You mentioned you started working on it a year ago, after you had been out in LA. How did you and Bieber reunite?
We've stayed close over the years. He called me over to his house and said, “This is what I want to do and I want you to creative direct it,” and hit me with the idea of what we should do, and laid it all out pretty simplistically and pretty specific, but pretty in depth. We just kind of got going from there.
What was that first meeting like? Does he have a vision? Are you guys talking it out? Or he's already sketched something?
There's ideations of the name of it and where it's going to go, what kind of impact he'd want to have, things like that. Then we started talking creatively about how it should look.
House of Drew
House of Drew
House of Drew
We can kind of just do whatever, and because we're doing it ourselves, we don't really have to answer to a bunch of people that are looking for us to open up different distribution channels, et cetera. We have a website and we're doing it all ourselves. So we basically have the luxury to just be like, Yeah, we're going to make what we want to make.
Do you remember anything from that meeting around what he said he wanted that impact to be?
It's just about making cool things and stuff, ultimately, that he likes and wants to wear. It's not too complicated.
What's it like working with him on this sort of project? How involved is he?
He's involved in every step of it, from what we want to make to how we're going to shoot it to how visuals are going to look and how we're going to roll it out.
That's one thing that's really important to me. He's got a great instinct and you've seen him over the years—even just how his style has evolved and his eye for fashion. It’s not just his impact, but his actual eye for fashion is one of the most valuable tools that our brand has. Of course, it's cool, him and his wife and their impact on fashion from an eyeball standpoint, but the truth is that they both actually just know it.
What's he like collaborating on design?
Specific. He's detail-oriented, which is awesome. How things are fitting to very specific technical details. The form and shape and material and softness and etcetera. “Maybe this could feel a little bit softer. This is not soft enough.”
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Did he come up with the idea for the hotel slippers? Obviously he’s been wearing them, and I like the idea of injecting something funny like that into the line.
Yes. We were thinking maybe we'd be able to drop some stuff a little bit sooner—around the end of last year—but it just didn't work out that way. But we had the idea that before we launched that we were going to give out some hotel slippers.
