SKIMS Co-Founder & CEO: Jens Grede – Timelessness, the American Dream, & What It Really Means to Make a Simple Product Great

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0:38The Gstaad Guy:There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. Jens, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure. I know you don't do many things on camera or public facing, so it's a real honor that you accepted to do this. you know when you're a fanboy like i am of you you know you have to show up it's very kind of you i don't think you're a fanboy of me i think you're a fan of stod i'm a huge fan of stod i'm a i'm actually is uh i would say i'm a fan of yours i followed i think i've followed you since you just got started that's very kind yeah i appreciate it says something about my algorithm that you would come up when you had like 500 words or something um but yeah i'm a huge fan of stad place what drew you to stad initially surely andrews called it the last paradise on earth and that wasn't yesterday and i still think it is i really think that is one of those it's as close to utopia as you find on planet earth i agree especially during the lower seasons when it's oh i'm a summer guy summer is the best it's incredible and it's it's everything you want from a small town it's like living in a small Swiss Alpine town and every time I've landed it's just full of friends and it's pretty special I don't know where in the world I would find that Around the World with your host the Stade Guy we welcome you back to the Stade Guy podcast sharing stories of excellence with those in the know for those who just Well, other than your love for Shtad, which is definitely a reason for you to be here, I was very excited for this conversation because I'm a big fan of the businesses you've built.

2:33The Gstaad Guy:Thank you. And also the process of building those businesses. I've spoken about this before on the podcast, but as a man, I admire men who do great things, of course, but especially while being present fathers and husbands and doing that while being a family man I think is a really really cool thing especially in a city like Los Angeles I think a lot of people here reasonably so are focused on their own path and delay the family time and the family decision for after they've kind of carved their way and I love that you've done all that at the same time the most reoccurring hashtag on my content is it's all family oh yeah every single post since day one so it's uh something important to me something i'm excited to talk about with you but i think there are two notions of family in your 20s it's um you leave your kind of you know eternal maternal family and you tend to make a close group of friends your family you know the tv show friends is really based on that moment in life when your friends are your family and that's incredibly important and i think as you start building your career and you start building your life i think having a family of your own is a it's a superpower it's i think people are fearful perhaps that that would slow them down or give them less opportunity and less freedom i found it to be the absolute opposite i've been married for 14 years i have for kids and I don't know anything more motivating and honestly even though might not be liberating in time it's so special to have someone to wake up for and to go to work for.

4:33The Gstaad Guy:And I also love that in the process of that you've managed to build businesses that reflect what it seems to me your values as a consumer and as a person and i see the way you're dressed today i've gone to understand the way you like to think about things and i understand that being timeless versus being timely is something meaningful to you and elevated essentials are things you care about a lot and that category of business are is a category i'd put brands like Laura Piana in, which you're wearing today. Uniqlo, which is a brand I admire. Frame, which is a brand you built. And Skims, which is also a brand you built.

5:17The Gstaad Guy:Why does timelessness and essentialism matter to you as a consumer first and foremost? So first of all, the notion of minimalism is prevalent in Scandinavian design. and having grown up in Stockholm and Sweden, that's really colored my own personal aesthetic. I reduce rather than add. It's kind of innate in Scandinavian culture. You see it in homes, in furniture design, through mid-century. It was always about reduction. So finding beauty in simple form. And I think that's carried on today. And you think about some of the great fashion brands that come out of scandinavia more recently like totem uh it's also built on on the same notion of minimalism so that's just my aesthetic and when it comes to building business to me businesses uh is a byproduct of doing something you love it's not the starting point i'm you know as i got older and you know i've had the benefit of spending time as you have with some of the more successful for people in this world, you find that very rarely did the journey start with a goal of making money or building a business.

6:40It started with a passion, a love for something, something you wanted to do. And I don't think I've ever started a company, invested in something on the basis of what it was going to become. This looks like a good idea. it always starts with am i waking up the next day with that feeling that i have to do it not because i'm trying to be smart and i've done that by the way and nine times out of ten then they tend to be really bad investments but when you wake up and you're passionate about something everything is easy the highs and the lows but if you're in it because you want to build a business

7:21The Gstaad Guy:it's it's really tough yeah completely agree i think a love for the process versus a love for the outcome yeah two very very different feelings and you often find it in all aspects of business from silicon valley to retail um sam walton who built walmart is passionate about value retail these are guys that would as they became some of the richest people on earth count every single penny of change it's just in them it's who they are that's why they're so damn good at what they're doing and i will say the same thing about the folks at lauropeana they are uh dedicated to the craft they truly love what they do and it shows up in the product and i've been a very regular customer for the past 15 years or so maybe 20 way before it was cool good i love that you mentioned sweden and you're bringing in sweden i've had the pleasure of spending some time there and i noticed there's a lot that is very unique to swedish culture one thing in particular that came up a few times especially in the categories of things i like to observe is this culture of logum am i pronouncing it correctly yeah it's pretty perfect logum and i understood logum as this culture of commitment to understatement is that right logum is there's no direct translation it kind of means not too much not too little okay it's a The origin of the word comes from all the team or the team around.

9:10And back in the Viking days, when Swedes were a little bit less sophisticated than we are today, you drank beer at a very large jugs and they were passed around in a circle. So you cannot take too much and you don't take too little because it has to last all the way around the circle. That's the origin of the word. and swedish culture is very much defined by it but also a sense of conformity that comes with it you know we don't want to stick out um so we tend not to be outwardly extravagant and yeah the word lagom really you can apply it aesthetically because you know we are the people that when we get dressed we will remove one thing before we leave the house you don't you don't want to do too much yeah you're petrified of being too much

10:07The Gstaad Guy:i see that and i also see that with the choices of design this this i guess the logo and culture within design is unassuming from far away and maybe some connection from up close like with your sweater from far away it's an unassuming sweater but if i give you a hug and i see how soft it is then it tells me something is that a good read yeah i think that's a pretty perfect read and what i've tried to do uh in in my own professional life is really give people items of exceptional quality for what they pay so i think that what i'm wearing is good value for money some people probably think i'm crazy for saying that but i think it's good value for money because of the quality in which it's made.

10:57And I believe that Skims and Frame represents individually very different price points, great quality for what you're paying. There's an honesty to it. And I think that honesty is very Scandinavian.

11:12The Gstaad Guy:I believe it too. Before you founded Frame and Skims, what was it that drew you to even become a founder in these categories versus just continuing to be a passionate consumer for these things you loved so going back to how i started i started in a magazine in stockholm when i was about 19 years old and when i turned 20 i felt i fell hopelessly you know in love with an english woman and so i had to and she worked at vogue and you know if i wanted to be with her i had to come to london i couldn't stand london at the time i wanted to move to new york new york is uh what they call an easy city to visit and a hard city to live in yeah where la where we're sitting today is the opposite it's actually hard city to visit people come here and they go where's the city it's an easy city to live in london i find to be a relatively easy city to to to live in um but it didn't feel that way when i first arrived and i had got i got a job for geico tile brulee who today have a magazine called monaco but at the time a magazine called wallpaper well so i was 20 years old and they had just won a big ad account for time magazine and he said why don't you run it and i was 20 or 21 years old i knew nothing about advertising at all and the story will prove i didn't know anything because i went to the ceo of time magazine and said we need to reclaim the red and the white font and they said don't you think it looks a little bit like the economist i said don't worry about that yeah you're the original and um we launched this pan-european campaign and i remember the ceo of the economist calling us thanking us for wherever we advertised sales of the economist went right up wow so that was my starting point and I was lucky enough to work for a man who didn't fire me.

13:31I was able to learn as I learned the job. But working for Tyler and Wallpaper in those days, in the early 2000s, was an amazing experience. In many ways, what you do reminds me so much of what Tyler did. it's just that his media was the magazine and his life if you lived with him for a month you traveled with him you lived the magazine you lived the next issue you know his life was condensed into the papers of that magazine you have the opportunity to do it on a weekly and a daily basis for your channels um but in a way uh i i see quite a few similarities oh thank you so much

14:19The Gstaad Guy:what a what a compliment i i do think so in some ways it's the social media is just my my language and my chosen bridge to the audience i must say it's a lot easier to communicate through humor to me at least than to do so through great journalism as was done by you and your colleagues in your past life but i think you're selling yourself short i think that it's easier to romanticize about media of the past someday someone will romanticize about the media of today and about what you did so i i really think it's just great content is great content platforms come and change but great content is great content well i know that you have been very passionate and focused on content for a long time actually and after this job i don't i know that there must have been jobs in between but i know you eventually became a founder of a media and content business yeah what happened was i wanted to work with my best friend eric and it's really hard to go to somewhere you want to work and say hire us both so when we were 24 25 not 24 we started our own ad agency and we were backed by an agency called mother which is to this day actually uh probably the greatest ad agency on this planet well and this was in london yeah and i remember that they kept asking me how old i was and i said i'll tell you when i sign and then we were very lucky diego della valle who is the proprietor of todd's and hogan gave us a shot and um jen franco ferret and um the people at liberty and and later nike and so we had people we had worked with who was really there for us and over the next decade i built this group that is referred to as the saturday group but really it spanned 14 different businesses all the way from advertising, media buying, public relations, physical distribution of goods, sponsorship rights.

16:43I mean, really the whole gambit. And yes, as part of that, I was, I guess, an early entrepreneur in the beginning of the creator space, which was a great experience. And I got to my mid-30s and I was like, you know what? I'm going to do something different with my life. I no longer want to work for these unbelievable founders and entrepreneurs. I want to be one of them. Wow. You know, I've spent, you know, 12, 13 years learning from the best, having the opportunity to work with Bernard Arnault or Remo Ruffini or Diego de la Valen, all the greats in Europe. It's my time. I don't want to be in the service business.

17:31i want to do with you that data that's amazing yeah and what was that big leap of faith step it's not an easy leap to take so and i've said this um to remo uh post and he likes when i say it so i'll say it again on this podcast but i don't think if it wasn't for moncler i don't know if i would have started i would definitely not have started frame and i'm not sure i would have started skims what remo did was take this uh technical commodity expert driven product in ski and he attached that to the cultural values of fashion he put on the unbelievable fashion shows in central park and grand central station he created fashion ski wear with giambattista valley and so forth and so forth he gave bruce weber who's an unbelievable photographer he would just send him a box of jackets and say just send me back the pictures he really understood how to orchestrate fashion culture and everything he did was to load value into this black puffer jacket that for a long time was probably half of the sales of the company yeah and he would said he said to me i wake up in a cold sweat every morning thinking how many more black puffer jackets could i sell turned out he could sell a lot more and i was so inspired by what remo did verging on the obsessive that i thought how could i do this because i'm not a classically trained designer nor me or my partner eric we too need to find an expert driven category that we can load up with values you know at the time i was really really engaged in fashion culture me and eric had co-founded mr porter um with with natalie and and the netta porter team and it was based in our office out of the gate in east london not a lot of people know that we'd started gq style with dylan uh we started our own men's magazine called man about town and later a very kind of navel-gazing magazine called Industry, which big claim to fame is that we put a picture of Anna Wintour on the cover unauthorized, and she loved it.

20:05That's amazing. So we were really in it, like really in it. So we started Frame, and we gave it to, you know, the kind of who's who, I guess, of that moment in time. And it kind of just took off and ran away with it. But it didn't become Montclair. Frame is a phenomenal company. And I think 14 years later, 15 years later, it's just going from strength to strength. This year opening more stores in China, all over France, Holland, Italy, as well as a slew of more stores in the United States. And it's really becoming a global business today, which I'm very proud of. But Skims really was my third attempt or my second attempt of doing the same thing again.

20:59Again, you know, intimates and performance is a technical product. and it's all about the execution of of simplicity you know in form and function and fit and feel and for those who follow skims or have seen it i think that this brand is it's undeniably that this brand is shaped in the intersection of commerce and culture so uh yeah we went all out connecting our brand with culture and this time we got it right.

21:36The Gstaad Guy:Incredible. When you were describing Ramo Ruffini, the founder of Monclerc, who is someone I share your admiration for, I think he's incredible and what he's done with Monclerc is just absolutely amazing. You used the word orchestrate, what he was able to orchestrate and I think that is the perfect word because when I think of an orchestra and the conductor of an orchestra, it's basically someone who more often than not doesn't actually share the skills of the people they're conducting but they know that these instruments will work with those and this artist will work with that and somehow they make it all work together and I think that is something Romo did incredibly well to my knowledge with his story not a fashion guy a businessman who had a vision and he made it come to life by orchestrating the group that's true but he does understand product he understood product really well and he had a company before montclair and i hope i'm getting this right because it's going to be super embarrassing for me we'll check you know i will be expecting a text message or dm when i when this comes out if i'm wrong but i believe they had a short company called new england that did actually extremely well uh in those days he had been to the east coast of america and kind of took that ralph lauren aesthetic back to italy okay created new england which is not totally dissimilar to what diego della valle did with todd's you know todd's is the name he found in the you know phone book in boston wow him and his brother so with some kind of a manufactured story of an American driving shoe that he then took back to Italy but Revo truly understands product and making simple product great is the hardest thing and I'll give you a good example you know what the hardest I think the hardest garment in the world to get right should I answer that?

23:44please what do you think what do you think i think it is i think you think it's denim no i think it's a white cotton t-shirt i know people that have spent 20 30 years to get a t-shirt right and would say i haven't even gotten close it's incredibly hard to make the perfect t-shirt and i would argue that i'm not 100 % sure if anyone have it's like the holy grail is the perfect t-shirt it's proportionate incredibly hard good point which t-shirts do you wear tom ford okay i think they got it the best yeah yeah nice exclusively tom ford t-shirts i think it it kills me but i think they're as close to perfect as they come.

24:37The Gstaad Guy:Oh, beautiful. Well, speaking of the orchestra of Rambu Ruffini, with that passion and understanding of product, to me those are our values and things that you share. And you have a deep understanding of media, of culture, of product. You brought those things together and created Frame. And then Skims. What was your vision with Frame first and foremost? So going back to what we discussed earlier, there was no vision when you start something other than an aesthetic, something you want to express, a world you wanted to build. And at Wallpaper, they had this tagline, the stuff that surrounds you.

25:24And when we started Frame, we used to say we made it for the people that surrounded us. You know, that's really the starting point. this whole world or we all construct a world around us right and you've constructed a world around you and i believe my job is to create for the world around me no one else because that's the only world i know so i presume it's the only world i'll be any good in so all we tried to do was to do something great that people close to us would love and i really wasn't thinking about anything else we were lucky enough to be relatively successful already at that point in our careers but i totally underestimated and this was one of the greatest learnings of my career because i've done the opposite i've tried to be clever and i pretty much always failed but when i've done something because i love it because i actually it really resonates or speaks to me or i have so much fun doing it it's always worked and it's like it you know perfect batting

26:41The Gstaad Guy:average i love that how do you differentiate a love for something versus a passion for something that you do when i speak to founders or potential new partners i always end the conversation by saying the same thing and i say if you wake up tomorrow and you think about this conversation we had today then let me know then there's something there to do but if you don't there's no need because everything that turns out great it's really hard to do stuff right it's really really hard so you got to start with all that good energy you got to start with that feeling that you know what i am going to make i'm going to make this happen i'm going to see it through i'm going to be that naive people are going to tell me not to do it but i'm going to do it anyway because I just have to see this come to life.

27:50And if you don't start there, it's incredibly hard to be enthusiastic as you go through the trials and tribulation of company building. Winston Churchill, the quote machine of Winston Churchill, has one of my favorite quotes. I have two favorite quotes on entrepreneurialism or being an entrepreneur, but one is from Winston Churchill. and it is entrepreneurialism is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. That is the journey. So you have to assume that the starting point has to be really high. Yeah.

28:31The Gstaad Guy:I know that after you left the UK, you moved to the US, and in many ways to me, you pursued the American dream. Can you tell us more about that move to the US and what drove you here? Well, as I was in my mid-30s, I sold what I had spent my life building. And I was a frenetic builder, like frenetic. You know, logging 250, 300 days a year on the road, buying companies, starting businesses, you know, assembling this group. And then I had that, you know, epiphany that this is not what I want to do. I want to be that guy. um so i decided the only way when you're successful or moderately successful when you want to be something else you got to give something up so i was like i'm selling i'm out of here and you know what when i have nothing left to do i'll figure out what to do next so i sold the saturday group over three years um the main agency group went to omnicom i sold one piece into public group and another piece to private equity and i was living in london we had a house in the cotswolds it was the english dream yeah for all intents and purposes you know beautiful i was walking around with a barber and wellies and going shooting and you know early wine lunches at the local fish restaurant and after about three months i was like screw this i am so bored and uh why don't we go to la i still own frame why don't we go there and i'll sell it then i can figure out what to do with my life uh and we arrived never sold it um spoke to kim around the time that we moved here my wife and i spoke to kim she had a vision of what she wanted to do aesthetically and she showed me a few things just directionally kind of the world that she thought we should build and it was one of those things once i saw it i couldn't unsee it and i woke up the next day thinking the last thing i want to do is to start another company right now but i have to do it This podcast is brought to you by Pubelle, bringing you interchangeable charm jewelry hand-painted with enamel on styling silver, allowing you to celebrate all the things you love and all the things you might question through interchangeable styling silver bracelets, bangles, whoop, charms, mini charm, bracelets, rings, cufflings, and much more.

31:20The Gstaad Guy:And all customizable through our 3D Builder on Pubelle.com. That is poubelle, P-O-U-B-E-L dot com. Thank you so much for watching. And now back to the podcast. Before we get to Skims as a product, I know that people often say the most important decision in your life is finding your life partner, right? Choosing your husband or choosing your wife. The second most important decision could be choosing your work partner and your co-founder and your work wife. Yeah. I'd love to know more about that process of meeting Kim and realizing, okay, I love this idea, but why us together as a team? It's a good question.

32:05It's a very good question because, yeah, one of the most important things in life, as you point out, is who we spend time with, who we end up marrying or building a life with, and who we work with. Yet I find that we're not as much in control as we think we are. And if you think about the really important things that happen in your life, I believe you and I probably spent a good deal of time thinking about them. Yet I don't think you actually chose any of them. You know, I didn't choose to meet Tyler when I did. That's just something that happened. I applied for several jobs in London. and that's just where I ended up.

32:52I met my business partner, Eric. We became fast friends. All of that's beyond my control. We don't choose who we fall in love with. We don't choose timing in life. I couldn't choose that Kim had this idea at that point in time and I would be there. So I think being a little bit naive to actually how consequential these decisions are is probably helpful because you know it's a bit like a golf swing if you overthink it it ain't gonna be a very good drive so i don't know how clever um i was but i also think that when you when you're lucky enough and you recognize that you have a good partner in business or in life and we had this conversation last night when I saw you for dinner it's incredibly important that

34:06you own what's important to you you don't compromise what's important to you but that you understand that the journey is full of thousands of small decisions and not one of them is as consequential as it might feel you see if i like brown and you like blue and it's really important to you that the color is blue if i'm a good partner i'm gonna say have blue and if you're a great partner you'll recognize if i really want brown and i want brown way more than you actually care for blue and then you give it to me the best partnership is always between two people that recognize what's the most important thing to their counterpart and i believe that for love i believe that in friendship and i believe that in business and i have been so lucky that i have worked with a number of people in my life where we have all respected what was important to the other person

35:20The Gstaad Guy:most of what i studied in university was bordering useless but there were a few classes that were very valuable oh good one in particular was a negotiations class and the first half of the entire course was trying to figure out incentives and desires from the counterpart as the number one priority for a successful negotiation and more importantly a successful outcome so my teacher agrees with you yeah and we have to recognize in life that we're going to make a lot of decisions and we're going to make a lot of wrong decisions. We can make way more wrong decisions than we need to make good ones.

36:02Your life is defined by a small set of really great decisions. So I try to optimize for making decisions and moving on. I believe that your success rate in life, so to speak, or your batting average or how you do over time is less connected with the quality of every decision you make, but rather your ability to make a decision and move on. You're getting more shots at it. You take more shots, you're going to land more shots. You're going to land more shots, you're going to have an exponentially better outcome.

36:39The Gstaad Guy:I saw Roger Federer's commencement speech. I think it was at Stanford. Yeah. Did I accidentally bite it? you said something that that he said similarly right he said number one tennis player in the world for many years but he's only won 51 of the points he played well let's say that's a perfect analogy yeah that's a perfect that's a that's a really perfect analogy so you think you think about the journey with uh with kim the good decisions was to do it to work together the approach we had a few this a handful of decisions around certain products and a handful of decisions around big moments then we made a lot of wrong turns but that's okay because we made some big rights what did you see in kim as a founder and partner personality wise i know that human connection is incredibly important to you she's a remarkable creative director and i have worked with some of the best creative directors in this world over 25 years and she's a remarkable engaged creative director she has a very strong point of view what she wants to create and if you don't mind i'm curious as well about your life partner and choosing your life partner how did you make that decision to also move forward i think she made that decision i don't think i had a say in it no i'm kidding um you know it's not so much about me choosing her as she is she having the grace and and for inexplicable reasons choosing me i was just a happy recipient um no i mean we fell in love a long time ago and i'm just so happy that i still feel exactly the same as i did 18 years ago when i wake up every morning so i am a big believer in that life is a roller coaster but every relationship has to be predominantly positive and i'm just lucky that i live with a partner who feels the same way we share the same idea of life the same aspirations she loves stade too big green flag a big we discovered it together no but jokes aside i uh again it it's about those big decisions what really matters in a relationship do we see the world in the same way do we see family in the same way do we share the same ideas more or less on parenting And if you have those fundamental building blocks there, I think that's incredibly important.

39:58That's incredibly important. We want to lead similar lives. And she's incredible at giving me the grace and space to pursue my dreams and self-realization. and I believe there's moments where her dreams and ambition has to take the front seat in our family and we all come together and support her in that. Again, recognizing what's the most important for your counterpart in friendship and love and business is, I think, a superpower in maintaining healthy, productive relationships.

40:45The Gstaad Guy:Very well said. And I think you put that so clearly that it only has to resonate. I love that. Well, today you have a beautiful family, four kids. Thank you. And you chose to also build that family in Los Angeles as well as the businesses. And I'd love to go back to that American dream topic of, yes, the opportunities were right but you chose to double down here over and over again yeah why the u.s and why los angeles i'm a big believer in america i have had growing up i guess a love affair with america from afar i grew up skateboarding and snowboarding and the heart of that is right here in california I grew up with 90s pop culture, you know, obsessing over TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Baywatch and what takes place right here in Los Angeles.

41:51so you know when you're growing up in in in in sweden and you're sitting there at 5 p.m on you know on a sunday and you're freezing and free blankets and a cup of chocolate and you're looking at uh beverly hills 90210 you think to yourself you know that that looks like a pretty great life I wanna try that out. That's true. So I think I was always warm to it. But honestly, as a place to work, as a place to build, the US is exceptional. It's exceptional. We're sitting here in California, the world's fourth largest economy today. Wow. With a population of 40 million people. I mean, it is stunning.

42:38what America can do and how it consistently reinvents itself. And now this might sound like a slight to the old world from which I hail and which I love, but European culture, tying it back to a conversation you and I had yesterday, is very much led by preservation. preservation of culture architecture ways of life america is dedicated to tomorrow the whole country is always building for the future and our lives and uh are now we're so dependent on American technology, culture, and innovation. So to be working in America as an entrepreneur, it's a pretty wonderful thing. It's exciting. It's exciting.

43:39You definitely feel incredibly competitive. And you also feel that anything you want to accomplish, you can accomplish it here. So I'm incredibly grateful to America for giving me the opportunity to live and work here. And I'm proud of my dual identity as a Swedish American.

44:02The Gstaad Guy:Earlier in this podcast, we spoke about this logum culture. I think generally, I would say it's quite alien to Los Angeles culture. I think there is lots of that simplicity here, but it's harder to come by than some of the extravagance. How did you manage that on a personal basis and also find people to align with that essentialism and simplicity for both businesses you've built in Los Angeles? That's a great question. i feel that european societies are tend to be far more homogenous you know in in not just in values that's clearly obvious um but also aesthetically as a way of life america is not homogenous it's not a homogenous um country los angeles is not homogenous as a place there is room for you to be and live however you want to live so you have to create your own city within the city your own community of people like-minded and that's why it's a hard place to visit because you can't see it but over time you build your own culture your own community within the city of people that share the same values and aspirations as you do have you clearly defined those values for yourself i think so can you share them with us

45:46oh my god i wish i had some prep work for this question um um no but i mean first of all they extend on all levels of life okay so aesthetically um this is a city that is constantly changing there's very little building regulations if you want to build barbie's dream house go ahead and do it no one's going to stop you from I'm putting 15 towers on your house. And I pursue architecture of integrity, which also exists here. I live in a Paul Williams home, and Paul Williams is a phenomenal new Regency architect who built some of the more prominent estates here in the 20s. and in my other home in Malibu it's kind of a perfect expression of mid-century modern architecture and so I pursue things with integrity in the city of art direction you know in the city of the facades right of fake brick and fake spires i uh i i pursue a uh a life lived in in in places of architectural you know integrity for example um and you touched on it you know both me and my wife we truly believe in family first and i enjoy and love pop culture and i'm as attracted to the bright lights of hollywood as anyone else is but family always comes first so i think it's no different from living in any big city you know sometimes people ask me are you not worried about raising children in los angeles such a superficial place and i said i am worried about raising kids anywhere because i lived in london for 17 years I know some horrible kids in London

48:02The Gstaad Guy:I know them too and I know some of the best people I've met in my life and that goes for Paris and New York and Stockholm and Los Angeles too there are people that are on the nose that would be challenging but I know some of the most interesting, creative exciting people in the world that also live here so you choose your city I like that you brought up your admiration for pop culture and i see your deep understanding for pop culture but i also see that you have a very unique relationship with it the unique relationship i notice is this thing i mentioned earlier of timeliness versus timelessness and pop culture by design has to be very timely what's relevant today and tomorrow is the most important thing and what was relevant a few weeks ago, no one really cares about.

48:59The Gstaad Guy:And all the businesses you build and the products you love as a consumer feel timeless by design. I think skims and frame are very culturally relevant today. The technology is, of course, the best that's available today. However, in terms of branding, positioning and essentialism, feels like they could have been here 10 years ago and they feel like they could be here in 10 years. And that to me is the definition of timelessness. How do you manage that relationship? And what is, to you, the balance between being timeless and timely? Well, I think it's exactly that. You know, I'm building a lot of stores.