Canada taken by these guys up there. If I had seen that 10 years ago I would be like, holy crap. But now I don’t even spend the time to Like it. I’m just like, “Oh, that’s cool.” I don’t even double-tap it because I’m so used to it. When you have so many war photos, so many horrific photos, people get used to it.

OM: Sameness?

CR: Visually there are a lot of similar photos. I’ve been posting a lot of Hawaii landscapes. I’m just so bored with them. I have to show other people like, “Hey, is this a good photo?” Because I can’t even tell anymore. I’m just like, “Here you go.” The last photo I posted last night, I had the same thing. It’s cool to see it through someone else’s eyes who hasn’t seen them before. But when everyone sees it and they’re all used to that silly landscape and the entire world is known, what’s next?

I think the truth, actually, is what’s next. The story is all that matters. The memory of it. If that is as impactful as what a pretty photo used to be, then I think you’ve actually taken a good one.

OM: One other thing I’ve often thought about photos is that when you look at all the pictures — like, when I came to New York for the first time, I had seen few pictures of New York. I had only read books about New York. It was all in my imagination.

There was this whole joy of discovery. Like, “Oh, I remember reading that thing, and there it is!” And, “It looks better than I thought it would,” or “it’s less than what I thought.” Your imagination is always in competition with reality.

Now there is little joy of discovery. You go and you’re like, “Damn, I’ve seen this picture. I’ve been there, it seems like.” I went to Berlin last December and January. “I’ve been there” was on a loop in my head, and that just didn’t feel right. I wonder if this is the part of photo revolution that we don’t really talk about, this ability to discover.

CR: Yeah, the magic gets muddled.
[topic]How to spot a fake Route 66 sign[/topic]

How to spot a fake Route 66 sign

OM: Let’s shift gears. Do you have any advice for budding photographers as to what they should be doing and what they should be looking for?

CR: It’s that extra five minutes or five hours, or that extra ten percent that you put into it. Because most people don’t put in the effort, don’t open themselves up to that sort of thing. You could have an amazing experience five feet away, but if you don’t walk in that direction and put in the effort to do it, you will never have that. It’s trying harder and also opening yourself up to letting the photo find you. Living the story, going places that you’ve never been before, surprising yourself and letting the day dictate what you capture.

I’ll tell you a story. I was in Baker, California. Baker is just outside Edwards Air Force Base, a middle-of-nowhere town with just one intersection. Two roads intersect; there are two gas stations and an antique store. We’re sitting there, kind of bored. We didn’t have to get home too fast so we’re like, “Why don’t we go to the antique store?” We go into the store, and we are looking at all the road signs. And we see this gorgeous Route 66 sign. It looks like a real antique. $300? It’s actually cheap. This old man in the back chimes in. He’s probably 80. He says, “You know those are fake?” What, really?

He walks over and goes on to show us how to tell a fake Route 66 sign from a real one. He’s like, “I’ve got some real ones in the back in my shed. You want to see them?” We follow this guy outside the antique store. He goes into this giant warehouse in the back that we didn’t notice from the street. He slides the door open. What I think he’s going to do is pull out a couple signs from some dusty area. He opens up the door and it’s a freaking museum. He’s got a Chevy ’54, ’57 — these gorgeous cars that he was restoring.

It’s the most well-preserved, deep collection of Americana road signs and cars I’ve ever seen. He’s got missiles from the air force base up on the roof. He’s got a plane in there. He’s a pilot himself. It was gorgeous. We were just like, “How are you hiding this from the world? This should be a museum.” He’s like, “Oh, this is my personal collection. I don’t let people back in here.” This is his man cave.

We spent the next hour trading stories. I took a photo of him, a portrait that I love. It’s the story around his life and how he’s curated everything in there. We learned that the Kansas Route 66 sign is hard to find, so most of them are fakes. If you see a Kansas one, it’s probably a fake, unless it’s got these certain things. Or with Texas, it’s such a short word that it doesn’t span the entire sign. They center “Texas.” Or if it says “Route,” that’s totally not right. It only says “66.” There’s never a “Route” anything on the sign itself. Fascinating.

We spent probably an hour and a half or two hours talking with him and having an incredible day. I took one photo. That was his portrait. That photo meant the most to me that day because of what it actually was. We would have never had that experience had we not gone into that antique store and been open, just winging it. I’ve never planned a single photo in my life. Let me say that. I’ve got a ton of work, and I’ve never planned a single one. I’ve been in forest fires and insane, insane things.

There was this other time when we were driving toward this cloud formation. I was with my best friend from college and his new girlfriend, who was a model. They were in a separate car. We were driving, and I saw this giant plume over the mountains as we were going, snaking through on that road. Intrigued, I decided we should drive toward that and find out what it was. That’s the kind of decision most people don’t make. They look and go, “Gee, I wonder what that is,” and they keep driving. They listen to their radio. We decided to follow the smoke. We ended up getting closer and closer. It was this giant brushfire. We kept going. We got closer, and we went up into the mountains again. I’ll show you the photo.

Earlier that day two guys had taken off on a plane, and they crashed and died. That plane crash started this brush fire. I learned this after the fact. That was really horrible.

But we got so close that ash was raining on us. This DC-10 flew over our heads, probably 500 feet up, and dumped its load through the smoke. You could feel the heat from it. It burned as the ash hit you. We had to leave, but we did a photo shoot right in the middle of it. My friend’s girlfriend was wearing a white dress. She fell in front of this forest fire at sunset. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it because of what we went through. We were afraid that we were going to start burning. I had holes in my clothing because the ash was so hot. That photo found me that day.

OM: In your mind, there’s no difference between the lens and your eye, essentially. That’s a good picture, when the lens and the eye are in complete sync. You’re seeing and capturing at the same time.

CR: It’s exactly that. You find this honest moment, where you connect with something, and that’s when you take the picture. That’s all you need to do. It’s enveloping that moment and then putting it somewhere. If you open yourself up, it will allow you to do anything. I’m not a great photographer. I’m just a curator. I know when to hit the button. I leave the rest up to life.

OM: The iPhone isn’t really a camera. It’s like the lens is the extension of your eye.

CR: It is, exactly.
[topic]My iPhone is really me[/topic]
OM: If you let it be, right?

My iPhone is really me

CR: If you connect to my phone via AirDrop, it doesn’t say “Cole’s iPhone.” It says “Cole Rise.” It is me. This phone is everything. It is who I am, because it’s always with me. It’s an appendage, and it happens to record.

The whole Google Glass thing, that’s cute. I think we’ll have something better to be able to capture things all the time. If we can solve the storage problem, then we’ll always be capturing these memories. You still have to decide which one you share, and that’s what we’re doing, currently.

OM: Litely essentially wraps presets into an app. I have another photographer friend, Kevin Abosch. He made the Lenka Cam app. Right now they’re black-and-white. It’s just one style of photography. That’s how he likes to take a black-and-white picture. Do you think more people are going to open up to something similar, where the apps become a wrapper for your interpretation of creativity? Like, it’s less about a tool to take pictures and it’s more about a way to express yourself?

CR: Absolutely. Curation and who curates it are as important as how well it’s built and how easy it is to use. A good example is Lenka Cam, of course, because that’s his style. It’s like paint. If you want to use his style, that’s awesome. I don’t see Litely competing with other apps, because it’s just another alternative. I am the burnt sienna, and he is the magenta. He has his style, people can use it, and that’s awesome. I’ll use his style once in a while if I feel like doing it.

VSCO Cam has its own thing going too. You might feel like using whoever’s style that is. Pretty much, all we have is ourselves and who we are. When you edit photos using Instagram filters [laughs], you kind of go away.

OM: It’s interesting; I started out using filters and now I don’t. The only thing I control on the photo is exposure and contrast. Most of my pictures were slightly crooked, and that is because I had some sight issues. It was Helena Price who pointed out that all my photos were crooked, and I ended up figuring out how to deal with the problem.

CR: They discovered this about Monet. Monet’s artwork became more and more colorful over his lifespan, because his eyes were becoming worse because of macular degeneration or something like that. I forget exactly which way it went, but you can see the progression of his vision through his artwork. That’s beautiful, because you are, in a sense, that filter. I prefer that.

OM: Do a lot of people buy your iTunes presets? Or do they buy the Litely app now?

CR: The Litely app was supposed to spur desktop presets, because the margin is a lot better there. Rather than 70 percent, it’s 98 percent. Both have gone up, but far and beyond it’s the Lightroom app. After the first month, it was easy to see, “Wow. We’re making way more money that way.” It’s cool to be surprised that way. Mobile is certainly here.

OM: Why do you think you’ve been successful?

CR: I’m just like any old other person in the world. I’m just a human being. I’ve tried to live honestly to photography and have cared about it for long enough where Litely isn’t a ploy to make money. It’s a passion. It’s who I am. I’ve been fortunate, through photography, to be able to communicate that message on some level to certain people. I feel that honesty resonates with people. It’s not coming from nowhere. It’s coming from someone who has a message. It’s the same reason why I would buy Lenka Cam versus something like an Aviary. I love what they do, but there’s no one behind it. It’s a business.

OM: That’s what you do with food, fashion, the whole thing. We want to know a story. Somebody wrote about this recently, how customization is the next big wave of the internet. I think it’s the new thing already. People have not figured it out.

CR: I’d love to think of Litely presets as handmade. Although they’re digital, they are made in a place over a span of time with a tool. It’s for a reason that’s more than making money. It’s for making art and telling a story.

Photos of Cole Rise courtesy of Helena Price.