Crafting Places Guests Remember: Inside Sage Studio’s Story-First Approach - Walter Isenberg, Sage Hospitality Group

Josiah: In our last episode, we heard how Sage Hospitality co-founder and CEO Walter Isenberg's partnership with Dana Crawford showed the power of story in shaping unforgettable hotels. Well, today we take that idea even further. In this episode, Walter pulls back the curtain on Sage Studio, the in-house team behind the creative vision that defines Sage's iconic properties. Keep listening to hear how story and strategy can come together to create places guests love. Let's get into it. 

[intro]

Josiah: You've done so many projects over the years. I'm curious, I want to expand on this notion of story. It feels central to your work and how you operate Sage. Where do you begin with that story process? Is it about identifying the story that's out there? I've heard in some of your public remarks over the years where you dive deep into the history of the places that you operate in. Where do you start with a story process for a project?

Walter: Yeah, so we have a company called Sage Studio, and they do all of our branding and placemaking work. And they really look at the history of the place. That's a place to start, where it sits in the community. Then, you know, really thinking about the customer, how's the property going to be positioned? Who's the customer we're trying to attract? Then we also identify. a muse for the project, right? And so that muse may not be public, right? But it's what we do to then create the story. Also, we use that in how we hire people on board those people and how we ultimately continue to train those people. And it also inspires the types of activations that we do. And we've done this in new construction as well as historic adaptive reuse. So it's not just the history of the place. And by example, we did a full block in Denver called Dairy Block. It happens to have a few historic buildings on it. One of them was a dairy, the other was a lumber yard. And the inspiration for Dairy Block is that it is a collection of makers. So you think about a lumber yard, right? People are building things, a dairy, they were taking the cow's milk and pasteurizing it here. And so they were making, if you will, they, the cow made the milk, but They were making it drinkable. And as you look at the hotel at Dairy Box called the Maven, a Maven is an expert at their craft. And then as you look around and see, we've curated the retail here to really feel crafted. We have a local jeweler, a woman named Sarah. She makes her own jewelry. She's got a very, very successful jewelry store here. We have a distiller, we have a line maker, a beer producer, all local to Colorado. So we've crafted the retail to fit the story. And again, that story. isn't like, I don't, I don't know that a guest would come in here and go, Oh my God, this is a group of, you know, makers, but they feel something and it's authentic. And I think that's really what we strive to do. And we fundamentally believe that consumers are very, very smart and they know the difference between something that's authentic and inauthentic.