1993 is when I started coming to the Lower East Side, and it was sort of the place to
get mixtapes, hard to get music, and I was always just a fan of what would be known as
streetwear today.
Back then I was a fan of individual people making clothes that I couldn't get anywhere
else.
Guys like Jay Kwan, who was doing a line called Rock Hard, Camilla Elkie, who was doing a
line called Triple Five Soul, and that was all here.
It was a very, very innocent naive time that was really dope.
It was like the nascent prehistoric street culture days, and it was an amazing time to
be in the city.
Maple Design is where I work.
It's what I started.
I started it in 1997, and I didn't know what I was doing back then, and I didn't know
what I was starting.
What Staple Design is, you know, we're a creative agency, we're a clothing line, an
apparel collection.
We are a retail store, we are art gallery, and we're a magazine as well, so those are
the different businesses that we operated.
Tone Video shows the scene outside the Reed Space Store on the Lower East Side yesterday,
when nearly 100 self-proclaimed sneaker heads got into a shoving match as they waited for
the doors to open, and the chance to buy one of only 20 pairs of pigeons.
That's limited edition, of course.
Kids were piled up against the fence like it was a soccer game, and I was just like,
I can't believe this.
I was actually fearful at times for the safety of the people here, the staff, myself.
I was just, you know, it was scary at times.
When I was really young, I wanted to be an astronaut.
I didn't have, like, ambition to be an artist or anything, you know, it wasn't cultivated
by my parents at all.
I didn't show in any, like, youth galleries or anything like that, it was just literally
a geek in his bedroom, like, just drawing comic book characters, you know, that's what
I was doing.
I didn't see it as being anything like a career opportunity, but I guess the artistic
scene was always in there somewhere.
Design to me is just all about communication, that's what a good designer is.
Every time I'm presented with a design project, I see a problem that somebody has, and it's
my job to fix that problem, you know.
It's almost like they have a Rubik's Cube that they can't figure out, and good design
can be like, boom, now we can all see it, you know, that's what good design is.
And I love trying to figure out that Rubik's Cube for people all the time.
The first thing was clothing.
It started in clothing, by accident, purely, you know, wasn't really trying to sell shirts
at all, walked into a store that wanted to buy the shirt off my back, like, saw the shirt
and said, like, how can I get that shirt, where can I get it, and I said, I made it.
So then, you know, that's really how business started.
They were like, make 12 and we'll try it here, and I was like, okay, that's cool.
I didn't even have a name then at that point.
It's just a freak chance accident that, like, that guy liked the shirt that I was wearing
and wanted to buy them, and then another freak chance that they sold, and then business was
kind of open.
So that's how it all got started, it's where it all happened from March 7th, 1997, my birthday.
Whenever we design something or create a line or logo or a t-shirt, there's like a story
behind that, there's a process, so we wanted a space where more of that story could be
explained and told, and that was one of the main basis for opening Reed Space.
I named it after my high school art teacher, Michael Reed.
He was a huge influence in my life.
Throughout your life, you're going to meet a certain number of people that really, like,
shifts the fork in the road, so to speak, like, you know, when you're at, people say
you're at a crossroads in life, like, I was going to make a left, but this dude came along
and made me make a right, you know, it's a way to have his legacy live on, he passed
away, he died while he was teaching us, you know, like, he taught enough life lessons
but then to teach the final lesson of, like, you know, that which is possibly most sacred
to you can then be taken away in a blink of an eye, like, literally he died in an accident,
so it was, like, overnight, it was, like, you know, one more lesson, you know, that he taught.
Reed Space is sort of secretly our ear to the street.
It's one thing to be designing in a bubble and just being able to create great stuff
but then does it work for real, like, in reality, does it work, do the people like it?
And Reed Space is our in-house incubation laboratory that we could just make something,
put it right out in Reed Space and, like, nobody likes this, oh, we fucked up, you know, like,
that happens and it's, like, our testing ground.
People ask, like, how can we work so much?
I actually dread falling asleep because it's those hours that I can't work on staple
or can't, you know, operate staple, so it's, like, I stay up as much as I can to continuously do it
and then fall asleep, fine, finally knock out, you know, second I wake up, it's, like, I'm back right on it
and I don't want to stop.
Outside of just making cool t-shirts and highly sought-after footwear, you know, that's fun and games
but, like, I definitely don't want to go to the grave being, like, you've made a great sneaker, Jeff,
like, what have you done, you know what I mean?
Like, I tell you, if one kid is, like, you know, I was headed for this direction in my life
but after I saw what you did, I decided to go this way.
That's worth so much more than, like, an eBay hit or, like, you know, like a highly sought-after pair of sunglasses, you know.
