Ep. 202: COOL HUNTING’s Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten on Exploring Uncharted Territory

Oct 31

Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten fell in love at first sight when they met in the office of Razorfish in the 90’s. But before then, Josh grew up straddling Miami and Vermont, where he gained experience navigating different worlds and perspectives. While Evan, growing up in Minneapolis, was bursting with curiosity, learning languages, and pushing to travel as often as possible. Their chemistry and compatibility ultimately led to the founding of COOL HUNTING. Now after 20 years, they are still exploring the edges of art, design, cars, craft, tech and travel, while also leading the charge (custom project with Ferrari blending traditional craft with high-tech luxury) and the conversation (new podcast, Design Tangents) on the design of a meaningful and beautiful future.

Learn more about Josh and Evan on their COOL HUNTING website.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to both founders of Cool Hunting, Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten. Cool Hunting is a beloved indie publication that is widely considered among creative professionals to be an indispensable resource for an informed preview of the future…In the 20 years that Cool Hunting has been around - Josh and Evan have been voyaging to the bleeding edge of technology, art, design, craft, and travel, interpreting what they find within the larger context, and bringing back their discoveries, curated, distilled, artfully packaged, and fully translated to the readers of Cool Hunting. In addition to the award-winning publication, they also operate a strategic consultancy, branded content studio, hosted travel service, and experimental retail program… and now also a podcast - it’s called Design Tangents and features Josh and Evan in conversation with all manner of cultural luminaries, from artists & designers, to musicians and tech pioneers. The founding of Cool Hunting plays out like a serendipitous chemical reaction - that in hindsight, is suspiciously obvious - like, maybe kismet is the cover for what actually is acute ESP? I don’t know, you decide, but the way they navigate spontaneity is deft and precise, like they know what’s coming before it gets here. Partners in life and in work, they have a chemistry that will warm your ears. And before all this, each of them had vibrant and formative professional lives…So when you hear the backstories, everything will start to add up…And it will be as clear as the view through cosmic telescope why everything they do is infused with their profoundly worldly perspective, and deep, reverent other-worldly love… for each other and for the future…Here’s Josh and Evan…
Evan Orensten: My name is Evan Orensten, I’m the co-founder of COOL HUNTING. I live in Beacon, but I’m a citizen of the world
Josh Rubin: My name is Josh Rubin. I, along with Evan am the co-founder of COOL HUNTING. Evan and I are married, we like to tell people right away because sometimes they pick up a dynamic between us and they don’t know what to make of it. So yeah, I also live in Beacon and I’m also a citizen of the world.
Amy: I want to go back to the beginning of both of you. Can you each tell me a little bit about where you grew up, how you found your way through teenage years and to school.
Josh: I was born in Vermont. My parents were both from New York and left for Vermont to find a simpler, happier life in nature. They had opened a couple of ski shops and that was kind of the family business when I was born. But I was three or four when they divorced and my mother moved down to Miami and my father stayed in Vermont. Until I was eight years old I spent half the year in Vermont and half the year in Miami.
Then when I was eight they married each other again and we lived in Miami. That did not work very well, less than a year and they were divorced again but from that point forward I was in Miami. I left Miami when I was done with high school and I'll catch up to that in a minute. Evan likes to joke that this back and forth between Vermont and Miami is the foundation of my life of contrasts. And the reason why I have so many tattoos (laughs) kind of attributes to my psychological uniqueness (laughs). But the other thing that I've realized somewhat recently is that my first creative output was photography. I started taking pictures when I was eight years old and developing them, developing the film, printing them in the dark room, started doing that at very young. I continued through junior high and high school which was great because then there were dark rooms in school. Then when I got to college and was continuing with photography, PhotoShop came out and I started scanning and manipulating images.
I became really critical of the interface of PhotoShop and that led me down the path of studying cognitive science and ultimately becoming an interaction designer. My first and earliest work was as an interaction designer which now is thought of more as UX. Some studios still have people in the role of interaction designer but interaction design, user interface, user experience. I think going back and forth between Vermont and Miami and going back between different schools, I had a chance to see how people perceive things in unique ways and how education can be different and how the environment that you're in influences your perception of so much. Those were sort of the seedlings that turned into my critical opinions of how we interact with things or how I think we should interact with things.
Amy: All right, Evan. I would love to hear your background.
Evan: I grew up in Minneapolis. I have enormous affection for the city and I loved growing up there. I feel like I had a really incredible childhood. It was a time of really exciting things, different kinds of educational styles happening. I went to a school that had open classrooms and modular classes. It was public school but you went to whatever level you were in. So if you were ahead in math you might be with people a year or two ahead of you. And if you were in reading and you were the same as everyone else, that was your age, then you would be with those people. It was this really amazing, progressive, thing. I'm enjoying this moment on Instagram when there are people who are of my generation sharing how we grew up without technology, (laughs) with absolute freedom, with parents who didn't really care. They were like, “Come back for dinner,” hopefully. There was no checking in, there was no safe spaces, there was none of this sensitivity about feelings or anything (laughs). It was just a very different era and we were untethered.
Amy: Just to clarify, what generation do you count yourself among?
Evan: I'm a Gen X'er. Near the beginning of the Gen X spectrum.
Amy: Oh man, so you were there for Prince and The Replacements and Hüsker Dü.
Evan: Everything, yeah. The live music scene in Minneapolis was epic, epic, epic. When I was beginning high school it was the very beginning of Prince's breaking out from just being a local music star.
Amy: I'm going to have heart palpitations. Okay, keep telling.
Evan: Yeah, so he played at prom.
Amy: (Laughs) Oh my god!
Evan: Yeah, pre. This is before his first album, Prince, came out. Before he was major.
Amy: What? What was that like? I mean I'm a Gen X'er, too, but we just had a shitty DJ for our prom. (Laughs) So the idea of Prince performing is something I can't even.
Evan: Yeah, you have to go back to a time and a place when he was in a certain circle of people who like live music in Minneapolis, a smaller town, before there was internet and stuff. If you weren't on the radio, no one knew who you were.
Amy: Right.
Evan: So it was a very different era. He was not a celebrity.
Amy: But did he play like a set of RnB covers? Or was it originals?
Evan: No, always original.
Amy: Was he playing all the instruments? (Laughs)
Evan: Always original. No, there was a band. A small band. My sister actually went to school with a lot of the people who were in that band and later were part of that world, the stylists, the musicians.
Amy: Yeah, the whole mini scene.
Evan: She's a few years older than me and was part of all that. So Minneapolis, I have mostly incredibly fond memories. I knew, by the time I was in Kindergarten I recognized that I was not like the others around me. A couple of layers to that. One, I was Jewish. I went to a school that wasn't heavily Jewish in a neighborhood that wasn't particularly Jewish. I had no idea what 'gay' was or what 'sexuality' was, but I knew that I felt different than the people around me. That definitely played a part of my being this outsider or 'other' person. So I think I understood from a very, very early age that I was gay but I didn't really know what that meant or process it for many years later. Part of it really is around, I would say, curiosity. I'm a person driven by curiosity and I found that a lot of the people around me, friends, family, students, I felt weren't as curious as I was.
Amy: I know that feeling, it's kind of a trap.
Evan: Yeah. For me it just felt like this wasn't my place or my time. I think a fourth layer was something I've learned much more recently in getting in touch with my own energy and my connection to what I would say are past experiences or past lives. I feel like I just had the most curiosity about traveling from the very earliest age and that has always been something fueled me. Part of that is my Sagittarian nature, but part of it is just this insatiable curiosity to see other places and people and hear other languages. I had a pretty natural affinity for languages. I took German in elementary school, eventually French in middle school, and went on to college where I studied language. So I left Minneapolis and I went to Vassar
Amy: I don't know if you want to talk about the meeting and getting together, but I love to hear the origin story of a love story.
Josh: Yeah. So for undergraduate I went to Hampshire College in Western Mass, super fun, funky, creating, weirdo, challenging school. No tests, no grades, no core, no majors. I moved to New York and went to NYU to the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Amy: Nice.
Josh: When I was finishing up at ITP and starting to look for a job a friend of mine said, “Oh well, I'd love to introduce you to my friend Evan. He is one of the guys that kind of helped start Razorfish,” and at the time Razorfish was the hottest of the digital design firms. This was 1999 so still very early days, Razorfish was helping companies figure out their very first web strategies and build their very first web experiences or developing functionality that hadn't been done before. Anyway it was pretty groundbreaking, super interesting stuff. Of course I wanted to go in and Evan can tell his side of the story as well, but when I showed up to meet him it was a love at first sight moment.
I had moved to New York for grad school and I spent that first year when I wasn't in school trying to find a relationship and that doesn't work so well in New York. Then my second year was just enjoying being single. I was very happily single. I was not looking. I walked into Evan's office and was like, 'oh wow, wait, he's the one,' and why now? All that kind of stuff. We had about a six week period, of getting together a little bit here and there to talk about work.
Then he invited another person to join us at dinner one night like, “Oh, this guy works with me and he's also single, maybe you guys want to date,” all that kind of stuff. I'm like, “Wait, what's going on here?” Okay, I'm just going to roll with this and see how this plays through. That friend whose name is Nick, is still one of our closest friends. We totally hit it off that night but after dinner that night I needed to clarify a couple of things with Evan and we've basically been together ever since. (Laughs) There's more to the story though which is worth telling, and I'm going to hand that over to Evan.
Evan: After Vassar I thought I would go to Japan but I ended up going to Paris, or actually suburban Paris technically. I wanted to get an MBA. I felt like I needed to do that right away. If I went into the world and worked like everyone else did before they got their MBA I felt like I would never go back to school. And I had the opportunity to go to the first business school in the world created by Napoleon in France called Ecole Spéciale de Commerce et d'Industrie and I won't go deep into that story other than that they were starting a new major in international business and I of course wanted to study international business.
In the US in that era there really wasn't a focus on that and if there were, it was mostly taught by American professors. I felt how can you have a really international experience if you are being taught by other Americans? Yeah, they have experiences but it's not the same as being with foreign students. So I went from having an incredibly active and engaged community and social life in a pretty small sized college, to moving to suburban Paris. Other 18 students were literally from every other continent and very interesting international mix. So that to me was all very, very powerful. I was so happy in France. I loved France. I loved going to the market in the morning and all of a sudden it's apple season and there is 18 varieties of apples. I'd never seen that before. I'd seen like four apples, right?
Amy: Right. (Laughs)
Evan: There's a red apple, a green apple, you know. When I went to work the water cooler conversation was like, “Did you go to the market this morning? Did you see those apples? What did you get?” It was an incredibly deep conversation about the importance of variety and provenance and what I grew up with and my grandmother made this kind of tart and my mom made this and I learned how to make that.Yeah, that was another big moment of mine. I went back to Vassar for my fifth college reunion, it was 1993. I was in New York and the talk was about technology and about how the web was changing or I should say how the internet was evolving and how the web was kind of percolating. It didn't really exist so much, and certainly not in the way in which we know it today. I felt like I had to, this was something that was so big, that was so immense, that was such a major force that was going to change the world.
I took that back with me to France and I started having conversations with where I worked and also with other places that I was interviewing and I was like, 'this is really going to be the future.' The response was France had done something miraculous in creating the Minitel and the Minitel was a text only basically web device that they gave to everyone in France. Every home got a Minitel if you wanted one and most of them had a green screen and it was very small. It basically was a text web and it had a digitized phone book, it had train schedules and plane schedules.
All this was free to anyone in France. Then it had paid services like dating and horoscopes and sports things, the exact same things that we still have, right? But they did it all first in a text only way. They were really resistant to this notion that it could be bigger than that. I was like, “I'm telling you that this is major.” At the time I was so interested in branding and brand identity and things like that. If you are familiar with that world you would have a brand handbook or guidebook that was this massive printed thing that was crazy expensive to create. Then of course the minute you print it it's outdated and then every year you have to have an update.
You print it and ship it to all these other whoever is involved in creating and works with that brand. I was like, “For example, we could digitize that I just felt this unease and I was at this critical life conjunction point of do I stay where I feel so complete and happy and peaceful and in love? I just loved France. I loved Paris. I learned how to be compatible (laughs) with French people, and to push back and evolve there. But I also felt like the future was not going to happen there for me and the future is going to happen in New York.
Amy: Then this decision between staying where you feel good to going where you feel like the future is happening, that is a tough one.
Josh: It's rare that a month goes by where Evan doesn't suggest that we move back to Paris. (Laughter)
Amy: Really?
Josh: So it will happen, I imagine. At some point.
Evan: Yeah. I've been working on it and I'll get back to how Paris plays a role in our life. So I moved back to New York. I reconnect with two of my best childhood friends and we were all kind of figuring out how do we work in this world of technology. There was another conjecture point that happened a little bit later.
This was just the three of us who were working together and I had this kind of dream opportunity where I was like, 'I'm loving this being with my friends,' but also we weren't just sure what to do and we weren't sure how our individual responsibilities could manifest properly in this nascent company that we had started. I had an opportunity to go to a very highly respected old school corporate identity firm called Siegel+Gale and they wanted to really have a very strong presence in this digital space. Long story short, I went there, and it was about two years later, so 1995 or so that I went back and went to what became Razorfish or what was already Razorfish. I was the 10th person there and helped grow that company over many years, taking it public, growing to about 2,800 employees.
Amy: Wow.
Evan: It was pretty major. So here I am. I'm single for the first time. I have achieved a certain level of very early success and one of my closest friends said, “Hey, there's this really hot guy that I hang out with at the coffee shop and it's been months that we've been flirting. We finally talked and he is really interested in Razorfish. He's just graduating NYU. Would you be interested in?” He didn't even say that. He said, “Would you do me a favor and have just an informational interview?” His name is Lin and I was like, “Lin, come on. I'm so busy. I'm hardly ever in New York.”
My job by that point was basically running our whole international organization. I lived on an airplane. I was in New York maybe five or seven days a month. But I was like, “For you, of course. Anything.” I will reconnect where Josh said. He walked into my office. I had a glass office and here is this incredibly beautiful human that walked into my office. Our eyes locked and it was one of those movie scene moments where a lifetime flashes ahead of you. You just see stuff that is so intense. And I think while we probably weren't aware of it then, our energy was just like, 'Wow, what the fuck is going on?' I'd never felt that before and there was not just an attraction, but a connection that I don't think either of us understood but we felt was manifested in that moment.
To jump ahead there's six weeks, we finally had that weekend together, we made out for the first time, maybe a little bit more and the next day I was going back to Europe. I was, at that moment, running one of the Razorfish offices in Hamburg in Germany and I had to go back to Europe the next day. Josh, I knew was graduating and was kind of free. I was like, “Hey, I'm a bit of a baller, what are you doing next weekend? Why don't we celebrate your graduation in Paris?”
Amy: Damn.
Evan: Because as much as I liked being in Hamburg I also loved Paris and I would go very frequently on the weekends because I didn't have time to go back and forth to the States. So we met in Paris and we were supposed to be there for two or three days, it ended up being about five days and that last day we were in a taxi on our way to the airport and we had this very deep conversation about not wanting that connection to end. We decided that we would date exclusively on that date which was May 8th and subsequently that is the date we use as our anniversary so it's been 24 and a half years, whatever you want to call it. Next year in 2024 will be our 25th anniversary. And it feels just like a moment, like a blip, this journey that we've had together. And it's true.
Amy: That's the most beautiful story.
Evan: And we got married twice, subsequently on that date.
Josh: First time in Canada because we couldn't in the States but that was on May 8th. And then the second time in New York once New York passed and we could do it in New York.
Amy: This all makes me so happy. Do you feel like your connection is karmic on some level?
Evan: Oh yeah.
Josh: Absolutely.
Amy: I know. I could feel it. Wow!
Josh: Meanwhile while I met Evan with the interest in potentially working at Razorfish, I then had subsequent interviews at Razorfish with other people and was pursuing other jobs. So fast forward to this incredible weekend in Paris where we decide, 'this is it, we want to figure out how to make this work.' I got home from Paris in New York City to a message on my answering machine because we still had those then.
And it was a job offer from IDEO and IDEO was my first choice actually, Razorfish was my second choice. (Laughs) So I had this offer from IDO to move to San Francisco and start as an intern, sort of as a 'try before you buy' kind of program in the San Francisco studio focusing on bringing digital to the practice because for the most part IDEO was just focused on physical design at that time. I then moved to San Francisco. Evan is mostly based in Germany. We have this incredible...
Evan: Summer of love.
Josh: Connection. A passion, love story going on, and we're separated by a very far distance. Somehow we managed to get together almost every weekend in different cities around the world based on...We were traveling together really from the outset. And sidebar, when we talk to any of our friends who are in some early stage of a developing relationship and they're questioning it, the easy, quick advice is travel together. Just get on a plane, get on a train, get in a car, go somewhere. Stay in a hotel, stay somewhere else, and be someplace new together and see how it all works. It becomes very clear whether or not you're compatible in that kind of environment.
Amy: Clearly you two are compatible, but in what ways do you complement each other? You just talked about all these different things. Are you both spontaneous or is one a little bit more a loose plan and the other one is winging it? You can also bring this into your work life as well. I'm interested in how you complement each other.
Josh: I am more of a planner. I am a bit more rigid. Evan is more fluid and more inclined to wing it. Where we come together with a lot of things is putting a few key, if we're traveling or we're visiting someplace new or what have you, a few key destinations or restaurants or meetings or most importantly people, on the schedule ahead of time and leaving room for discovery as well. Part of it kind of came into one recurring editorial format that we have for travel content that we create. It's called Word of Mouth and it really is about that. It's having a couple of starting points and then based on the experience you have there or the people you talk to there, finding out about other things to see and do in that destination.
So I think in terms of travel that's how we come together. In terms of work and a lot of other aspects of life, in general Evan says yes and I say no. (Laughs) I have learned to say yes a lot and Evan is getting much better at saying no. But Evan is very optimistic about being able to do a million things in a day, about whatever the project or the plan is, it's always going to work. And I'm a bit more pragmatic. There's a beauty to that optimism and I see that beauty and I love that beauty. And I get frustrated with it at times. (Laughs) Another thing that we do that is kind of an extension of COOL HUNTING is we organize and host travel experiences. We travel so often for what we do, we realized that we could create an extension of the business where people get to come along for the ride instead of waiting for the story.
Amy: I was reading about that. It sounds magical.
Josh: The trips are great! And when we plan those trips Evan is usually leading that charge and he will have an initial itinerary that is just untenable (laughter), it is the pinnacle of optimism. He has a million things. There is no consideration for how much time it's going to take to get between A and B. All of this stuff. And the fact...
Evan: That people need to rest. That they're on vacation. (Laughs)
Josh: That people need to rest. That people don't have the stamina that we have. We travel a lot. We do a lot. We go from thing to thing to thing and we have stamina for it.. And that's where I have to come in and really kind of edit so that people are not just flat on the floor by the end of it.
Amy: I like that you're really approaching this with a story-telling and curator's perspective.
Evan: And just the fact that we experience the world in an unbelievably beautiful and privileged way that is the life of an editor.We've been doing this work for 20 years, have such an incredible network across so many categories, we just know a lot of people and we have these incredible opportunities to experience things in a manner. Everyone maybe can go to a museum and see the new show, we tend to see that before it opens to the public. We're usually there. If the artist is alive the artist is there talking about their work, the curator, someone else from the museum is there. That is kind of what we're used to and we're always incredibly aware that it is a blessing and a privilege.
It is not a right, it is not given. It is in exchange for of course hopefully writing about it and sharing that with other people. Even if we don't write about everything we certainly share it personally at least, or on social with everybody. So it's something we never take for granted and when we're having these unbelievable experiences and we could go on and on about even just the last couple of months about amazing things that we've done, we want to be able to share that. One way of sharing that is through our content on COOL HUNTING and another is as Josh said, bringing people along for the ride. Instead of writing the story and having them read it, it's having them be there to kind of write their own story, if you will.
Josh: Just one little bridge before we talk about the present, Evan. Because we talked about Razorfish and IDEO and all this stuff career wise. My time at IDEO did not last long before I realized Razorfish was the better place for me. So I bounced over to Razorfish, moved back to New York. Evan also moved back to New York and we immediately moved in together from this long distance relationship and we were both at Razorfish. Not working on the same projects but at the same company. We had developed this blurry line between life and work and ultimately at Razorfish I was running our wireless and mobile practice and then I was recruited by Motorola to build a user interface/user experience team at a point where phone screens were becoming bigger. And then back to grad school. My graduate work in '99 was looking at the design of panning and zooming interfaces on touchscreen devices.
Amy: Oh wow.
Josh: So that was becoming more and more relevant.
Evan: We both left Razorfish in the summer of 2001 and we ended up moving to Chicago so that Josh could have this experience in Motorola. I was in a position where I didn't have to get a job right away and I was just trying to feel out Chicago and what that could mean for us, what the opportunities would be, and having lots of interviews. We decided to get a house there and that was a big project so I was working on that.
We had one friend in Chicago which is kind of funny, only one, and she had left New York the week earlier to go be Oprah's Chief of Staff. She said, “Why don't you just come and hang out? There's some amazing people here, you should just meet them and maybe something will happen, maybe not. But you'll meet some great people and make some friends.” Long story short I went from being this tech entrepreneur in a very senior role at what became a public company, to making breakfast for Oprah and Stedman on occasion.
Amy: Oh my god. (Laughs) Both of your lives are just so incredible.
Evan: So we would come home and I would share my experience of the day and the things that I found that I was super excited about and sometimes those were things like okra pickles or ice cream or this new rice cooker.
And Josh would come home and say, “I just found this amazing thing that I think is going to be really helpful as I think about how to create an interface.” These were the world's first touchscreen phones that were designed exclusively for the Chinese market and he had all these incredible technology things. So we found our conversation at night to be really great and Josh was like, “But I really just need a couple of minutes, I have to journal this,” basically.
Josh: I wanted to catalog this stuff. We were having all these great conversations about our different discoveries and I wanted a way to keep track of it in earlier days we would rip pages out of magazines and file them and put together scrap books, and had all these physical references. I wanted to build some sort of digital reference. I downloaded blogging software, put it on my server, customized the templates, and started using that as a way to keep track of all these things that we were discovering and that we were exciting about.
Evan: To be fair it was really things you were discovering and it was very short into this process of a couple of months where we'd come home and I'd be like, “I want to talk to you, stop using your computer. (Laughs) Stop and let's talk.” I just said, “This is something that is either going to bring us together even more so, or it's going to drive us apart. So let's try doing it together.” That's really how our adventure in this started, was having this collaborative journal and online resource or reference library that honestly was just meant for us. Because of using blogging software it just happened to be available to other people.
Josh: And it developed an audience. This was a time when there were only a few design magazines that were out there, a lot of people who were subscribed to all of them. They would receive their issue, devour it over the course of a weekend, and then have to wait a month for more. They were starting to look online for more regular sources of information about design or tech. We were all over the place. It was food and cars and travel. So that was the initial audience.
Amy: So this is 2003, yes?
Evan: Yeah.
Josh: This was 2003.
Amy: In Chicago.
Evan: Yeah, born in our kitchen in February of 2003.
Josh: By the fall of 2003 we were already back in New York.
Amy: I don't know what I imagined (laughter) but I imagine it was maybe a little more calculated than that. This is so...organic.
Evan: It was just something we did. We had this very big moments. We came back and we both got different jobs when we moved back to New York. We were still doing this on the side and we realized that Josh would be better just being independent and not working at a company. So he started doing that and then we realized that we were in a position where we could have an intern and then that intern became our first editor and subsequently an editor in chief. Things were just starting to move in that world but we both had other jobs. COOL HUNTING was definitely our side hustle and all of a sudden we were starting a new company together, a new tech company which we did with a lot of our former colleagues from Razorfish, and we integrated those two things.
Not integrated but we share an office space I should say. So we had a separate team of people that were working on COOL HUNTING who had nothing to do with the consulting side. But that was how we earned a living, through the consulting business.
Josh: We had some super fun and fulfilling projects and a lot of them, not all of them but a lot of them were tied to helping different publications figure out their online strategy. They were seeing what we were doing with COOL HUNTING and they were at a point where they were taking whatever was in print and putting it on their website.
They were just realizing that there was room to make content that would only exist online and to do that on a much more regular basis. But they didn't really know how to do it so we were helping to redesign their websites, figure out the content strategy, work through what the team make up should be, editorial workflow, all of that kind of stuff because we had figured it out for ourselves with COOL HUNTING. So it became a big part of the practice for the design firm that we started.
Amy: That makes sense.
Josh: Yeah, and we worked on some things that were outside of that space as well, but it was very fun and satisfying for a while until the market dipped and all of a sudden it was insurance and pharma that were the only industries that were hiring for our services. Meanwhile COOL HUNTING had a small team, they were off doing incredible things.
Evan: I remember one pivotal moment, Josh, we were working on a pharma website and we had a vacation planned. We were sitting down and the COOL HUNTING team were like, “So what are you up to?” And we were like, “Oh, I'm going to Italy. I'm going to Ferrari and they want to share all these things with us.” And the other person, I don't remember where they were going but the team is repeating what they're doing and Josh and I were like, “Fuck, we just canceled our vacation to work on this pharma website for the next week.” As Josh said, there was this downturn in the economy so this was I think 2007 where we realized two things that had happened.
One, we were ready to commit full-time to COOL HUNTING and importantly, again this is such early days in the media landscape, we felt like there was an opportunity where we could actually earn a living by doing COOL HUNTING alone and no longer needing to subsidize it by having a 'normal job' or 'day job.' That was a really big deal and I think the first advice we gave was travel with someone you're interested in dating or partnering with.
Second I would say is take advantage of down turns. An economic downturn provides a huge opportunity and pivotal things have happened to us where we've seized those moments to reposition our business and the way we work and the kind of work we want to do and that was one of them. It was a really good move and it was good timing because the market was still very immature in the digital media space but it was mature enough where there was enough happening that it worked for us.
Amy: So that resulted in you shaving off this aspect of your work that was no longer satisfying and leaning more into the COOL HUNTING piece of it.
Josh: One hundred percent.
Amy: And COOL HUNTING being the bread and butter.
Josh: Absolutely.
Amy: But you still do strategy consulting but now it's through the COOL HUNTING lens so you're only doing the kinds of projects you want to do? Yeah. Yall, I'm taking notes. You're living (laughter) life right. (Laughs)
Josh: COOL HUNTING is really the backbone for all of the different ways that our business extends. On the consulting side we're really taking advantage of the access and the insight that we have because of COOL HUNTING to help clients. A lot of it is trend and futuring work. There's also a lot of design strategy.
Evan: Product development.
Josh: We do a fair amount of product development. We've put together partnerships and collaborations. And there is also a bunch of studio work helping clients tell their story through short films and photos and narrative. Yeah, it is definitely an extension of COOL HUNTING and it is different. It's very different from the approach that we've had in the past, being at other design firms in the past.
Evan: Yeah, what I think is interesting is there's two things. We're not people who go out and talk about ourselves. There's actually in 20 years, not that much press about us or about COOL HUNTING from our point of view. We're very much behind the scenes people and we're observers more than we are out there hustling. Lesson number three, and this ties to when we were having a little pre-conversation talking about your work at RISD and students and how it would be great to share with them how important it is to communicate and share your work with a bigger audience early on.
We've really learned that we have to find this way. We've not honestly been very good at it. We don't hustle, we don't talk about ourselves in that way. And partially starting a podcast which is actually our second. Our first podcast was started in 2005, but having this podcast which debuted earlier in 2023 has given us this opportunity to kind of reflect a little bit about our journey both personally and professionally, and about COOL HUNTING.
What we've come to acknowledge or understand is that our 20 years of experience diving in and out of so many different communities, the technology community, the fashion community, the art community, the architecture and design community, the furniture world, automobiles, food, travel, all these things that inform us, what we realized is that we're kind of unicorns and our relationships are so deep over two decades in so many different worlds that we bridge these multiple worlds simultaneously. And in fact when we do something really great for an editorial story, it's typically where maybe art meets technology or one of the reasons we write about cars more frequently than we ever did is because of all the things happening in that space. We realized that we were in a position that we could be additive to those companies and to those teams without being threatening. We are not starting a PR firm. We are not starting an agency of other things. But we can come in and, I don't want to say the word 'enlighten' necessarily, but we could introduce them to things that were happening and potential partners as Josh said.
We could help lay a strategy based on our very unique purview of the world both geographically and through different industries. That is honestly what we do and it's incredibly hard to market that and communicate that as, “Hey, we're unicorns. We're just weird. We know a lot about a lot of things, and none of your people that you're working with have the same life experience as we have, or work experience.” That's what we bring.
Amy: I totally understand A, how important that is and what an amazing sort of mélange of insight that you can bring to a situation. And not only that but because of the way that you're already observing perspectives, filtering it, communicating it, you know how and why these dispirit ideas connect. You can see the system through which they connect which is super important because most people don't even know they need a unicorn like you. They think they need a one thing so they go shop for that thing they think they need. But what they really need is somebody to help them zoom out and see how it might connect to something else and where it lives in the larger context. Yes, I can see that you two are solid gold (laughs) when it comes to that. (Laughter)
Evan: This is leading me to, is this our third or fourth big observation and that's while there is a lot of glamor to what we do, it's also exhausting frequently and many things. But it's also a lot of trade shows. A lot, a lot, a lot of really un-glamorous trade shows in Vegas and other places. Something we observed along the way was in between our appointments with the really obvious big players, that if you go to the part of the trade show that is low budget.
Josh: The perimeters.
Evan: Which typically is the outskirts or the perimeters, there's no branding, there's no PR person, of course you have the context of going to these really big firms with the flashy booths and cadre of PR or marketing people. But it's in between those appointments that the discovery of the really interesting thing happens, and that for us has been so important that a lot of our coverage of those kinds of things.
Whether it's CES for example, is of course we're going to talk about what some of the big players are doing, but here's all of these things we discovered that truly was a discovery for us and that we can really share with our audience. I think it's one of the hallmarks of COOL HUNTING is kind of being obscure and not just regurgitating press releases from all these known brands. But bringing in what lessor known creators, designers, makers, entrepreneurs are doing, and giving them a spotlight. So it's harder work because the messaging isn't there. You have to kind of make the story. You have to observe it.
Amy: So you have to be kind of a detective, yeah.
Evan: Yeah, like what are they doing and how does it fit in? Again there's almost always no marketing materials or even great brand messaging and you have to kind of put those things together and be like, 'actually what this group is doing is super interesting and what they're working on should be shared.'
Amy: I think about the explorers who needed to trust themselves enough to go into uncharted territory and then they needed to tell people what's happening in this uncharted territory to people who don't have a frame of reference. I feel like that's what you two are doing so much because you're out there on the edges of what's happening and it's kind of your job to decide what has merit, what feels like it's going to connect. Then you need to spin it into something that other people can understand who don't yet have a frame of reference for it. That's a powerful skill, that's a really powerful skill.
Evan: I think everyone has this opportunity and you can start with if you are regularly going to work or to school or whatever, just take a different route. Or maybe you take a different mode of transportation, if you always take the bus or the subway, maybe you walk, maybe you ride a bike, maybe you're in a car or whatever. Give yourself the opportunity to experience something new or different even if you're just going one block out of the way it's a different experience on your way to where you're going. When you travel, feel that you have the ability to not do the obvious thing and go down the main street. Meander and find your way through side streets. It's the same construct as the trade show, right? If you're on the main street you're going to find the main things that are happening and unfortunately or fortunately depending on your point of view, a lot of it is really similar.
You're seeing the same brands, the same stores, anywhere you go in the world. But if you go a block or two out of the way, that's when you're going to see stuff that is probably only really local and that's the hardest thing to experience today for us when we are trying to discover someplace new. So take the opportunity to find those lesser known things and to just not shock your sense of discovery but to just kind of poke it a little bit. To say, “I can do this, even on my commute that I've done a million times from here to there, if I just went out of the way or took five more minutes to drive a different way,” or whatever it is, take a different bus line, that is going to expose you to new things and provoke you to be open to them hopefully.
Amy: I was going to ask you as you travel the world and you see the homogenization of, you know.
Josh: Everything.
Amy: Everything. What is it that stands out as being resistant to that? And it sounds like food is one of them that might not be completely resistant but is still a stronghold. Anything else?
Evan: Craft.
Amy: Yes. Yes!
Evan: Craft is still something that is so important to us and a big back bone for COOL HUNTING. It is thriving in few places and supported in few places. Cuba is one of those places where the government is behind training people to learn craft and trades. Morocco is another where you can go to incredible schools if you are talented, and you can learn how to do ceramics or metal work or wood work or tile or iron if you show some promise. And because those are such important parts of those economies in those countries and for tourism and all these other things, they're supported and recognized. If you compare that to places like Japan where you're dealing with just a lack of maybe interest in some products, so the kimono is a good example of that.
You go to these places where maybe there used to be five or 10 or 20 families doing that, and literally 20 years later there's three. So you see the contraction of traditional craft in so many cultures and we have tried to go in and celebrate that. We worked on a project for Ferrari where they asked us to work with their customization team to really push them and to show what could be done if you had a very unique vision for a car. One of the highlights of that was that we brought in several Japanese artisans to create that. I'll just say that the interior of this car was made from 75 year old vintage upcycled kimono. By using a fabric that is traditionally used for moreutilitarian uses. We brought that into the interior of a performance and luxury vehicle and showed the world that you could celebrate craft and adapt it to different kinds of uses and surprise and delight people through that.
Josh: Also that fabric was called sakiori. It's an ancient method of upcycling basically and the opportunity to show the fans of Ferrari and the followers of Ferrari that something that is upcycled can be luxurious was really meaningful to us.
Evan: And the techie part of it and getting it to work.
Amy: It's not even upcycling at this point, it's archiving (laughs) in a way.
Evan: Yeah, and sharing it. I tell this story all the time and it always brings a tear to my eyes. At the debut of this car it was New York for Design Week last year and several of the artisans came for that big unveiling. They hadn't seen the car. The car was done during the pandemic so there was no travel. It was all these conference calls and DHL'ing [1.40.00] stuff all over the world. So the artisan who wove this fabric lives in a very small island called Amami Oshima which is near Okinawa in the Southwest Archipelago of Japan, and someone who has struggled to continue his family's business as weavers and who has taken sakiori as one direction to create new things, new products that they could sell. I said, “Hajime, I want you to close your eyes and I'm going to walk you to the car. When we get to the car I'm going to open the door and then you can open your eyes.”
I open the door and he takes his hands away, and just the tears start coming down his face. This kind of disbelief that his 'humble craft' as he would say, was used in such an unimaginable way. No one would ever think to put it in a car. The techie part of actually being able to have it in there and be usable and viable and safe and all that is a whole other story, but we eventually got there. It is beautiful on its own, but to see his face and to be able to honor him and his work. He spent three months weaving that fabric that was used in the inside of the car. So the levels of story-telling are just so amazing. You can see all about that, lots of videos and photos at ferrari.coolhunting.com.
Great story-telling but for us it was more than that. It was amazing to work with Ferrari but it was also such an honor to celebrate the work of so many different craftspeople in Japan, and show the world and especially those in Japan, that maybe you don't want to grow up and be a TikTokker or a footballer. Maybe you do want to continue in your family's business of craft. Or maybe you're inspired on your own to be an apprentice or to learn that, and to find that there is honor and opportunity and excitement in traditional craft, and there is a way to sometimes evolve it.
Amy: That is such an incredible story. I love it on all the levels, but I also love just the juxtaposition of a slick, high tech automotive with this deeply handmade, tactile piece of craft is a very unexpected combination, three months of somebody's skilled craft labor into this space, it makes it so much more special. You're saying to the world, “Don't forget craft.”
Josh: Yeah, we love using contrast as a way to introduce people to new ideas and change their perspective on various things. With this project, as you've just said, it was very much about the contrast between a high performance, very analog, simple, ancient craft. It also was about a dialog between Japan and Italy. One of the big pieces of the project was this idea of creating a bit of a love story between Japan and Italy where there are so many similarities in the intended output. There is an attention to detail and a passion for the output, the final product. And the process of getting there was so different culturally, it was really a big challenge and a huge learning opportunity and ultimately super interesting to navigate and manage the back and forth between Japan and Italy and we worked with an indigo dyer in Kyoto who works with natural indigo. Most things that are indigo dyed are actually dyed with synthetic indigo. Natural indigo is really hard to work with and he dyes leather in natural indigo. As far as we know no one else has really figured out how to do it or if they can do it. So he did the leather dying and then the leather was sent to Italy where it was cut and woven in a very traditional Italian style to make this woven leather headliner of the car. We also really love and appreciate the poetry of that headliner not being visible to anyone outside of the car. It is there for the driver and the passenger and that's it. It's this special moment and again contrast or this reminder about craft and handwork and attention to detail, while also experiencing something which is very much of the moment and moving into the future.
Amy: I love that. I very much interpret your looking to the future as being about evolving.
Evan: I think we're going through a big transition in our lives and in COOL HUNTING. We're 20 years old. We know we're on the verge of another really, really big reset. The things that are happening around us, AI is one of many things. The way we're working is changing. And most importantly the way that people consume media is constantly changing. If you think back to a couple of years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, most of the platforms we use didn't exist, a lot of the tools that we use today didn't exist, and the way that we consume information has radically changed.
As we approach our 20th anniversary we were like, 'we're going to do a book, we're going to do an installation, we're going to do all these things, we're going to celebrate everything we've accomplished.' The more we dug into those things during the pandemic, we were like, 'who gives a shit?' If we do an exhibit I want it to be 5% here's what we've done, and here's 95% about where we think the world is going or what's interesting or commissioning work from artists or whoever. It's about the future.
We only talk about the future almost all the time. We rarely go back and talk about. We obviously think about what have we done, how have we done this, what can we learn from that process. But we are very future focused so our history is important, especially establishing who we are and our relationship to one another and to our work. But our focus every day is what's next, what's in the future. How do we honor what we've done but how do we just move forward constantly.
Josh: In terms of what we're doing but also in terms of what we're covering. But at the same time we love craft, we love culture, we love food, we love so many things that have incredibly deep historical context and sometimes we need to provide that historical context. But it is about how do these practices move ahead into the future. So when Evan talks about the future and focusing 95% on the future, it's not without being aware of the past and without acknowledging and respecting and celebrating the past and figuring... It is very much in many cases about looking to the past and figuring out what to pull forward to the present and into the future.
Amy: Well you two are inspiring. This has been such a fortifying, gratifying, fascinating, wonderful conversation and I am so glad I got to spend this time with you and I hope it's just the beginning.
Josh: Us, too. This was super fun.
Evan: Same. Thank you so much, Amy.
Amy Devers: Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. For a transcript of this episode, and more about Josh and Evan, including images of their work, and a bonus Q&A - head to cleverpodcast.com. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: - share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, support our sponsors, or hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, er X - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements and bonus content. You can subscribe to our newsletter at cleverpodcast.com to make sure you don’t miss anything. Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers. With editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround podcast network. Visit surroundpodcasts.com to discover more of the Architecture and Design industry’s premier shows.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

Josh: Don’t talk about work during dinner.

Evan: Always hang out with people who are smarter than you.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

Josh: It’s a tie between analog film and generative AI.

Evan: I love Otter for interviews and Notion for organizing work flow.

What books are on your nightstand?

Josh: Why We Hate Cheap Things, The School of Life

Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers; Leonard Koren

Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, Michelle Janikian

Tokyo Tattoo 1970, Martha Cooper

Farsighted, Steven Johnson

The Longing for Less, Kyle Chayka

Evan: Termination Shock, Neil Stephenson

The Anomaly, Hervé Le Tellier

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Andrea Lawlor

Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

Dancer From the Dance, Andrew Holleran

Chakra Healing, Margarita Alcantara

Favorite restaurant in your city?

Josh: Juban, 207 10th Ave, New York, NY

Evan: Rainbow Falafel, 26 E 17th St, New York, NY

Evan, Josh and Rory in Hudson Valley, 2021.

Who do you look up to and why?

Josh: Ivy Ross because I can’t think of another person who better balances design, art, business and spirituality.

Evan: Keith Yamashita for his listening skills, analysis, integration and naunce.

Evan, Josh and the COOL HUNTING Ferrari Team in 2022.

Ferrari Roma Tailor Made Specially Crafted for COOL HUNTING, 2022, Marinello, Final Assembly

What were the last five songs you listened to?

Josh: (not literally the last five listened to because been listening to jazz all day (see first on list) so more like the last five intentionally played)

Oscar Peterson and Lionel Hampton, Love For Sale

Dolly Parton’s cover of Wrecking Ball

Air’s 10,000 Hz Legend (remastered for Dolby Atmos spatial audio) full album

Round + Round, Bob Moses

Tropical Fuck Storm’s cover of Stayin’ Alive

Evan: Cristina Chong, Tom Polce + Kay Hanley, How Would That Feel (omg so nerdy-last episode we watched of Star Trek Brave New Worlds was a musical)

Dolly Parton’s cover of Wrecking Ball

Ice Spice + Rema, Pretty Girl

Troy’s Sivan, Something to Give Each Other

Was due Project, King of My Castle Purple Disco Machine Remix

Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.