· Ronnie Fieg
It comes in this red box, and in the box comes one of the two sandwiches that you can order, and then pronto fries, and then one of these two frozen drinks that we make in LA. And with it, more importantly, is a toy box of a pair of shoes. And I'm bringing back for the first time in its original form, because we brought it back one time with a navy sole, but there's a shoe that really put me on the map when I opened Kith called the Salmon Toe. It's a Salmon Toe ASICS. And it's a Gel-Lyte III in this salmon, the whole toe is blocked with salmon, and there's navy on the quarter with white stripes. It's beautiful. So, a miniature version of those shoes will come in a small shoe box, and then that will be basically the toy in the Ronnie's meal. The truck will only serve a Ronnie's meal. That's the only product it'll serve, and it comes with the options I mentioned. That will launch for the exhibition where we're launching the exhibition, which I can't name right now. And then the truck then gets positioned in front of the flagship store after the exhibition full-time. And I got the city to approve me having outdoor seating in front of my store in Lafayette, so then I'm going to have the Ronnie's truck stationed there. We're going to launch also delivery for the full menu out of a ghost kitchen, which will happen, I think, the end of October.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. I love this idea of keeping a catalog of past work and looking back through it. On my other podcast, "Founders," where I read just biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, I went down this fashion designer thing for a while. And so I did Coco Chanel and Ralph Lauren and then Balenciaga. And I think of Balenciaga now as kind of like not my... I don't want to insult him, but I was like, "This is like not my thing." But what's interesting is I'm always interested in who in the top of their profession, who do they say is the best?
· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Okay. [00:00:00] S0: Warren Buffett has this idea where it's like, well, if you want to invest in a company and in an industry, go around asking all the leaders in the industry and say, "Hey, you got one bullet. You can take out one guy. Who is it going to be?" [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: And usually, they'll all say the same guy. He's like, "That's the guy you should invest in." So he has this. So Balenciaga was that, where like Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, they called him the master of us all, I think was one of the quotes. And so I got to... Obviously, what I think of Balenciaga now and how they thought about him back then is crazy. But Balenciaga, if you haven't read about him, I'll send you some good biography recommendations. He essentially redid his stores almost like a church. He had a reverence, a religious reverence to what he was doing. But one of the most fascinating things is he had notebooks of... Because he would not only design, but he would also physically sew everything together. He was one of the few coutures or- [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: ... master couture, whatever they call it. But I thought that idea of like, okay, your career, in his case, I think he started relatively late. Let's say he spent 20 years. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: He can go back and be like, "What was I doing 18 years ago?"
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: He can go back and be like, "What was I doing 18 years ago?" [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. But as an atelier that he was, to me, and this is very important, especially in footwear, I got to learn how to make a shoe from scratch also. So, going back and looking at the progress that we made, also the knowledge working with certain brands, and some brands do things better than others. So the amount that you pick up along the way working with this many brands, I feel like in footwear, I've become the most well-rounded, knowledgeable person in footwear because I got to see between athletic shoes and brown shoes and boots. I got to really learn how these brands make product, go to the factories, go to their offices, and really understand the dynamic of what makes them so special. So this book, it stands for so much more than just the product at face value. To me, it's a timeline of feelings that I had and knowledge that I gained along the way. So, when I think back to a moment, there are things that you'll remember based on certain events or based on certain news and milestones in your life based on certain things that happen in your family or whatever it is. I remember my life through product. So, I think back to when I got married, and I think about also the product during that time. The product when my first baby was born, when my first store opened, or all the stores along the way. I have product that- [00:00:00] S0: Your life milestones are anchored to the products you were creating. [00:00:00] S1: Oh.
· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Oh. [00:00:00] S0: It goes back to, again, why the soulful... We talked before we started recording. It's like, when I said, it's like what I'm trying to understand is I can't understand the way you push your work until I understand the personality of the person that developed the ideas. [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: I seek to understand who the fuck is sitting across from me. [00:00:00] S1: Yes. [00:00:00] S0: Like, how the hell... I ask you, like, "You're 13. How the hell do you get interested in shoes?" And so then it's like, oh, think about the culture he's in, think about where he's living, think about what he's listening to, think about what is around him. It's like you can't understand Ronnie unless you understand everything that happened then.
· Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Going back to that, taking two buses to high school, the Q17 to the Q30, or taking the train to work when I took the F train from the last stop on 179th and Hillside to Broadway Lafayette, or West 4th when I used to work at 8th Street. What you see on the train, because you pass by certain neighborhoods, right? Each stop or every other stop would be like a different culture hopping on the train. Because cultures are spread out and they create communities, and then they get on the train in packs. And along the way from basically the first stop on the F train, or the last stop, I should say, going into the city, what I got to see became my world. That was my influence. I got to see so many different styles, people dressed in so many different ways. And that's when the sense of individuality was at an all-time high, before you were influenced by your algorithm, which now a lot of people want the same things because it's based off of what they see or what brands have to basically pay for in terms of mass distributing content. We lived in such a different era. I got to see people walk in to a store, have no idea what they're looking for, have no idea about the brands, and I got to see what they gravitated to first based off of a visual of what they thought looked different or looked on par for what they wanted to wear. So, I got to understand why so many different people liked so many different products for so many different reasons, and that became a big part of who I am, because it became a part of why I like product. That was my influence, basically, is seeing so many different styles and then forming my own edit. It's like that's a lost art.