Fashion Archives - Pi.co: A Conversation Series!

Abe Burmeister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Om: But you live in Brooklyn now?

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

Om: Cool.

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

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

Outlier’s Formative Days: Then vs Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reality of Capital Investments in Apparel & Retail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of Technical Apparel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fabrics of The Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Good Company

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

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

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

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

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

Parting Words of Advice

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

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

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

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

Abe: Thanks, I appreciate it.

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

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Julie Zerbo

Om: Were you interested in fashion when you were growing up?

Julie: Not really. In law school a professor thought I might be interested in fashion law, and it turns out that I was. I didn’t set out to work in fashion or to be a blogger. I was under the impression that I would go to law school, do everything that a traditional law student is supposed to do, which is write on the law review and join the court team and then be summer associate and go into a big firm.

But by the time I was in my first summer of law school, my website had taken off. That took up a lot of my time. I would go home from school and write articles of my own and post them, giving me instant access to readers, which I found to be more interesting than the law review practice with its extensive lag time

Law Review is very well respected and old school. I find it to be dated, though, because the articles are so long and it’s not digestible material. It’s not interesting for everyone, and the audience is somewhat limited. There was something about being able to reach so many people and make these otherwise difficult, complex topics more digestible.

In addition, from the beginning it was selfish. It was a way for me to learn. We didn’t have fashion law classes then at my law school, so I would read and research and write as a way of learning the theory of law.

Om: When I was growing up, it took forever to pay your dues and get to the point of success. Now with the internet age, it seems like you can have an impact at a relatively young age. Do you agree with my assessment that the internet has allowed people to compress the time it takes their careers to unfold?

Julie: I agree completely. While I have been able to build an audience in this area of fashion law, I don’t think that’s even remotely equivalent to the experience of some of the people that I look up to in fashion law. The website and the internet have given me a platform much earlier than they probably should have.

Om: My argument is that the internet compresses time and distance. It’s like a time machine: You fast-forward to what you’re supposed to do much faster, because you find out much faster what you’re supposed to do. One of the things I often think about is the correlation between how we’re always on the internet and fast fashion.

Julie: I lose sleep thinking about the cycle of fashion and about fast fashion. There absolutely is a correlation, especially in terms of time. One of the ways it started was to make these high-fashion garments accessible at every price point, which I think is a noble goal. It just has come with so many abuses, whether it be slave labor, which fast fashion retailers have been accused of, or unsafe garment factories, as we’ve seen multiple times over the past several years, or human rights abuses.

We’ve created this system that is so unbalanced. We’re asking for so much in terms of the quantity of garments, and we’ve come to expect it for so little in terms of price that it’s an unmanageable system.

Practically, it’s cheaper to send X amount of dollars on a PR campaign than to implement a new auditing system for overseas suppliers. It looks prettier. It’s something tangible that shoppers can be a part of. Fashion is meant to look beautiful, and it’s supposed to make you feel beautiful. Part of that is the industry protecting itself and making sure that it always looks good.

Om: How do you, individually, stay away from this magnetic pull of the industry and becoming part of the firmament?

Julie: I consider myself much more in academics than a fashion industry insider, and that gives me some perspective. Not being afraid that I’m going to burn bridges — it’s my biggest asset. I feel stronger about telling the truth, being an objective voice and educating than making friends.

Other publications and blogs can’t get away with that, because advertisers are on top of everyone and censoring what people can say. Luckily, I have advertisers that are largely based in academia.

Om: This is a tough business. There was that big story of you taking on Chanel: It was pretty amazing to see that and that they actually made amends and took the product off the market.

Julie: It was surprising, because I didn’t know that anyone would read my story. At the time, I was still a first‑year law student. I didn’t know that a blogger had that kind of power. I was just writing about what I thought was right. It goes to show that you don’t have to be a CEO of a fashion company or an editor in chief at a huge publication to have an impact.

Om: How would you describe the fashion industry to people who are not into fashion? People ask me, “What is Silicon Valley like?” My simple explanation is that we have thousands of socially dysfunctional, ultra‑smart people in one tiny space, so things happen. We don’t know how, but things happen. That’s it.

Julie: The fashion industry is like high school, but everyone’s better dressed and and everyone ignores any elephant in the room.

Om: The other day at an event for a well‑known brand, I realized that this company has less than $50 million in revenue. Their presence is so much bigger than the reality of their business. My perspective is a bit messed up because I’m in Silicon Valley, where things become big pretty fast. I was shocked by how small many of these operations really are.

Julie: That’s a good point. The perception of the fashion industry is that it’s a lot more glamorous than it is. Designers are made into celebrities. Then you go to their office in the Garment District in New York and realize they have a team of five people. It’s much different than you would otherwise perceive it, when they’re on the red carpet with a celebrity or on TV.

Om: It’s “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” That’s part of social media. Instagram and Facebook help create this projection. It’s the ultimate glorification of an average person, including fashion and tech.

Julie: We forget that the image portrayed on social media is curated. No one’s showing their daily life, by any means. They’re showing this idealized version of themselves.

Most often it’s for the purpose of branding, because in fashion, particularly in high fashion, there’s this ideal that has to be upheld in order to charge $3,000 for a purse. Particularly on social media, I think it’s easy to forget that this is someone’s Instagram page as opposed to a huge brand.

Om: Social media is much more of an equalizer than most people think, so we have a lot of small brands that are getting exposure. I’ve suddenly become aware of a lot more products from Japan and Europe, even South America. Do you feel that this will have an impact in the long term on some of the larger companies like LVMH or Kering? Do you think they’ll start to see some of the attention move away from their brands to these smaller players, or do you think the magazines, TV and advertising will still keep them in tight control of the fashion industry?

Julie: One of the big positive takeaways of social media is that it has given exposure to brands that lack a marketing budget. I’m not sure whether that will ever challenge the truly big guys in the industry.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how brands or anyone in their respective avenues can compete with the established system in whatever industry they are in. You have to work within the established system and make it that way, or can you make a system of your own.

I’ve been struggling with this point, and it seems social media has to some extent given people an alternate avenue to make their name. Going outside the norm to compete, and that doing business doesn’t only have to be conducted within the existing system in order to work.

Om: Sometimes I wonder if I want to believe that more than anything else. There was a line from the show The Wire: “The game is the game.” You can’t change that, unfortunately.

Photos by New York based photographer J S Silberman. Follow him on Instagram @jssilberman

Brunello Cucinelli

Om Malik: I’ve been reading about you, and I have been fascinated by your progress and more importantly how you have conducted your business. Where did you find the inspiration to follow this path?

Brunello Cucinelli: From the teary eyes of my father. When we were living in the countryside, the atmosphere, the ambiance — life was good. We were just farmers, nothing special. Then he went to work in a factory. He was being humiliated and offended, and he was doing a hard job. He would not complain about the hardship or the tiny wages he received, but what he did say was, “What have I done evil to God to be subject to such humiliation?”

Basically, what is human dignity made of? If we work together, say, and, even with one look, I make you understand that you are worth nothing and I look down on you, I have killed you. But if I give you regards and respect — out of esteem, responsibility is spawned. Then out of responsibility comes creativity, because every human being has an amount of genius in them. Man needs dignity even more than he needs bread.

[In the past, people] didn’t know anything about their employer. My father or my brother didn’t know if their employer had a villa on the sea. Whereas with Google Maps, I can see where your house is. That’s where the world is becoming new. Mankind is becoming more ethical, but it is not happening because man has decided to become better than he was 100 years ago. It’s because we know we live in a glass house where everybody can see.

In order to be credible, you must be authentic and true. Twenty years ago, something might be written about you in a newspaper. Then this newspaper would be scrapped, and that would be it. But now your statement stays [online] for the next 20 to 50 years — who knows how long for. To be credible, you must be consistent in the way you behave. Someone can say to you, “Listen, two years ago, you said something different.” In a split second, they know. That’s where lies that wonderful future for mankind.

Radical Transparency

Om: So you are in favor of radical transparency?

Brunello: Yes, I am in favor of that, because that’s the way to become authentic and credible.

Om: Authentic and credible and open are wonderful ideas, but I wonder how you feel it all fits into today’s reality. Now every person edits the story they tell about themselves, carefully ensuring what the world looks at — whether it’s over Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.

Brunello: I’d like to focus on the positive. The positive side is that you must be credible. Because everybody knows the problem that I’m concerned about, the dangerous is what you’ve just said, Facebook and all that.

Like [Greek philosopher] Heraclitus used to say, Polemos is the father and master of mankind. Without Polemos, there is no discussion, right? It’s difficult to have a discussion, because nowadays human beings walk with a bowed head, looking down [at their phones]. Yesterday morning, a girl bumped her head in my face because she was not looking up.

I want to take a step backward. Who remembers the last email they sent yesterday? No one. Or the last text message. Emperor Hadrian used to say, “The daily business, the daily life, the daily chores, kills the human being.“ I’m not interested in daily chores. We have now swapped information for knowledge, which is not the same thing. I do not want to know. I’m not online. I don’t even have a computer.

I am a great supporter of memory. If I remember things, I do not need to go back and check and revise. In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening. The day after, when you turn up for work, what are you like? You are a still person. You are better.

I do not want to be liable for intruding into your private life. Saint Benedict said, “You should look after your mind to study every day, then your soul through praise,” which is basically speaking to yourself, praying. “Then work, through work.” But the abbot is the one who basically assigns all the work; he is responsible for you even after your death. I do not want to assign work to you where I feel responsible for ruining or altering your private life.

Taming Technology

Om: How do you reconcile that with a world that is moving constantly and quickly, 24/7?

Brunello: Well, for example, we call our New York office and no one says, “Hi, how are you? How’s your day?” No one. If everything is so short and to the point, how much time is then left for your mind? [It should be the case that] if we need three hours to go deep into things, then we do it.

Om: So you run a business that is across the universe, across the planet, different time zones, different people. Isn’t that more of a 24/7 endeavor?

Brunello: No, it’s not 24/7, because here in the company, you start at 8 AM, and at 5:30 PM you are forbidden to work any further. No emails can be sent to more than two addressees, just one or two. No group mailing. Why must a single email be read by 10 different people, unless it’s the 10 people who are interested in that specific issue? In order to disperse responsibility?

The first time I was in New York, we had a tiny office, and they were emailing across it. I said, “No way. Just get up and go to your neighbor and ask them one thing, in one split second, in person.” First of all, you look me in the eye. You smell me, my presence. Maybe I take the opportunity to ask you about your family. Don’t you feel better than if you get an email? Maybe I smile and you feel even better.

The other day, I was writing some things that were important to me, and a message arrived. Who is able not to check the message? No one. Everybody is tempted. You go there for 30 seconds, then your mind is there, even though you were focused on what you were doing previously.

Here, no meetings with mobile phones. No one is allowed to bring them into the meeting room. You must look me in the eye. You must know things by heart. You must know all of your business with a 1 to 2 percent error rate. It is also training for your mind. It is also a question of respect, because I have never called someone on a Saturday or a Sunday. No one is allowed to do so. We must discover this, because if individuals rest properly, then it is better.

Do you know the word otium in Latin, meaning, “doing nothing”? The Roman people were all laid back. In all the pictures, they were all laying around. They were doing nothing, just staring. In the winter on a Sunday afternoon, I can spend six hours in front of the fireplace, just looking at the flames and thinking. In the evening, I’m drunk with beautiful thoughts. My wife says to me, “What are you looking at?” I say, “The fire.” We have to take a step backward.

Many years ago, I witnessed something in America. I was there for Thanksgiving. When it was time for lunch, my friend would get a dish and bring it to the children, who were placed in front of the television. They were absorbed by the television. I said to my wife, it’s something I can’t cope with. I’ve always said we must be on the cutting edge with technology. But your life shouldn’t change as a consequence.

Slaves to technology?

Om: Is it fair to say that you believe in technology as a tool and not in us becoming slaves to it?

Brunello: Yes. I have a phone. I think I receive 10 calls a day, because they know that I only want to receive the important ones. In Hong Kong, I walked out of the subway and someone was saying on the loud speaker, “Be careful, there’s a wall.” It’s basically what happened to the lady yesterday morning. We must really manage this kind of reality. We must rule it somehow.

Om: What’s the correlation? All these people you are quoting are very interesting, but why mention them? Also how are they correlated to all these people whose photos you have on the wall here?

Brunello: Those are the ancient thinkers, philosophers: Socrates, Confucius, Constantine, Palladio. These people are the contemporary figures that left me with a different view on the world. Dostoyevsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Kafka, Kennedy and the Pope. At the end of the day, all these great people, what do they focus on? Human dignity. They all talk about being custodians in the world. Hadrian, the emperor said, “I feel responsible for the beauty in the world.”

Can I ask you, how old are you? I am 60 myself.

Om: 48.

Brunello: You are not far away from my mindset.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a great enlightened man, but he was the first of the Romantic movement, too. I think that in the last 30 years, we have tried to govern mankind through enlightenment, through the use of reason, our mind. This is no good.

This century is where enlightenment and romanticism must blend. A great idea that is born out of the mind and then goes through the soul — there is no doubt that the outcome is marvelous. If this idea is true, fair, beautiful, there’s no doubt that it is also a good idea. I think this applies to everything.

Om: Agreed.

Brunello: I spend a lot of time in the Italian café, and when we are in the café, what is that? That’s the Polemos I was telling you about. Discussions over time, debate about theology, economics, economy, religion. If we said, “When was Kant born? 1750?” and your mind was working in the meantime. Now, split second, Google it, and you know. There it is.

The mind no longer searches for things. For example, in what years was Marcus Aurelius emperor? When was that battle that we always talk about? What was there in that precise moment? What was going on?

In the past, say we were going to to meet up. I had seen you once before — your face, your body. But I didn’t know what it would be like to meet again. Whereas now I’ve seen you and you’re wearing your bikini. I’ve seen you everywhere. I do not want to deprive you of the surprise of the magic. Because then when you finally show up, you feel the smell of the burnt wood and everything else.

The other night at my place, there were 19 friends who have known one another since birth. We went through childhood, youth, everything together. The other night we were having this beautiful discussion about death. One of them got his phone out and said, “Look at this video.” It was one of those videos about jokes and stuff: funny, of course. Of course, the discussion was interrupted. I said, “Are we crazy? No, there’s no way.” In the end, we never resumed the talk about death.

Then you ask yourself, “How can I govern this? How can I manage it?” No one can actually be so strong that you are thinking, then a bleep comes and you’re not tempted to take a look. I don’t know anybody who can resist that temptation.

Cashmere Chronicles

Om: Can we talk a little bit about you and your career as a businessman?

Brunello: Yes, with pleasure.

Om: You dropped out of engineering school to design cashmere sweaters. What was the attraction to cashmere?

Brunello: I had read Theodore Levitt, the American, who used to say that developed countries were supposed to manufacture special handcrafted goods, because one day, new people would arrive who would make the same things but at a better price. The idea of doing luxury, “made in Italy” has always been with me.

Why cashmere? Because I was using something that theoretically never goes to waste. You never throw away a cashmere pullover. The idea of manufacturing something that you never scrap, you never throw away — I liked it very much. Mind you, I had no money in my pocket at that time. Absolutely nothing.

I had this idea of building a company with one or two people and giving dignity to work.

Om: Now we have a world that is changing. The idea of “brand” is kind of amorphous, and you don’t really know who stands behind that brand. I wonder if you have any thoughts about it.

Brunello: I wanted the brand to have my face. I wanted the product to convey the culture, life, lifestyle, dignity of work. We are a listed company, and I wanted to manufacture a product with dignity. I wanted a profit with dignity. Because the press all talk about the moral ethics of profit. Why can’t we have a dignified profit then?

Would you buy something from someone if you knew that the person, by making this product, has harmed or damaged mankind? No, you would not buy it. You wouldn’t even buy it if you knew that the company had staggering profits. Our cashmere blazer costs $3,000 retail, but the profit must be dignified. It needs to respect the raw material producer, then the artisans, then those working for the company. The consumer also needs to be respected. Everything must be balanced.

We need a new form of capitalism, a contemporary form of capitalism. I would like to add “humanistic” to that equation.

Don’t you feel that over the last two or three years? Don’t you smell it? There is an awareness raising, a civil, ethical point of view. The idea of community, dignity. Yes, it’s a strong sensation.

Om: I refuse to buy anything made in China, unless I know who makes it, and also I don’t buy anything which comes from fashion conglomerates. I like to pay for quality. The only challenge I feel is that for our approach to work, there has to be a certain amount of money, a certain amount of comfort in life. Without it, some people still have to work with the industrial society we are now in.

Brunello: My daughter refused to buy a pair of trousers for €19. Beautiful trousers. I said, “Why didn’t you buy them?” She said, “How much money do they think the worker actually made or was paid for that?” I think that if you make a product, you have to sell in that specific market. In India, it has a price; in America, it has another price. I’m fine with that.

There are some companies that give a lot of their money to charity. I’m not interested in that. Because first of all I want to see how they make their profit in the process. It is meaningless that they make a huge profit and then do charity.

Rise of the Internet Brands

Om: There is a big boom in internet-based fashion brands. Do you think that trend has the ability to influence the world of fashion and clothing?

Brunello: Yes, absolutely.

There’s luxury, absolute luxury, aspirational luxury and accessible luxury. Luxury is a handcrafted good or a place that is beautiful, well-made, exclusive. It must be exclusive; otherwise it’s not luxury. It’s nearly always something beautiful, well-made, true, and also useful and fair.

But what is this thing, “accessible luxury”? The two words don’t go together. Absolute luxury must be exclusive too. Everything must be balanced. You made it. The raw material supplier, did they earn the fair amount? Good. Do the people who work for the company earn fair wages? Yes. Has the company made a fair profit or an excessive profit?

I think this jumper is three or four years old. Ten years old. Five years old. Three years. Even if you stop wearing it 10 years later, it should still be there. At the end of the day, most of all, there is quality, a high degree of workmanship.

We went public, and we have more than 50 percent American investors as shareholders. Before going public, I said to them, “Are you looking for a company that grows very fast, that makes profits that are too high, in our view, quick profits? Do not invest in our company. Do you want a company that grows in a gracious way? That allows suppliers to grow alongside it, so that your artisans can grow as well as the company’s staff?”

You buy this product and you feel better, you feel at peace, because you bought a product that, although very expensive, there is work and respect for the work that goes into the product. I do not buy a specific product if I know you have made preposterous amounts of profit out of it. That’s exactly where, in my view, the new capitalism lies.

The world has changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Man must adjust, must be contemporary. Capitalism and capitalistic people must be contemporary.

Om: What do you mean by “the world has changed”?

Brunello: It’s open. We were saying before that I can use Google Maps to locate your home. I can see which car you drive, what swimming pool you have. I think that the world is completely different as a consequence. It is new. In a split second, you can have 2,000 people convening or rallying to a square.

Om: Let me give you a little counterargument. My theory is that we live in a world that moves much, much faster than ever before. In the Industrial Revolution, we moved at a certain speed and compressed time and spaces. The internet makes everything even faster, mobile. From my pocket to Italy to America to India is essentially microseconds.

The world is much faster, and there is a big change as a result. Whether it is fashion or cultural movements or political movements, we forget about what’s happening so fast. We had Putin move into Crimea, and it’s old news and nobody talks about it in the American media already. We are talking about something else now. The world is very different like that. That’s a big challenge we face as a human race.

Speed Kills?

Brunello: In 1220, Genghis Khan was boasting that in two days, he could do what the Roman army would do in 10 days. He was boasting about his speed. Man’s feeling has not changed, but the pace has changed.

Om: From a business perspective, has this connected planet helped you grow your business and open new markets quickly? Or not really?

Brunello: No. As far as business is concerned, I do not like things to go too quickly. I like to be swift as a person, but I don’t like things to be rushed lightheartedly.

What I have tried to do is manage the American market as if it were a domestic market together with Europe. I speak to the Dallas store as if it were the Venice store. Someone from San Francisco basically listens to the same music as someone from Milan. They wear roughly the same clothes. They have their iPad, their iPhone. Just think of how mankind has become more homogeneous.But true luxury lies in the fact that you are not too widely known.

I am fascinated by the time that we are living in, because enlightenment and romanticism are blending. We are rediscovering human dignity, plus the dignity of the territory, the community.

Om: You once said that running a company is simple. I wanted to know more about that. I want to learn the business principles that other people, other entrepreneurs, can learn from you.

Brunello: You must believe in the human being, because the creativity of a company — Let’s say you have a company with 1,000 people. Maybe we were told that there are only two or three genius people in the 1,000. But I think that if you have 1,000 people, you have 1,000 geniuses. They’re just different kinds of genius and a different degree of intensity.

We hold a meeting here with all the staff every two months. Everybody takes part in it. Even the person with the humblest tasks knows exactly what was the latest shop we opened. Everything is based on esteem, and esteem then generates creativity.

Everything is visible, when things go well and also when they go less well. When we are sad, when we are worried, when we are happy: If you show all these different moods, then you are credible. That’s why I say this is simple.

Om: Right now you’re a publicly traded company, but you yourself have a more a philosophical bent. How do you reconcile the need of the stock market with your outlook on the world?

Brunello: Finance is now going back to working along with industry while respecting each’s mutual role. In the last 20 years, finance dealt too much with industry, and industry dealt too much with finance. Whereas I myself, I’m an industrialist. I don’t know anything about finance. If you invest in me, you invest in an industry. I like it even better if you call it an artisanal industry.

As for my business plans, I have three-year business plans and 30-year business plans but also three-centuries business plans. I think that this is another good breakthrough in the world.

I haven’t come across one single investor who asked me to target a higher growth. Generally speaking, we pay our suppliers and staff 20 percent more than the average on the market. No investor ever asked, “Why don’t you reduce their wages? They’re too high.” I’m confident, because finance will become contemporary and modern too.

State of Modern Fashion

Om: I want your comments on the modern fashion industry. As an industry insider, how do you see all this internet-driven hype?

Brunello: I think that there are some finance people, the French ones, that are great at finance and have bought companies. This is one way. Then there’s a second way, the Italian way, where there are some industrialists with many enterprises.

They have a never-ending kind of outlook about their companies. Armani is just a witness to that. Basically, it testifies to this. They follow their own path, their own route. They can both be appreciated, but they’re two different routes. Then, of course, some of these companies might sell to the other side, maybe because the owners are old. Some of them go public. Some of them have private equity funds.

When you sell a company, you tend to say that everything is going downhill. Whereas I like to quote Heraclitus on this: While things rest, the world regenerates. Something is born, grows, dies, rests, regenerates and regenerates again. That’s why I’m not at all worried. These are just different routes.

Om: There’s a lot of talk of manufacturing revival in the United States. Do you think it is feasible? If it is, what are the lessons from Italy that the U.S. can take?

Brunello: I think that there is a trend toward going back to manufacturing there. People want to buy a “made in the U.S.” thing. You want to buy a French champagne, but you also want to buy something from your own country.

We have to rebuild the basis of all the skills. For example, the schools for arts and crafts. We have to start rebuilding. In order to do that, we need to give moral and economic dignity back to this kind of craft. Say you are a tailor. If you earn $1,200 a month, you are sort of ashamed to say that that’s your trade, because that’s the culture. We have to do the opposite. It should be that if someone sees you are a tailor, they say, “Oh, you are plying a very great trade, the tailor.” That’s the moral dignity I’m talking about.

Italian Pride

Om: We have a lot of good shoe brands: Alden, Allen Edmonds, and a bunch of others like Codie. They have done well in the U.S. One of the reasons you can have so many arts and crafts and artisanal stuff being made in Italy is that you have the whole ecosystem.

Brunello: Each of us specializes in something. Italy has strong industries. It’s ranked second only after Germany in Europe. There’s furniture, food and apparel. [The United States] will go down in history because of technology. Germany, cars. The French have champagne. Every country has its own identity.

Say I work for Apple. Maybe I have the humblest kind of job, but I’m not ashamed that I work for Apple. Because it is still Apple. Whereas here in Italy, you say, “I’m a tailor” or “I’m a waiter” and you still get that kind of respect.

That’s the nobility that we have to rediscover. That goes hand in hand with a comeback to the community, to the territory. In Italy, this is strong. The 35-year-olds, 40-year-olds, with their children, they’re starting to take a look at the community. They want to go back to living in the countryside. They want to buy good food, good fruit. There is something in the air.

Om: I’m fascinated that you have such deep passion for philosophy. I wonder how it has helped you as a businessperson.

Brunello: In everything, really. For example, take Marcus Aurelius, the emperor. In any possible mood that you might be in, you read a sentence by him and you feel better. Any philosopher helps you to raise your head and the world will look better. Respect the human being, and that will be better. Hadrian the emperor said, “I never met anyone who after being paid a compliment did not feel better.”

The true way to nurture your soul is philosophy. The true malaise of the human being — no matter whether Italian, American, Chinese — is the malaise of your soul, the uneasiness of your soul. This is stronger now than when my father was young or my grandfather.

I would like to try to somehow cure this malaise of the soul, even with the young people working for my company, because at the end of the day, you can be wealthy and still feel the same way. I know many people who own a fortune. The other day, a very loaded person said to me, “I’d love to be more serene.” This is true for rich people, poor people.

There are three things you cannot buy. Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not. Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you. I think that diet is the biggest sacrifice in my life. Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself. This is something you can do through culture and philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius says, “You should go with the flow of mankind, you should live as if it was the last day of your life, plan as if you were to live forever,” and then he also adds, “You should be at rest, at peace, you should give yourself some peace.” Saint Benedict adds, “The sun should never set on our rage. Let’s go to sleep at peace with mankind.”

Let’s try looking after our soul while working. Do you know that we work 11 percent of our life? We can’t have everything revolve around work. Unfortunately, now in Italy, it is hip and chic to say, “I am so tired and exhausted by work.” My father was tired because he was farming the land. He would say, “I need some sleep, I need some rest,” but he did not have this kind of feeling.

This is the great kind of treatment that we have to follow on a daily basis. Philosophy prescribed this treatment to me. I don’t know if you know Boethius, who lived in 520 AD. He was King Theodoric’s right-hand man. Theodoric condemned Boethius to death. He resorts to philosophy for help. Philosophy turns up as a woman, not very young, but with alert eyes. She says to Boethius, “What are you complaining about in your life? You have had this, this, this and that.” This is part of man.

Alexander the Great conquered a country. The tyrant cut the noses off the people there. It’s just the way it is. It’s part of life. I do not feel anxiety. What am I supposed to say here? You see, I think that philosophy really is part of human life.

Meetings & Mail

Om: One of the challenges that I have as somebody who works in the world of technology — and a lot of us in technology, like founders and engineers, have — is that we tend to work hard all the time. That is just a human state. How does one get away from constantly working? What is your advice?

Brunello: Sometimes our meetings are done standing, without coffee, no buffet, everything quick. This does not mean that everything is treated quickly. If the meeting takes three days, then three days are devoted to it.

How can you work 12 hours a day? Where is your mind? Where does it end up if you work 12 hours a day? Maybe your mind only develops in a specific sector. Maybe if you focus on that, you lose out on family, you lose out on spirituality with yourself, time with yourself.

For example, the other day I was in Milan, and I met with two 55-year-old managers who work as investors. One said to me, “I work from 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM.” Sitting there, in front of a screen, I wouldn’t entrust anything of mine to him for 12 hours. Then, if you live in the city, you go back home, it takes one hour to commute. What about the morning after?

That’s where we have to find a different kind of balance. You think that you have worked one hour less, but the morning after, your rate of creativity is sky-high.

What is Success

Om: This is a challenge in modern society. We measure success in terms of, “We’ve worked 12 hours.” The entire society is rooted around the idea of more, and longer has become the measure of success. How does a young founder or a young startup measure what you’re suggesting?

Brunello: So, I am 60. I have decided to work seven hours instead of eight, because I’m starting to be old. I have not reduced the rapidity, not by one split second. Since I am older, though, I get tired and I need rest.

We went public, then all the banks came here, all the people, and we were working until midnight the first days. There was one hour with just a sandwich, one hour coffee, one hour discussion. I said, “From tomorrow, everything changes.” So everybody turns up at 8 AM, and at 5:30 PM everybody leaves. That’s the only time we have available. I do not want to see any time wasted. I do not want during the day to see funny emails or joke emails. So we were able to go public without being overwhelmed.

During the road show, the banks said to me, “You are supposed to meet eight to nine people in one-to-one meetings a day.” I said, “You must be crazy!” Am I supposed to meet someone for 45 minutes, and then another 45 minutes with someone else, then at 2 PM, I don’t know what I said or didn’t say? I said, “No, that’s not my way. I’m meeting five, tops, very focused, that’s it.”

We have to rediscover the quality of work. If during the day, someone texts, “Why don’t we go for a pizza on a Sunday?” I don’t receive it until after 6 PM.

Om: I guess you’re not on Twitter. [Silence.]

Brunello: No, I understand. You see, we can make things concise, and we have time for our family. When I say family, I mean your time, your private time. So tonight, at half-past five, that’s it, I’m finished. I go for a jog, I have a booklet that I carry with me, and when I come across a good idea, I jot it down.

Om: This is fantastic. I have so many more questions.

Brunello: I think we will have the chance, because you are a very interesting person to me, too. I will come and see you when I am in San Francisco. You have a view and outlook that is extremely modern. You are fascinated, nevertheless, fascinated by philosophy. I am fascinated by philosophy and by the world. I have always kept technology at a distance. I was always scared of being dragged away. So I try to be a bit obnoxious because I am scared of it.

Om: I want fewer interruptions in my day. I have eliminated a lot of things from my life. I’m on a declining scale of wanting things. Fewer and fewer things. I think that is one of the reasons I find your approach to life, a more philosophical approach to business, fascinating.

Brunello: A 58-year-old man committed suicide, a great Italian manager, I think last year, or a couple of years ago. He wrote, “I spent a whole life running, chasing work, without realizing, at all, of the great ideals, of great values of life.”

This is a question of balance. Those who come to me and say, “You know, I work 15 hours a day,” I say, “I am not interested.” I am interested in the quality of working hours, not the quantity. The brain of the human being. Do you think that during the first five hours of the day you are the same as you are in the last five hours? No way. You’re tired, and if you’re tired, you stop listening, and the decisions you make are risky.