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Aeranaut 05: Josh Peskowitz
The Go Between - Editor, Retailer and Consultant
For fashion consultant and branding guru Josh Peskowitz, work is about making magic happen
Josh Peskowitz is a hard man to pin down, at least in explaining what he actually does for a living. A multi-talented consultant in the field of style and lifestyle, Peskowitz is a go-to consultant in the sphere of just about anything that matters to men. There is practically nothing Peskowitz hasn’t done – from editorial to design to branding to retail to e-commerce. His clients have included venerable whisky brands, automotive giants and fashion brands across America, the UK and Italy and Japan. But because his work is often behind the scenes, you wouldn’t necessarily see it. But you would feel it. Josh’s broad experience and unique point of view put him in a very useful position for brands looking for real engagement with their ideal customer base. It also makes him the ideal guy to speak to Aera on matters of contemporary taste and design. We caught up with him for lamb chops at the storied Keen’s Steakhouse in New York City to chew over modern men, taste, luxury and of course watches.
Josh, can you describe what you do?
You know, it's the hardest thing to explain. Usually, when you talk to someone and they tell you that they do a bunch of different things, you tend to think that they're not doing anything meaningful, right? Or maybe they have a trust fund. But because of the opportunities that have come my way, also the way my brain works, I don't like to do things that I already know how to do, and so I I've had actually a lot of trouble describing myself, and a lot of other people have had trouble describing what I do because it’s never just one thing,
What drives you in your many activities? How do you keep it fresh?
I feel it's important to learn new things. I don't like to repeat simply because, what's the point? You can do the same type of job, you can have the same position, and do it for different organizations, and the outcome and the experience of it will be very different. But for me, earlier in my career I just wanted to learn from people. The best thing I could do was work for people that had very strong points of view and had a definite way of doing things. I’d learn that and then figure out how to do it in a way that they would find unexpected, and contribute to the end result.
"I
don't
like
to
do
things
that
I
already
know
how
to
do."
Is that a way of working that you encourage others to follow?
Absolutely. When I talk to people who are working for me, I always say I'm never going to tell you how to do your job. I'm just going to tell you what the goal is. You come up with a plan, because your plan will be different from my plan. We may poke holes in it, but then, when we will agree on a route forward, my job is to protect you. Unless you mess up, then I'm going to be the first one to tell you.
Are you essentially a kind of creative go-between?
Yeah, I'm a Yenta. I'm a matchmaker at the end of the day, and I've always done that. I've always been the person who was able to go between different groups of people and help find their commonalities and figure out who needed to be working together, who needed to be friends, and even who needed to be dating. I like to put people together just because I think the results would be interesting.
Was all this apparent from an early age?
Yes. I wasn't that good at school early on; I'm profoundly dyslexic, you know. I always say I was never very good IN high school, but I was very good AT high school. I went to a big urban school, you know, in Washington, D.C.. And this was in the '90s. We lived in a nice neighborhood, but it wasn't the nice city that it is now. There was a huge mix of people from a lot of different backgrounds there, and there weren't that many kids that could run easily with different groups of people and introduce them to each other. That was something that I ended up doing a lot of. I was never trying to conform to any one group, and as such, I think I’m very accepting of different people and how they are. I've always been naturally inclined to put myself into someone else's shoes, to try to understand their motivations, to help put what they're doing - or how they're feeling - into context.
So, collaboration is key?
if you're going to successfully get things done and get ideas executed and get projects off the ground and or just put out a good magazine or make a good T-shirt. Nobody really ever does it alone, and so you need somebody who can help bridge the gaps between what everyone does, and that's not something that the world, the way we live in it now, is necessarily rewarded in the way that it used to be.
“Nobody really ever does it alone.”
Consulting is essentially what you do with a whole variety of brands now. How do you work out who to work with?
I try not to work with brands or companies that I don't have an affinity with, that I wouldn't work with anyway. But I also try to work where I think I can be helpful. And a lot of times, the most important thing is setting the expectations at the beginning.
Managing those expectations is a lot right? Do you find that easy?
Sometimes there needs to be a hard talk, but what I try to do is instead of telling people you're doing this absolutely wrong, I tell them "Listen, I'm going to spend time learning about you. I'm going to spend time learning about your people. I'm going to spend time learning about where you've been, and I'm going to spend time talking about where you're at, and then we need to have a real, honest discussion about where you want to go.
A certain amount of diplomatic handholding is needed here right?
It’s the same as when you get hired for an actual job. You hear ‘Oh, we want to change this. We want to change that. We want to bring in fresh blood’. No, they don't. Often they want everything to stay exactly the same, or at least some people in that organization do. A lot of times people don't know what they want. If you ask them, they'll tell you what they don't want. Yeah, because they haven't made it that far. They've only made it to what they don't like. You know, ‘I don't like the president. I'm gonna vote for the other guy’.
Which begs the question, where do you start?
I look at the product, feel the product. I ask them about the product, but almost as important, or maybe even more important, I ask them about the brand. I ask, “why are they doing this?” This business is hard and the world does not need any more brands, so, if you're going to start a brand, or if you're going to rehabilitate a brand, or you're going to try to foster the further success of a brand, you have to have a pretty strong idea on why you are doing it.
What do you feel is the ideal end result of your projects?
A lot of my work – fashion at least - is about showing men that it’s acceptable and preferable for them to care about the kinds of clothes that they wear and know more about it. Particularly in America that is still a minority of men. Customers who are willing to pay premiums for products because of how they're made, who they were made by, where they were made. The majority of people still fall under the spell of the brand and the advertising.
What motivates men to buy clothes?
I think many men buy clothes out of fear, out of fear of looking stupid. And that's from billionaires on down, and it doesn't matter what the aesthetic is, because for a lot of men, thinking about the way you dress is seen as frivolous. So, they play safe. That’s only because they don't have a point of view on what they like, how they express themselves. So as a retailer or as a marketer you must answer these three questions. “Will my friends make fun of me for wearing this? Will my employees or my boss snicker behind my back if they saw me walk in wearing this? Will wearing this prevent me from getting a date?” If the answer to those three questions is a no, and you have convinced the customer of it, then you’re helping them out big time.
No one is born with style though, it’s learned.
As a social animal, humans are pretty much unadorned. We don't have any feathers. We’ve got no fur, no spots, no antlers. All these things that other animals use to display their health or their virility, we don't have any of that. Consequently, we have to make the choice, and it's always seemed weird to me that men don’t. Maybe it's because of how and where and when I grew up. There, our clothes did matter, but it was a function of a different mindset than the norm. That was the '90s, it was tribal. It was all about Polo Sport, and Tommy Hilfiger, and Nautica. These were status symbols. Pelle Pelle jeans, Girbaud, Guess, Timberland. You know these are things like Timberland boots. Who could imagine Timberland boots being such a status symbol? $120 a pair. I couldn't afford that. That’s part of the reason I got into the business in the first place.
It doesn’t seem tribal dressing is quite the thing it used to be...
The tribal aspect of style has been diminished not only by brands but by social media because the image and the meaning have been decoupled. Now, you can like the way Sid Vicious dressed and want to dress like him but listen to J Lo. What made a punk a punk, or someone get into grunge, it was all interwoven with music and with and community. Those cultural connotations just aren't there in the same way.
Social media these days would have you believe in a major trend at 9am that’s over by lunchtime. What do you make of trends these days?
I don't think they really exist. Almost any mode of dressing is acceptable now. There's no formality. But also, you can just observe it, and it's a trend. You don't have to participate. I mean, yes, there are shifts, and this style will come in, and that one will go out. Suddenly everybody's wearing loafers, and then everybody's wearing sneakers, or everybody's pant legs are wide, and then everybody's pant legs are super slim, and those are functions of the pendulum. It's not really about trends.
Do you think that the modern obsession with startups in the modern sense meshes well with fashion?
I've worked for startup companies, companies with a lot of funding, and the CEO says, “we want to be the Netflix of luxury”, and I'm thinking, what does that even mean? Like, tell me how? Because at the end of the day, fashion retail is a business where we buy products from a manufacturer and sell them to a consumer. That means you hold inventory. That means you've got to put out a whole bunch of cash and then get the goods in. These are immutable forces. 60% of the stuff you buy, if you're very lucky, is going to sell at full price, and it means that 40% of it is going to have to sell at markdown. That’s just the way that it works. If there's a way to disrupt that, we haven't found it yet. You just need to be very clear-eyed about that; a lot of people need a little bit of outside perspective or they miss it. They think that there's a secret. There isn’t. It's a running game. You get tackled a bunch. You got to break a couple of tackles. You get down the field. You got to punt sometimes.
What’s the best advice you would give to a small brand trying to get to success?
I've said for many years now, if you're small, or independent, or if you're starting out, scale is not your friend. Sustainable profitability, slow growth is your friend. It's not cute to do it that way, but the only way to survive in a world where you know things get supersized and people get attention really fast is instead of trying to focus on trying to make something for everyone, make everything for someone, you know. If you can get one person who totally buys in, you can get more.
What lies ahead for fashion then?
The day will come when everything is 3D printed and then you put it into an incinerator and it goes away, and the only thing that will matter is IP. And I've been involved with companies that are working on that future too. But that day will come. I won't like that world, but that will happen. You know, and there are justifications for it environmentally. But I feel you also lose something there. Fashion is a very tactile, emotional, human, business. So, until that day comes, I’ll tell my clients that there are not that many untapped secrets on how to do it right. You just have to do it well. Know yourself, know who your audience is, beat their expectations, stay real, keep going. Go slow, but keep going, and eventually it'll work out.
What defines luxury for you?
A luxury is something that used to be a necessity, anything that's still made the old way, something that once you couldn’t get another way. You know, there’s always an easier, cheaper way to do everything these days using machines, using cheaper materials, short cuts. For me it’s never going to be as dope as the old school way to do it, and the old school way is hard. And so, you have to pay more.
There’s another kind of luxury, something we never have enough time for. What's your idea of time well spent?
The beach. I love going to the beach. And that's if I just have the day off. Yeah. Let's get in the car. We're gonna go to the beach. Before I had kids, I wouldn’t take beach towels or umbrellas or anything. Now I have to get prepared. Now I have a big cart. But it's just a day spent cooking out and hanging out with people and laughing, that's my favourite thing. if we're cooking outside, and I’ve got all day, I'll slow cook a brisket. The most fun for me is the things that are unexpected. One of the things about being a kid or a teenager or a young adult, at a different time in the world, you could wake up, walk outside and see what happens. I might not make it home until two days later. I might be home an hour later, but invariably you would run into people, and you know it was just about the time.
Speaking of time, what was your first reaction to seeing Aera’s range of watches?
When I spoke about luxury earlier, I talked about doing it the old way because it’s the harder way to do it. Because it's no longer necessary to produce things in that manner, to continue to do so makes it a luxury. That's certainly true of Aera. What I admired about Aera the first time I saw any watches was that it proves that just because you're doing the “luxury” thing, it doesn't mean that it has to look or feel old. That it has to be retro somehow. You can improve, add modernity. You can add a new design language. Aesthetically, those are the things that I really admire about Aera.
Watchmaking is of course all about the long game with many brands still successful after a hundred, even two hundred years. Is there room for newness?
Always. A lot of watchmaking is due to a singular vision from a watchmaker or a designer who has a run, you know, for 5 or 10, years, where they just make a bunch of wild advances, and then those, are somehow sealed in amber, and they never change until someone else comes along who does something different. And Aera is doing something different. It's got the guts and the performance and the mechanical excellence of a traditional luxury watch maker, but it's also a tool. It's an instrument capable of doing the hard stuff.
Which Aera watch resonates most with you?
For me it’s the M-1 Field. The thing that I really like about it is that it's smaller. I prefer a smaller watch, but the thing that I like the most about it is that while it has those clean lines, while it has that curve, you know, case, and while it had, you know, just a lot of cleanness, it still reminds me of an Explorer One or Hamilton Khaki King or a Spitfire, watches that just told time. There were hours, minutes, and seconds. I probably gravitate towards those kinds of watches because my grandfather was a salesman for Hamilton of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So, it’s that clean dial thing, because that's what I had on my wrist. There's an attic full of Hamiltons in Brooklyn that I will one day have to go through.
