The Business of Creative Leadership w/ Geoff Cook | Ep 397
The Futur with Chris Do
The Futur
4.9 • 998 Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2025
⏱️ 68 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Today I'm joined by Jeff Cook. He's a founder of Base, New York. I'm super excited to talk to him because we're going to talk about brand and branding and maybe even like world building. |
| 0:11.1 | I'm Jeff Cook. You are listening to the future. |
| 0:17.0 | Jeff, welcome to the show for the people who don't know who you are. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your backstory. |
| 0:23.6 | Thanks so much, Chris. thrilled to be here. Backstory, it's the early 90s and I went to work for a little brand called DKNY. |
| 0:32.6 | And as luck would have it, it became sort of one of the hottest brands on the planet. And during my |
| 0:38.1 | tenure there, I learned not only about all things brands, but a lot of adjacent areas like |
| 0:45.7 | retail experience and product and visual merchandising and so on and so forth. So that by the time |
| 0:53.3 | LVMH acquired Donna Karen in 99, I sort of was pretty well |
| 0:59.9 | versed in all things brand and had a couple of really close friends in Brussels that had an agency |
| 1:05.1 | base that I was always fascinated by. And so took a plane over. And after a few Belgian beers ended up at the end of the night |
| 1:14.4 | with an agreement on the back of a napkin to open base in New York. And that was right around 2000, |
| 1:21.9 | right around the turn of the millennium. Wow. Okay. Some interesting twist and turns here. |
| 1:25.4 | Are you a traditionally trained designer? I am not. |
| 1:28.3 | I am a traditionally trained marketer and strategist. |
| 1:30.3 | And so when you're out of school and you, of all places, why did you land at DK&Y? |
| 1:35.3 | I give all credits of my mother who was in fashion and she was sort of a first generation working woman who saw Donna as the apostle for all women. And I learned very early on about her and her |
| 1:48.0 | eight easy pieces and her luxurious clothing. And it was almost a fetacom plea that I would end up there. |
| 1:54.9 | So some influence and introduction from your mom and then you wind up there. What was the |
| 1:59.4 | job process like? Like, How did you get a job |
| 2:02.3 | like that? Because now, looking back, I can think of a lot of people who want to work with |
| 2:06.5 | like an up-and-coming or an established fashion house. It cannot be that easy to get in. How did you get in? |
| 2:12.0 | So funny enough, they were, if you can imagine, Donna Karen was at that time a domestic-only brand. |
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