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The art of the mad genius is not as daunting as you think. One part mad, one part genius, and you’re there.

For instance, there used to be this homeless man back home, who claimed to be the inventor of crab soccer (you know, the elementary PE game, where you’d waddle around on all fours, stomach face up, and kick around a gigantic ball of primary colors — for exercise) He also spoke plenty on both jamming with Jimi Hendrix, and being poisoned by him, by way of LSD, in the 1960’s. After the self-sermon, he would finish with an a cappella performance of a self-written ballad entitled, “She Can’t Get None” Then, he’d collect his quarters. This man was not normal. But the few times I crossed paths with him, at 7-11 or some gas station, I would always pay him some of my time. Even if it was just for a few passing seconds, it was more for any other stranger I walked by. That’s because the one gift of all mad geniuses, is their ability to grab our attention, make us stop in our steps, pause, and watch.

The difference between David Gensler and the inventor of crab soccer, other than privilege of shelter, is that for Gensler, quarters are not enough. It’s a small difference that has shown itself in the creation of The Keystone Design Union (KDU), a hugely successful design and communication agency based out of Brooklyn, New York with an international scope of some 1250 employees, in about a hundred countries, boasting a client list that includes LVMH, Nike, Adidas, MTV, IKEA, Karmaloop, Delta Airlines, Tiffany & Co., Wrigley’s Gum, Kevin Garnett, Kanye West, and Jay-Z, amongst others.

A couple months ago, members of The SHHO met with the KDU president and founder, at the agency headquarters, taking courtside seats at a large worktable, to what can be described by many words; a conversation, the most sensible choice. Whatever the case, it became obvious to all, that David Gensler is larger than life. He is unapologetically transparent, with shame seeming to have walked out on him many years ago. He is brash, even in first impressions, just as those who do not give a fuck usually are. And he is as opinionated as a man whose home is a soapbox. It was admirable.

He gave us an exchange of obscenity filled dialogue that was equal parts hilarious, dumbfounding, and educational. We came out of it with the simple conclusion that only David Gensler can be David Gensler. And as interesting as the words that were recorded are, we still find it impossible to ignore all the unsaid madness that, we know, remains and beckons inside his head.

Some of us have heard of you before. I remember getting an issue of Royal Magazine with my purchase at reed space, back in like 2007. But I think most of us are familiar with you from your bit in The Influencers film, from earlier this year. Do you consider yourself an influencer?

I’m not going to shit on anybody we all mutually know. But if anyone embraces being called an influencer, and runs with that ball, they’re a douche bag. It is one of the dumbest things that has come out as a trend. It just shows an utter willingness to thrust yourself at any little opportunity that pops up and completely abandon any sort of responsibility, if you are in a position to use the pulpit to speak wisdom, and try to at least say something that shines some light, rather than say, “Yo, I’m sitting in New York. I’m cooler than everybody. Shit happens here first.”

Shit doesn’t fucking happen here first. Shit happens in Virginia with a bunch of fucking kids. Well, you’re not kids…but cinema people, and finance people, ad people, and graphic people doing shit that ends up on the Internet. Where like two dudes, me and Charles Hall, (former professor at the VCU Brandcenter and ad professional) who is seven years older than me and consults with big brands, are sitting together having a conversation about you guys.

Content itself is what’s influencing. It’s just arrogant and shortsighted to wear that title.

I feel like the title is given though.

Oh, it was. Do you want to know the fucking story about how I ended up with my three and a half seconds of fame, since I was the shortest motherfucker on that thing? I was having one of the worst days of my life. I was walking from my motorcycle dealer in Tribeca, the Ducati dealer ship in SoHo. I’m driving back, I hit the brakes on my bike, the brand new bike, and the front brakes fail. And I was like “Yo! What the fuck man! I’m already having a bad day!” I’m plowing around SoHo at like 100mph, brakes fail, I pull the thing in, and I’m walking back and these two little French dudes walked up. They were very polite but I’m on the phone with an ex that I was having a very bad break up, a very biblically bad break up. And I’m yelling at her, she’s yelling at me, and these fucking dudes run up with a camera like, “David Genser? David Gensler?!” And I’m thinking, “Uh oh, I’m getting served.” That’s just what I need, a process server. And they were like, “Can we interview you?”

I say, “What is it?” They told me they were doing a film on street culture and I thought, “Fuck people still talk about that?!” They tell me they’re interviewing Rob Stone and jeffstaple and somebody else. It’s basically a fucking promo video for an agency.

Why do you say that?

Guess what I run?

An agency.

Guess what Jeff runs?

An agency.

I like Jeff, he’s a friend. But I don’t want to fucking promote his agency, and he doesn’t want to promote mine. And Rob Stone, guess what he has?

An agency.

An agency! They duped everybody. Sky Gellalty. Where’s Sky work? For fucking Team Epiphany. What’s that? An agency. They hustled agency people to promote their agency and nobody voiced their opinion. Like Jeff probably thought he was on fucking camera talking about whatever the fuck he was taking about, “I’m on the Lower East Side…”

You got to admit though, its kind of genius that they got all you guys on that documentary, and it’s as if their agency is affiliated with all of you.

I’d fucking hire him to promote me! He’d be better at it than I am! The fuck! And then he made this mutant thing. All of those people in that thing know each other, but we’re all just kinda friend-enemies, because we all are in the same business. I respect Jeff, I like Jeff, I’ve known Jeff for a very long time. But if Jeff was getting eaten by a pack of wolves….

You got to let ‘em go?



I got to let ‘em go. Got to say goodbye to my dude. You know? That just means a little more caribou for me next time.

Without actually living that culture, knowing that artist, or being passionate about a project – do you think people just do things because they see it on Hypebeast and they see certain people as an influencer first and foremost?

God Bless Kevin, man. We’ve always been supporters of that. Back when we had our magazine we would interview Kevin (Ma), way before it is what it is now, just because they were our friends and the culture was new and everybody was supporting everybody. It’s wild that in every client meeting that I’ve had in the last two years, the only thing people say is Hypebeast. “We need that Hypebeast thing.” That kid needs to be making…whatever he’s making, he needs to making more. Like, he should sue people every time they say the word “hype” He should trademark the word hype.

It’s all bullshit now. We were just having some big meetings today with some big, new partners and nobody wants to consult anymore. All the top consultants are like “Go fuck yourself. Go figure it out without us.” Like not only do I not want to consult for clients, I want to compete with them. If they don’t start paying more, they can all go suck a dick. That’s what the new motto is going to be, “What the fuck do I need my clients for when I have the education?” I’ve got the KDU behind me, I’ve got 1250 people in just short of 100 countries that I can just say, “You do technology. You do the finance. You send the emails. And you do the logo.” What the fuck do I need a client for? The math is short. A clients gonna pay you….let’s say this shoe company is going to pay you $30,000 to make more than $30,000 dollars. And then they hire smart, young kids with no fucking credibility that like runs the shit. Like we have some big clients that have these young kid employees call up on the phone, they start debriefing us on youth culture and start telling us about the urban market and I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool I put out the Black Album. Why don’t you go suck a dick?” Anything in your urban space, in the one project that I did, I win.

Who’s debriefing you though?

Oh you know, clients. You got to love ‘em. You love the good ones, and you hate them all. You love the ones that write a check on time.

Can you comment on the current state of streetwear?

This industry, the whole culture, is so bored that were so caught in this anxiety that you have to continue to feed into the moment. Which means there is no time for an idea to sit and simmer, nothing can slow cook long enough to taste right. So everything is kind of, half cooked so it can get out there fast. It’s funny we’ve been accused of not being real: SVSV (Gensler’s and KDU’s clothing line). The biggest reason for that is because we chose to not engage the wholesale market. So, people see us as not real.

My office kinda seems real. My big giant showroom seems real. My own big photo studio seems real. The seventeen sewers and eighty-year old Italian pattern maker that are moving next door, relocating from the garment district; they seem real. You don’t feed into it. But because you don’t feed into the hysteria of people saying, “Oh my god, they’re not real.” And then people wonder, my friend’s wonder, “How come you don’t respond to it?” And the response has been what it’s always been. We earn the right to be called strategists, from experience, through education, what we do for our clients. We didn’t just pick a word to put on a business card. A pretty big part of strategy is keeping your mouth shut, misleading competitors. It’s not just handing it over. There’s nearly 10,000 square feet dedicated to a brand that people don’t think is real.

It kind of works to our advantage. They can’t see our business model and they can’t copy it. It’s been the biggest blessing. Everybody else goes to market, every season sits next to each other and shows everybody their ideas. Every idea they have, they jump it out on the Internet real quick so they can get liked and so they can do all these things. None of them actually have revenue-modeling set up where they actually convert all of that energy into direct online sales. They’re still doing wholesale accounts. So even their main online distribution channels is still wholesale channels.

The most brilliant people in the whole streetwear game is The Hundreds. Years and years and years ago I honestly was like, “Who the fuck are these dudes?” They run it. We don’t have a client, out of giant global clients, with a single project that equal their web traffic. They run it. It takes pretty much all the rest of the streetwear brands in the world, to equal their traffic. They have the same traffic as the largest online streetwear retailer. Its not an anomaly, they just put in good business practice over a long period of time and built an entire community. They have a bunch of retail accounts, but they’re not dependent upon those wholesale accounts. If you go on Alexa, and you look at their rating, it’s astronomical.

And all they have to do is continue to do what they’ve been doing. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and its less and less risk to put out a project. They put out a Garfield project. Like, what’s next? They could put out a fucking Hundreds Terrarium project. They could put out some fucking Hundreds Kitchen mugs, coffee mugs, some spoons. Its whatever they put out, because that’s the model. And they feed off of the hype. They take that hype and directly, immediately convert it into a sale. Everybody else has a secondary online system set up where they trying to copy the strategy late in the game and maybe widdle a little bit of their traffic off. Sort of, eating on the idea. They’ve got the lead. I can’t really imagine them getting knocked off right now.

They show everything their doing basically. They give the story behind it, which is genius. They give a little bit more than a normal company would.

And they’ve got Rob Heppler. How can you go wrong with Rob? He’s like a genius.

“The friendly neighborhood maniac”. (a colleague of David’s in the background)

(laughs) He should have a shirt that says that. With a bomb on it. But this is a real bomb, not a cartoon bomb, because he’s nuts.

How do you think this all relates to youth and the current generation of youth?

I’m Generation X. My generation rebelled against the generation before me. It’s always sort of been…the next generation of youth culture, their role socially, to be a catalyst of change. And now what we see is that no one is rebelling. There is no punk rock mindset or ethic. Everyone wants to toe the line and fall in line. If you see that product on the blogs, you want to buy that product. If that happened in my generation, I would’ve done the exact opposite.

If you were wearing Nikes, I would’ve wore Adidas, if you were wearing Timbs I would’ve wore Vision Street Wear. Now, its like everyone is trying to be the exact same thing.

It’s harder to find those little pockets in subculture where real innovation takes place; because the people, who are just taking advantage of the current situation with this sort of new digital reality, need to make money. They need to make their clients happy. I mean, they mean well. No one is trying overthrow and control society, they’re just trying to get paychecks and live their lives.

But no one is rebelling. Everyone is just like “Oh my god, if I could get on Hypebeast!” I’ll come out and say it: For my own brands, personally, it would be the end of my brand if it rolled on a Hypebeast scroll. And no disrespect to Kevin. I check Hypebeast everyday, I look at it, I love seeing the stuff, it’s cool. It’s just in in my mindset, we are the antithesis of that. We will have an idea simmer and percolate forever and ever and ever, and I’d rather have a consumer slowly become a customer and experience it first hand, then for it to just be the next thing on the blogs. I mean, that is just horrible. There’s no attention span in digital media. And that’s where were kind of at right now.

I think now is the same as ten, twenty years ago. Authenticity is king. Hearing you, it seems like you really want to weed out the posers.

Me or in general? Because I’m about as cool as the fucking snowstorm. By that I mean I’m a hot mess. I’m not cool. I mean, we all need identities. You can’t shit on somebody for wanting to feel better about themselves. I go into some meetings, and I have to be a chameleon. Half of me does the strategy and roll into corporate meetings and if I’m just wearing some jeans, and high-tops and a sweatshirt, they look at you funny. So, I dress it up. If I walk into the Reed Space and I’m wearing a suit, I’m a toolbag. It is what it is. I stop caring. I wear what’s clean and available. But I don’t judge what people choose to wear. There’s enough people in the world. My personal opinion about aesthetics, is my personal opinion.

Like, I grew up skating and I was the first person in my little neighborhood to have Airwalks. They had the lace protectors, and I remember I had to drive down to Ocean City, MD to get Airwalks. I would drive back with my mom, with a little Airwalk store in the back of my mom’s station wagon. Like she would buy Airwalks and Vision Street Wear, and I’d take em back and all my friends would exchange them. We were doing crack runs for skate shoes. And then we started doing it for decks. We’d go down to Maryland and there was a store in White Marsh Mall, just a mall down there that had a shop, I think it was called Cheap Skates, and we’d buy decks and take em back to PA. Because you couldn’t get decks, people didn’t know where to buy the stuff.

Skating really affected people’s lives. Do you think that street wear has really changed the way the world views the world? Is there anything real punk rock about it? I thought it would be this entrepreneurial movement. I was really hoping it would create this master race of entrepreneurial geniuses that would team up and we would become one union that would stand against the big corporate machine. And then we would become unpaid marketing excellerents for the machine. Its like a 1000 to 1 pay out. If you’re Nike, why would you hire Wieden & Kennedy, the agency that helped build your brand for an enormous retainer, to develop ideas; when the market place that your aiming at, those consumers are just feeding you ideas for free on NikeTalk?

The market killed the marketing agency. And it happened over night that like that (snaps fingers) It replaced revolution with…I haven’t figured out what it replaced it with…hype? Regurgitation? Nobody wants to do anything really original. It’s too risky.

Do you see the same thing with hip-hop and hip-hop artists? Why do you think artists like Jay-Z and Kanye West have been able to last so long as opposed to artists like Lil Jon and others who were relevant for a moment?

Gimmick versus…not to take away from anybody else…it’s consistency. I know both of those guys and they have work ethic like…I don’t know anybody in street wear that has the work ethic of Kanye. I don’t have to necessarily like it, you know? But I think I’m too stained by the hip-hop industry to be a good person to ask questions.

Too much insight?

Nah. It feels like it’s still on me like a stink. It’s just so silly. It’s a silly industry.

Hip hop? As a business?

As a culture, as a business it’s just ridiculous. Granted, I still listen to a hip-hop song before I listen to anything else. But doesn’t mean its not ridiculous. I’d rather be an observer. Just enjoy it, just sit, and be inspired by it and listen to it. That’s it. Call it a day.

What’s the stigma?

For me personally, there is only so much drama and unprofessionalism that I’m willing to take before I unplug. There are definitely some people, like Blacksmith Entertainment and Talib Kweli; fantastic. The Roots, in my opinion, the best experience I’ve ever had in hip-hop. never so much the people, it’s never so much the artist. Whether it’s a really talented graphic artist or a rapper, they’re going to be a pain in the ass to work with.

Have you ever not got paid for a project or something?

A project? (laughs) Man, that’s just hip-hop. You guys are hip-hop heads. You got to love hip-hop. You’re doing shows. You probably know what I mean.

Well, where does the apprehension come from?

I have more respect for Kanye West as an artist than I have for any other artist in any category because of my experience with him, working with him, putting albums out, helping him promote his albums, and seeing him in the studio and stuff. But you could not pay me all the money in this planet to ever work with him again. It’s just too much. It’s just too much for us. But it’s a good thing though. It’s because he’s focused on his own shit. He’s a very accommodating person. I think that he’s generally a nice person and wants to please people. You don’t get to that level, being a dick head. I think that people have a bad perception of him.

It’s just if a person is that focused to achieve that level of success, and then you try to weave your way into that person’s schedule and basically become a distraction, while expecting good results — you’d have to be insane. That’s just my personal experience.

Can we hear a tragic story in hip-hop?

A tragic story in hip-hop? You can start it with Damon and end it with Dash. That’s just the most tragic story there is.

Seems like he’s doing something similar at DD172.

Except I pay rent. And work with real artists. And don’t bite me.

Is this where he got his blueprint from?

I don’t know. Considering the fact we were partners, I left, created this, and then tick-tock, you know? Dude puts magazines out about himself. I put magazines about talent, art, concepts, philosophies, and ideas. He puts out books about himself. You can put into this box: repeat business. Hype gets people to go to a restaurant one time. Good cooking gets them to come back. We focus on good cooking. At least we try. We try to do good cooking. It’s subjective, whether or not people like our cooking. We cook some good burgers. We have repeat customers.

Is all the success, thus far, more a result of working on big campaigns with big clients as opposed to projects that you actually personally like?

I don’t know how, but we’ve been really blessed with a lot of clients and projects that we really do enjoy. Even if on a daily basis we want to kill our clients, we ultimately come back around. Knock on fucking wood.

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