Why furniture designer Tyler Hays is ‘obsessed’ with AI

27:40So yeah, I'm a big fan of it.

27:42Mark Wilson:That's fascinating to me because so much of your really point of view is defined by craft, right? Like, you know, you built BDW from like literally recrafting spaces, right? Doing contract work, getting into furniture and building. But at the same time, you're saying like, does that mean it's really about process? Or does that really just mean it's about the product you get in the end and you'll use any tool to get there? Because I just assumed you were like a super handmade guy, right? Like that sort of defined your thinking. No, not really. I have a cynical view of that. The whole craft, idealized craft movement that I've been credited with helping nudge along is kind of a romantic view of people that have their bills paid.

28:34My grandma grew up in a making tying flies by hand and her hands were like deformed from it. It was handwork to make a living is almost human torture. And it has been historically. I like old factories and old tools and I collect them, but I go into those factories and I see the romance. But I also see the people who are doing this repetitive work and their hands give out. I mean, my hands have given out and I don't even, you know, a lot of my guys and gals that are working for me do more handwork than I do these days. I was idealistic when I started about that stuff. And I used to love, and I still do as a hobby, make things from a complete scratch, you know, like making, trying to extract metal from the earth, getting iron to make, you know, make my own knife.

29:22I obsess over those ideals, I guess, but in the purpose of what I've done, I think, with my career is kind of blending art and object and purpose and aesthetic and all those things that like one big ball without any lines between them. and that is a hard thing to do just as a career, I think, to say I'm going to be a musician and a furniture maker and an electrician. You know, doing all these things is confusing just professionally, financially, as a business. So any tool to get there is a fully employer. I mean, yeah, I mean, I would use nuclear weapon, not weapon, nuclear energy. to help make these things if it made it easier.

30:15Mark Wilson:I would blow up this country to make a bed. Yes. Whatever we need to extract. But yeah, I have no romantic view of getting this sweet nectar of stuff that me and the people that work with me do that we all get off on. It's just that when you realize that perfect thing after all that confusion and work, and that's just like, however we got there, it doesn't matter. A lot of the people that I'm surrounded by, many of them have been with me for over 20 years. We didn't get into it for the money or the recognition or the cool factor or anything like that. It was just like we really just kind of need to see these things almost to a fault sometimes.

30:58I mean, because we do get really deep into these things.

31:02Mark Wilson:I mean, I am curious about that, though, because, you know, you are making furniture and we're talking about BDDW here. We can talk about MCRO, what you're doing there. But you're making furniture and this is not I mean, it is at scale, but it's also not at scale when you think about like the current furniture market. Right. So like, you know, on one end of the spectrum, you've got like whatever Wayfair, West Elm. And then you have BDDW that is like maybe not at like the tail end of the other extreme, but it's somewhere around there, right? Like how exactly do you take those obsessive ideas that you and your team might have and scale them up?

31:43Mark Wilson:I mean, can you scale them up? Is that sort of like the beauty of what you do is that you can't? No, we can't. I mean, there's not a whole lot of difference between a Wayfair sofa and, you know, I mean, we've done some of those super artisanal kinds of things. And then we have like a part that we have scaled more out of, I think, curiosity. Also being growing up without a lot of access to a lot of stuff. You know, we weren't dirt poor, but we were, you know, we didn't buy stuff, basically. So we had to make it. So trying it out, you know, trying it. I think more than anything, I have like a, I don't even know what the disorder is, if there is one.

32:26Obsessive problem, O-P-O. I have obsessive problem obsession. Problem solving obsession. There you go. I love a challenge of anything to like, can we make a hundred of these? And yeah, let's try it. And what, you know, what is the, how to figure out how to price that or not. As much as I hate that part of myself that has a business mind, I guess, or an entrepreneurial mind. So I guess that obsession, like, how do we figure that out? It's like, is a really, you know, sexy problem to me. Coupled with, I have a lot of people and they all need a paycheck. You know, a lot of it is just pure business.

33:11What is the smartest way to make a living at this? that is going to give my people enough financial growth and enough fulfillment in their work so we can keep buying the tools to do the obsessive parts of it. So, yeah, I think we're kind of forced into it sometimes because we need to make a living. You know, the people that have been with me for 20 years, you know, all have kids now and, you know, some of them off to college now. So, you know, no one's, you know, we used to just work for$10 an hour, all of us. And, you know, I lived in the shop. and we just worked and worked. But yeah, now there's massive rents to pay in fancy showrooms and paychecks that have to pay for college and that kind of thing.

33:53So doing the, but scaling it is really not a lot different than a one-off artisanal thing to a Wayfair. A lot of it's the same equipment and the same tools. It's just knowing the tricks, how to do it, the processes and the compromise and then what is the client willing to pay for. You know, our stuff is obviously some of the most expensive out there in production furniture. And yeah, if you make one, it's going to be$100 ,000. If I make a million, I can sell it for$1 ,000, literally the same object. So it's not really about the craft or the artisanship, I think. It's just mechanics of engineering and scale of the product.

34:31Mark Wilson:I'm not sure I understand that, though, because if you're—and I want to make sure I'm hearing you right. When you say that it's not so different than, you know, whatever, building a sofa, a Wayfair sofa. But it is, right? It has to be about the craft and the artisanship if, like, you're selling it for, you know, over$50 ,000. Well, I mean, it's not the, it's not, I mean, the decisions that Wayfair makes along the way is cheaper materials. Their client doesn't want to pay for X, Y, Z. So there's decisions along the way. You know, what is true quality? What is perceived quality? What is craft? is really not, in this day of machinery and computers, there's not a lot of like the romantic version of handcraft left in things.

35:14And that's usually for people who already have their bills paid, which I still have hobbies of my own that I don't kid myself or smart financial investment because no one would pay for that level of craftsmanship. But there's this choice. It's really just a math problem of choices for me. And I always break it down to like, it's all the same. So I'm always looking for how things are the same. So absolutely, it probably doesn't make any sense because they're totally different when you actually weigh up those thousand decisions that go into that sofa.

35:47Mark Wilson:I understand. You're not sort of like where you could turn left, you turn right instead. And so, you know, both choices are there, but you sort of take a different path and hopefully, I guess, you know, a more premium or expressive path in a lot of those cases. Yeah, and then took the risk to build it first and then hope clients would come that would pay for that. You know, and that was, you know, if I would have built a Wayfair company, I'd probably been rich and doing something else by now. But we would take the risk to invest in something and hope a client comes to pay for that level of quality.

36:19And we've been lucky after 25 years of breaking our heads doing it that we have, you know, I can make stuff and sell it. And it doesn't really, some of those decisions even matter less. you know we only if we make 10 of something and 11 people want it one of those people might not even care that it's good quality they just want it because it's a bdd wvs um i think what is more interesting probably is that a fifty thousand dollar sofa and a five thousand dollar sofa isn't any different except for the fifty thousand dollar one a decorator can measure to the inch and you can pick the fabric and get samples and have a meeting in a really fancy showroom in soho So and that's one of the things I've loved about the auctions and that thing that we've been it's kind of the same sofa and you can sell it for five thousand dollars if you make a hundred of them.

37:09Mark Wilson:Let's back up on that, because I wanted to talk about your retail model, which is pretty unusual, I would say, in this space. You sell your pieces through an online auction model where people can basically bid whatever they want on your pieces. Some of them sell for astronomical prices. Some of them, you might get a deal, right? Some of them we lose money on. I mean, a$5 ,000 sectional sofa, we've lost money on those and they've done that. And it's, I don't know, strangely, we all get really excited about it. It's a better deal. Exactly. That's what I'm wondering. I mean, when did you start thinking about this and how did you land on this as like, if not a viable way to do business, an interesting way to do business?

37:47um i've been obsessed with i don't even know the word the commodity of things and value of things since i was in art school and had my first shows of how do you value your artwork i used to like lose my mind over for when i was a young idealist like how do you charge for art so i was always obsessed with that like truth in that and i used to do my art shows as like a reverse auction where They would start out at, I think it was$3 ,000 back in the early, mid-80s. And they would go down$100 a day until the end of the show. So I was obsessed with that business model before. And so some of my paintings sold opening night to collectors that really wanted them.

38:29Some of them sold, two of them sold for$100 to kids I went to high school with. Putting a microscope or a lens on a magnifying glass on just that concept of what is the value of something.

38:40Mark Wilson:It was such a quantitative measurement of art, right? To like literally have a graphed out. Yeah, no. And I was, you know, I kind of hated it and loved it. Our business model is not really anything more than just a big art project, you know, because we have a super expensive, fancy showrooms that we pay a ton of money in rents and we have to, you know, I have well-paid people that sell super expensive stuff. And, you know, some of my, most of my people are always behind what I do, but it takes a little convincing. It's like, Like, why are we going to try and sell these sofas for a shitload less?

39:14I'm just because let's see if we can. Let's see if we can scale it. And we do that. And we're kind of changing that a bit. We kind of tried to break that because I kind of hate the idea of, you know, the luxury brand kind of stuff that we've been thrown into this like luxury lifestyle brand, which we've never made any significant money at what we do. There's never been like a massive profit margin at the end of the year. There's some pieces we do that have that, but then the other stuff we do, it all balances out to maintain this large organism to supply beautiful objects in a beautiful gallery with beautiful people selling, you know, and then a giant workshops with the ability to perform is a massively expensive undertaking.

39:57And if you're going to sell a few things, they have to be really expensive. But we are constantly fucking with the system of what we're doing as just almost an obsession. And the key, I have a key group of people that I work with that crazy sense of humor, all of them like genius level makers, engineers, character, funny. And we just love like reconceiving the way it's done. And at the end of the day, the thing we always come back to is like removing every obstacle in feeding our obsessions and obstacles that get in the way of design, whether that is overpriced or underpriced or, you know, demand and scarcity.

40:38Because both sides of any of those spectrums can mess up, you know, us just doing our work and making really good stuff and making it better and better and better.

40:47Mark Wilson:I mean, if you were to remove sort of the idealism of the business model, I'd be curious what kind of impact, you know, embracing auctions really had. I mean, is it, you know, do you see a difference in revenue or is it sort of it takes care of like the marketing end of things where you have, you know, repeat traffic going in and in and out, in and out, like trying to hop on a quote unquote deal? Yeah, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, I mean, if your business class 101 selling widgets and that kind of thing, it's really just our own version of simple wholesale. You know, you can sell a lot of one thing and wholesale and furniture.

41:24Like I have friends that are designers, you know, of well known and they show at showrooms. The showroom doubles the price, the maker gets half. And that's just the way, you know, generally business art is done. And we don't have a lot of headspace for those relationships to show with other showrooms. But really just making a lot of stuff and selling it at half price is basically what the auctions are, business-wise. So we sell more, and we make about the same money, really. But we can provide, especially when people get really good deals, because I guess you've seen the auctions. Sometimes pieces have gone above retail.

42:03sometimes these pieces have gone below cost. It balances out to an even number that's about half, that's about wholesale and very close to essentially wholesale.

42:14Mark Wilson:Liz, how many pieces have you been on? I'm just curious. I've been on a few, but I've got a hard stop, right? Discipline, that's discipline. Yeah, no, I mean, it's not discipline, it's just math. But no, I do think it's interesting, though, because it's really a way to like make this egalitarian. Yeah, absolutely. People like me who like aren't going to go into your showroom and be like, yeah, sure, I'll buy that for like$25 ,000. Like there's an opportunity to own a beautiful piece of furniture or a painting or whatever it is. And I think that's valuable because, you know, your brand is known to be luxury, right?

42:55Mark Wilson:You know, you look in all of like the shelter home, like the shelter mags, And the jigsaw puzzle is like a marker of wealth, right? Like, I've seen that jigsaw puzzle in I don't know how many Brooklyn homes. And it's basically, you know, it's a signifier of like, oh, I can afford this thing. And so I'm just sort of curious. That seems so counter. I mean, that's what your business is. Let's just like take it at face value. But it seems very, based on what you've said, it seems very counter to, I guess, your own personal views on how your furniture should be perceived and maybe what you want for the business.

43:35Well, I think one of the things that is generally misunderstood about expensive or furniture, anything made well, when I was a kid in the 70s, my dad bought a coffee table. And it was made basically the same way we make stuff now. And it was a week's paycheck for him to get that. And he had a government job. And we had that my whole childhood. It was a significant investment back then that we don't do now. and we were able to pay a living wage to people in the 60s to put furniture together. Nowadays, people want to buy a coffee table for, you know,$800 and they don't want, there's no connection to, well, and that's why we don't have much being made in the U.S.

44:23anymore. But we kind of build stuff just like they did in the 60s, 70s. And we charge and we pay people, you know, the$20 to$30 an hour. we paid better than the average shop, but it's still not a great living. And that's what it comes out to, to just make a profit margin that is way smaller than the people that own Wayfair, guarantee you. But you're buying that stuff at a price that is kind of normal. People now call luxury. Some of our stuff gets really expensive just because we had, if we sold it for what it normal profit margin, it would be, we'd sell too many and I'd have to hire too many people, which I've never wanted to have a big company.

45:04So there is some of that stuff. It's either you say, no, you can't buy that for$25 ,000 because we've sold too many, or you have to charge 35, so you sell less. But the bulk of the work that we do that isn't the crazy over-the-top stuff is really just not even luxury. It's just what it costs to make small runs of things. So you don't see that in, like you'll see it in a lot of Brooklyn homes, but you won't see it many other places. And even those puzzles, which we don't, we kind of think of them more as commercial art because in the art world, you know, at auction they sell for$15 ,000, sometimes as low as 10 retail, they're 30.

45:50That's not a lot for a piece of art. If you're going to hang out on your wall to say I'm rich, that's not what you would hang up. So it's kind of more like a middle ground, like top 5%. It's not the, oh, a 1%. Anyways, yeah, we do the whole spectrum. I mean, we pushed the options and we don't really do it anymore because we did break it. We thought, let's see if we can break this. Let's see if we can build and sell more of these. not with the goal of ever becoming a giant company, more of just the experiment of, you know, how cheap can you make a sofa and sell it and guarantee it and pay your people well?

46:28Man, we were selling hundreds of sofas, which seems like a lot. It was a lot. It was kind of boring and it wasn't great money. We made a little money out of it. It's just like not a business that was, I'm interested in, you know,

46:40Mark Wilson:because we can do other things that are more fun. I do love this business plan is we can always do other things that are more fun, which seems like perhaps your biggest limiter on returns ultimately. We definitely keep always go back to having fun or just feeding our disease of needing to just like tinker and make stuff and see it happen. You said in your announcement of the closing that you are going to be trading square footage for Headspace. And I think that's a really nice way to phrase something. And I'm curious what exactly that means to you. If you're aware of it, this is the last month, last week, actually, last several days of the showroom on Crosby Street, 25-year lease is finally up.

47:26And, I mean, honestly, when you have a massive rent like that, you have to sell a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot of stuff to make a profit margin big enough to pay that. We don't have to, you know, we make the same money and make a whole lot less stuff. and probably even figure out ways to be more profitable. I'm 57. You know, at a certain point, you know, we're not kids anymore. Some of my young guys that work for me now are over 50. That we have to focus on making things easy so we can have an exit plan at some point. But we have some really cool plans that are to replace what we have that I think will be more interesting for all of us.

48:07Maybe not people walking through Soho, obviously. We're definitely not opening a store in Soho. but something where we can be hyper creative and focus on the stuff that I really want to do. I mean, the business that I basically just run it now, and it kind of runs itself and it has other investors and that kind of thing. I just basically consult on how the business part of it runs, but the stuff that I want to do is oversee and make things that are new. And I, you know, a lot of the furniture are big sellers or stuff I designed literally 25 years ago, literally the week before we opened the Lake Credenza, the captain's mirror, the ladder chair, there's wishbone slab table, um, and a couple other things.

48:56And we still make those square guest chair. Uh, and we still get orders for them and they're a big part of what we do to pay the rent basically. um so i haven't been able i have like probably 500 sketchbooks full of obsessive ideas of you know most of them should never be built but uh hundreds of things that i didn't get built because i was uh involved in running a business um basically and so now headspace to be like oh I don't have large, you know, as big of a machine that needs to be fed. I can design a new thing. And you'll see, definitely we'll see probably 10 times the amount of new stuff come out of my world.

49:43We got to actually get things finished and closed and reinvented the way we're going to be doing things. And it's going to be all new stuff, all interesting stuff. Well, interesting to me and my people.

49:56Mark Wilson:I'm sure interesting to a lot of people. It might be horrible, but do know that I'm happy making this stuff, even if it's terrible. Actually, some of it's really cool. I've gotten some good reviews from people that some of the stuff I'm working on from some obsessive clients, critical clients. So, yeah, I think that I can just make new stuff. Now you've got the headspace. Yeah, I get a little giddy talking about it these last few months. just being hyper creative is without the ringing in your ears of, you know, so many things that have to happen. Recreating designs that are iconic, but are also decades old.

50:34Mark Wilson:I can understand how that got tired. So I don't know. I think we're both looking forward to what you do next too. Thank you. Yeah, no, keep an eye out. It's going to be fun. It'll be different and not crazy different, but yeah, it's not going to be furniture company making sofas all day and pumping out 20-year-old designs. Yeah. All right. Well, Tyler, thank you so much for coming on. This was a really fun conversation. It was great to have you here. Awesome. Thank you so much. Hope I didn't ramble too much.

51:15Mark Wilson:And we're back for our final segment of the pod. hot or not, we bring in our producer Cody and Liz and I break down whether designs for the month were hot or not. Okay, we're starting off with a heavy hitter, probably the biggest news in the design world of at least the last few weeks. Anthropic has launched Claude Design, which is it's very new. I haven't used it, but it appears to be the vibe design tool of Anthropic. It's a big news item for Hot or Not, but how are we feeling about it? Yeah, I mean, interesting product. It's vibe design, but it also, you know, it's not just words. It pulls up a UI with lots of sort of, you know, finite controls over design you're producing.

52:01Mark Wilson:Everybody is reacting to the news really strongly. But if you kind of zoom out, I don't want to say clause late to the party, but they're not the first either, right? Like, you know, Google has sort of a vibe design platform. Canva's obviously been pushing into this space a ton. And so anyway, that would be my context there. But in terms of like assistive design tools and everyone's sort of going the same way, like actually I think it's kind of hot because it's messy. Like it's like a hot mess maybe, but we are sort of like moving toward this idea of people being able to sort of design. I just think like, you know, design with vibes or whatever.

52:39Mark Wilson:But like, I think the question is like, who wins that? Like, I don't know what's Claude. I don't know what's Canva. I don't know how any of that plays out, but I'm just going to say hot. I'll agree with the hot mess of it. We can paraphrase to hot. To be honest, I am not a professional designer. Therefore, I don't know exactly the preferred workflows. But I just like, I don't at this point, I don't exactly know who's using what and when and for what. And I think we're going to see a lot of this shake out over the next year. But as a tool, standalone tool, I think it's great. I mean, I have tried to use Claude in the past to create a diagram.

53:14Mark Wilson:Didn't work. So, like, just from a pure tooling perspective, I think it's really valuable to have this bigger question around what all of this looks like in the next few months. I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of people shifting their workflows over the next year. And that's going to be something interesting for us to watch, Mark. I agree. It's almost like your library started selling hamburgers. And, like, do I go get a hamburger at the library? Like, maybe if they have the best burger. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who needs McDonald's? What's next, Cody? Notably the best burger. Yeah, let's jump on to something a little lighter or a little more dystopian.

53:53Mark Wilson:That's for you two to judge. Next item is Air New Zealand's sleep pods. These are purportedly the first sleep pods that will be available to economy passengers. What they are are six lie-flat beds tucked into the aisle of a Boeing Dreamliner. they are launching very soon on the Auckland to New York flight, which is very long, I believe, 17 hours. And what these look like are, it's basically a closet with six beds in it. Two of the beds are basically on the floor. Two of them are basically at head level. And then there are some more appropriately leveled beds around waist level. They will give you fresh bedding, a privacy curtain, some vibe lighting, eye masks, earplugs, socks, the whole nine.

54:42Mark Wilson:The catch is a four-hour session in the pod will be$292, and that is on top of the ticket to sit on the plane that you will have already purchased. New Zealand Skypods, hot or not? This is a no for me, and this is coming from somebody who does not sleep on airplanes, even overnight. I'm very bad at sleeping on airplanes. I think the price is fair. I don't have an issue with paying$300 for getting, you know, a good stretch of sleep. I think it's a bit too communal and there's no way around it, right? Like if you're not in first class, there's no way around the awkwardness of sleeping next to a stranger who might snore, who might be, you know, like we just don't know what that environment is really going to feel like.

55:27Mark Wilson:And it feels a bit, it feels a bit too intimate for my taste. My take is hot if you're a family of six, literally. No one else. If you get these three and three bunks, like really, really, really lukewarm to cool if you get that top bunk and you're desperate. But otherwise, very much not. I'm just I'm also just very skeptical about stacking humans. I like see this happening in slow motion and just like, you know, us essentially eventually just being slotted in, you know, to like a human shaped pod into the plane. So yeah, generally not. I mean, in terms of squeezing more money out of a small space on an airplane for Air New Zealand, like from a shareholder perspective, very hot.

56:11Mark Wilson:I also hate it. Let's move on to something else. So we have a redesign of the cutting board, the humble centuries old cutting board. This comes from a company called PrepWell, which was started by Tom Palmer. He was an automotive engineer by trade. He led the team that worked on the Cadillac Escalade at General Motors in his free time. He was a hobbyist woodworker, which led him to this new creation. It is a modular cutting board system called the Chef Station. It's available from PrepWell for$545 US. dollars. And what you get for$545 are four different trays that attach magnetically to the sides of a solid wood cutting board.

56:58Mark Wilson:It's dishwasher safe. You can also add a supplemental board for another$75 and lids for these trays for another$35. Price be damned. They had a Kickstarter with 1380 pre-orders that are already shipped out. And you can get a very own chef station of your own now. Well, you know, this isn't the first terrible idea that's been backed by a lot of Kickstarters. I mean, this is just like 1000 % not for me. I think if you spend a lot of time in the kitchen, the idea of having like modular mini trays that feel like extremely specific to certain ingredients and to photo staging feels a lot different than being sort of active, wanting just more surface area to cook.

57:42Mark Wilson:I don't know, having bowls rather than these like military sort of, you know, MRE type trays. I like I understand why it's very sellable. I understand why it's a very good business model. But for me, flexibly cooking is someone who likes to cook a lot like so not. I really couldn't be less of a fan of this product. You know, I'm with mark on this. I really like the idea of it because I do find that, you know, like cutting something and then having to put it into a bowl is a minor inconvenience, right? To be able to just like slide your knife across the cutting board and plop it into this like ready-made little bowl.

58:20Mark Wilson:Interesting idea. I like it. I like the organization of it. But I also just, it's so expensive. It's so expensive. And you basically can do the same thing with the tools you already have. And I also think that these little containers are probably just a touch too little yeah depending on what you're what you're making like it doesn't seem like a practical solution that is like happens to also be an idea born out of practicality so it's it's unfortunate because i want to like it but if it was like 75 total i'd be in i'd give it a shot this is mise en place porn for people who've never cooked right like i that's that's my take on it what fair enough what's next cody Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

59:03Mark Wilson:I think I can sell you on hot with this one. So this is a smart bike bell. Why do we need this, you ask? Well, it is for your own safety. It is for the safety of cyclists and pedestrians. So Skoda, a Czech automaker, has released its duo bell. This is a bicycle bell that can cut through headphones with active noise cancellation. like I said the goal is to cut down on accidents between cyclists and pedestrians especially those walking around with the over-ear Apple headphones that cut out just about every noise known to man but Skoda's researchers found a gap in active noise cancelling's armor basically they call it a frequency gap it is between 750 and 780 hertz I find this fascinating from an audio perspective.

59:57Mark Wilson:But what do you guys think of the smart bike, Belle? If it works, I think it's brilliant, right? Like it makes a lot of sense. And also, I just don't understand people who walk around in the world with noise cancellation on, like in their own little pod. I can explain it to you. I do. They can't hear you, Liz. They cannot hear you. This is a separate topic of conversation. But for those who do prefer to just block out the entire world. Yeah, I mean, this is a great product. I would love to test it and see it in action and see if it really works. I just imagine you walking down the street just torturing everybody with over-the-air iPhones with a little ringer, just like, bring, bring, bring, bring.

1:00:40Mark Wilson:I mean, it's a great video. We'll shoot it. Yeah, hot for me. Hot for me for all the reasons. Clever. Great. I'm a little skeptical. It works with every system or whatever, but like, Seems cool. Peaceful hot or not there. Last item we have. I'm really curious about this. Frank Lloyd Wright Ties is a collaboration between the Architects Estate and Tie Bar, your favorite airport and mall tie brand. And it is a series of ties, tie bars, cufflinks, and pocket squares inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens, which was here in Myanmar's home city of Chicago. It was in the Hyde Park neighborhood.

1:01:24Mark Wilson:It was an indoor-outdoor entertainment space that actually only stood for 15 years, but now it is living on in tie form. It's eternal as a tie. Yeah. Eternal as a tie, hot or not. This is a little pet peeve of me. I'm not really into like taking a design and then like patterning it out or skinning something with it. And there are definitely, I'm sure, exceptions. There's probably some stuff in my house. But like, and putting that in the tie form in this particular tie, maybe there's somebody who can pull it off. But it's a not for me. I mean, for those reasons. Yeah, I think the interesting context here is that the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has really, like, stretched the idea of collabs, right?

1:02:09Mark Wilson:Like, we've seen them collab with Kith, we've seen them collab with Steelcase, like, they are just everywhere right now. No shade. I think it's interesting, an interesting way to carry on a legacy. But this idea feels like a little bit of a stretch to me. It's worth noting that there are some other patterns that are, like, slightly more attractive. And I don't hate the cufflinks that are a part of this collection. But I think this is a knot. This is a knot for me. It's a little on the nose, right? Like, I don't know. Yeah, it's a little on the nose. I do want to know who's wearing this, though.

1:02:42Mark Wilson:Is it architects? Is it bankers who, like, have, you know, a slight interest in architecture? Cut to our editor-in-chief, Brendan Vaughn, at his office. Hi, everybody. I'm Brendan Vaughn, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. Taking off his tie, slamming it down. Canceling our podcast. Lots of wisdom in there. I'm Brendan Vaughn. I don't see Brendan wearing this tie. Let's take this a little bit serious for a moment. Okay. Good hot or not, guys. Thanks, Cody. It's a fun conversation. That's all for this episode. We'll be back next month. This episode was produced by Matt Toter and Cody Nelson. Sound design and mixing by Nicholas Torres.

1:03:23Mark Wilson:Our executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time. Yeah, I know people are listening to this. It's time you go and give us that star. Nobody sees it. Nobody knows who you are. I'm just saying. It takes you a second. Five stars, not a star. Oh, yeah, that star five times. No, no, five stars. Yeah, thank you. New segment where we just berate our listeners in the credits.

1:03:50Which brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks for listening.