Working with Ian Schrager: The Iconic Studio 54 Founder's Approach to Hospitality Today - Adam Wallace

Josiah: We're going to talk about Ian Schrager, and Studio 54. We didn't get to experience that ourselves unfortunately, but I know we've both talked to people who have. And we've seen the documentary, incredible mix of human emotion, and just a way of providing hospitality in a way. Ian Schrager, of course, went on to become a hotelier, and you had the chance to work with him, his teams on a project. So, I wonder if we could tell the story of what it was like working with Ian and his teams to build the creative identity and communication around EDITION? How did that project come to be?

Adam: Yeah, amazing. No, it was so incredible to expand that brand. We started working with them when they had four hotels operational, and did, I don't know, 10 or 12 openings for them, and took the brand global, and all of that. It was really interesting when we started there, it was almost this closed red velvet curtain thing. The website for those who remember was just a list of the properties to come, and a closed curtain. And even though he had some hotels operationally, hadn't really launched the brand yet. It hadn't revealed itself. So feel extremely grateful to have had that moment of where he had defined the product, he had defined the design, but really to roll out that brand globally. Then parallel, we did seven years of all the growth of EDITION, and it was parallel to Rosewood. And then we did public and we did Ian's personal Instagram, and all that. So we were deep in that. He was very heavily involved in the creative, which was amazing.

Josiah: What surprised you about that collaboration?

Adam: Well, he was in the details. We had weekly in-person meetings to go over social media content calendars with them, and you look at how disconnected so many hoteliers are from social media. He still had his old school approach where we'd print them out, and he'd have paper. And he would mark them up each one, but go through post by post, and, "I like this. I don't like this." So he was very curated in that. He saw the value of social. He always valued PR, but he really saw the value of social. I think what's amazing about what he's been able to do is of course visionary design, and very opinionated design, and each of the products he created. Different than with Rosewood was very much an Ian idea, an Ian product, and much more hard branded in that context on the product side. But then really how he opened the hotels was really to the spirit of Studio 54, which was about who he curates to be in the hotel, right? So it was not necessarily this sense of place from what does the local culture, and this thing. It was about, "Who do I want to be at the soul of this property in every cool city around the world?" Ben Pundole, who was his director of culture and entertainment forever, or the head of culture and entertainment, would do an amazing job at going into cities, and finding their people, finding the cool places, getting to know the right people, hiring their positions of director and culture and entertainment, which I love that position, which is like each property, you're getting to the person in the market who's going to know the people in the market that are going to drive the word of mouth about that hotel, right? And in the Madrid EDITION, and I'm the guy that used to run GQ for Spain, and okay. He's going to know the people in the fashion industry and whatnot. And he comes in as director of culture and entertainment, and finds the right people to be there. And it has a level of exclusivity to it for sure. It's like only the right people are invited, and you have that velvet rope experience. But I think he really understands curating an audience in an amazing way, and being rigorously dedicated to all of the details of everything that it takes to create design and experience. And doing a great hotel is not simple on many, many levels. It's very multidisciplinary. And I think it's an argument for the power of a visionary driven brand. And no, it's an amazing experience. Also, a very interesting cultural experiment of a partnership between the godfather of lifestyle hotels in a way, and Schrager, and ultimately Bill Marriott with EDITION. And I think that that dynamic was super interesting, right? Because Marriott in this partnership was trying to scale cool, scale Ian, and it worked in many ways, and didn't work in other ways. And I think we always saw that tension between Marriott's cost-cutting, P and L driven, scalable approach, and Ian's visionary approach, and the tensions of that dynamics there. And super interesting brand to be a part of, for sure.