Interview: Tastemaker Anthony Sperduti

Mainly, people call on Anthony Sperduti for one simple reason. The man has good taste.

Anthony launched Partners & Spade in 2008 to spread his tastemaking among the masses, along with associate Andy Spade. And, a mish mash of companies request his services.

Together with Spade, Anthony dabbles in books, apparel, conceptual art, marketing and branding. He produced an award-winning film that showed at Sundance and Cannes. J. Crew enlisted Anthony’s company to design its famous men’s shop dubbed “The Liquor Store.”

Recently I met Anthony at his flagship shop in Manhattan’s Noho neighborhood to ask him how in the world a company like his is born. Here’s what the Partners & Spade co-founder had to say.

Partners & Spade is an unavoidably unique company. What was the idea behind the company?

Over many years and many different iterations Andy and I have done a range of creative projects, whether it was advertising, film, publishing or store design. We decided a few years ago it was the time to open up a company that did all of those different things.

We wanted one place where we could do all that – sometimes our own personal work, sometimes companies we looked to purchase and sometimes companies that looked to hire us and become our clients. We wanted to build a strong team and be able to perform all of those different disciplines.

You have a lot of different genres of clients. You’ve worked with apparel, beverage companies, sports and TV. What’s it like working between such different brands? Is it case specific?

Andy and I bring a certain sensibility to our projects, and hopefully a certain level of taste. There are some clients, whether it’s fashion, car, magazine or a hotel, that need to have that provided.

Some brands and some categories need to be loud and brash and inexpensive. It’s not so much having to be fashion or having to be anything in particular. Our clients are looking for what we can offer, which is usually an interesting taste level and sometimes a bit of conceptual humor or wit.

We usually know when someone approaches us if it’s going to be a good fit. If it doesn’t fit, we politely decline. We know there are better people out there to do certain things.

How about somebody who looks at your company and says this is super cool; I would love to do this someday. What would you tell them they need to be working on? How do you get to this point?

20 [expletive] years of working six days a week. When I first met Andy he was a Creative Director, and he was always the hardest working one in the agency. I started off at the very bottom rung of an advertising agency. It was literally 14 hour days six days a week for 20 years. And it still hasn’t stopped.

I think the only way you can pull off something ambitious, no matter what it is, is having experience on failing. It’s by making so many mistakes that when I go into a meeting and someone asks my opinion I can say with confidence, “No, this is going to be problematic.” Whatever the case is, you can’t skirt around the experience part.

What kind of people do you look for on your team? What sort of qualities do they need?

Andy and I are really scrappy. The most important quality is hard work. Someone who’s really loving what they do, working extremely hard.

Sometimes there’s certain roles we need to have filled like an architect who knows floor plans, and that person just needs to be really skilled at Cad. Things need to get done, and they need to get done quickly. So part of it is a hard work ethic and the other half is knowing your craft.

I saw that one of your projects was with the J. Crew Liquor Store project. Can you give us some behind-the-scenes info on what kind of branding and thinking was involved?

J. Crew is a fantastic company, and they’ve always made a great, well-made product. They asked us to lend a hand and give them some opinion on how they could make their men’s more interesting. Andy and I thought it was a perfect project because it was working with incredibly smart people.

They had a great product, but we didn’t feel like they had the proper context to show off what they had been doing. For us it was an easy thing to say you need a stand-alone men’s store. You need to build an environment, curate it and bring in other brands, which they had already started doing anyways.

We knew this abandoned bar, which would really tell a seductive story for men and give their clothes a proper context. Mickey is a brilliant guy, and he recognized what we were getting at immediately. Their in-house team was great, and we worked with them, did some fun interior stuff and put it together pretty quickly.

Everybody thinks they have good taste. But with you guys it’s actually a selling point. How is taste legitimized with your company?

I would never tell a client to hire us because we have good taste. I think the best you can do is be really consistent with our version of what we feel is good taste. If someone wants to share that same sensibility and taste, so be it.

It’s a tricky thing because plenty of things are considered good taste now that 20 years ago were considered bad taste. And that’s what’s fun about it. Someone can take “bad” tastes and reinterpret them, and that becomes good taste.

 Here you are in New York City, you own your own company, and there’s so many things going on simultaneously. When you get a second to yourself, what do you like to do?

My biggest passion is photography. I love classic portrait photography. A well photographed portrait, that’s what I love. So when I travel, if I have time by myself I’ll grab my camera. 

Fore more on Anthony's company, see their Web site HERE.