The Black Eyed Peas was in town last week to induct U2 into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Kind of a big deal when they’re rubbing shoulders with Mick Jagger and the like. He had a chance to pop into the SoHo store with Apl.
Later on we stopped into Saks to check out the shoes.
Shawn and Louis, Buyer and DMM at Saks met us on the floor.
It got kind of crazy. Kids were offering free dental work from their father’s practice in Brooklyn. Tourists from Italy were asking for autographs. One woman inadvertently asked for mine thinking I was famous. That was exciting.
They’ll be back next week to perform on SNL and at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show and also for one mega event with us on November 12th. Keep you posted.
Last night my buddy Dusty invited me to stop by Opera Gallery (down the street from the store) where I had the pleasure of meeting Ron English along with Larry and Brandon from Greedy Genius. Ron’s work is among the most, if not THE most, relevant and fascinating of any artist out there. We got to talking and there might be some opportunities for us to collaborate. It would be absolutely amazing to align with one of our generation’s seminal artists. Check out his work.
Ant Boogie is one of Madonna’s dance crew. He stopped into the store to cop a few pair of JUMP sneakers and to blog about it. If you get to see Madonna on tour, I’m sure you’ll see him dancing in our shoes. I really need a haircut in this video. That and some sleep.
The first night we hit up the Zappos party at XS. Open bar that includes Johnnie Walker, official beverage of JUMP, means 2 liters each.
It was a good time, as usual. The next night, we got to see Pharrell perform with NERD which was dope!
Cool picture eh? He’s glowing.
We had a chance to squeeze in a really nice dinner at Mix at the Mandalay Bay with Shawn, our Saks buyer. You can’t really see the food in the vid but it was awesome. There was a dish that was filet mig-non with foie gras on top of it covered in truffles. Can you imagine?
After an amazing dinner and discussing the poignancy of the BEP song, “I Gotta Feeling”, we hit up Body English at Hard Rock.
Here’s Footwear News’ coverage of our Spring 10 trend.
However, Larry had a different take on Spring 10.
“Following the release of Brüno there will be an emerging trend in exotic, eclectic fashion. Brüno donned the perfect outfit with matching footwear for all 4 limbs. We’re likely to see emergence of hooves into the world of fashion with plenty of ungulate aesthetics to choose from – horses, zebras, donkeys, bison, rhinoceros, camels, hippopotamus, goats, pigs, sheep, giraffes, moose, deer, antelopes, and gazelles!”
Lawrence Chen
Captain, Jump USA Inc., New York, N.Y.
So the Project NY show was an amazing success. The line looked fantastic and we did more business the first day in NY than we did all three days in the last Vegas show so I can only imagine what will happen at the next Vegas show. I’m already getting ready for Compass this week! Besides all our favorite buyers and many new buyers, we had some high profile people roll thru the booth as well. The celebrity love continues.
First we had Kenny Loggins swing by and he was totally into the Vanquish in Purple Croco.
You might remember Kenny as the creator of some 80s megahits like Dangerzone!!!!
This video makes me want to jump up and exclaim “YES!!” Totally my next karaoke conquest.
Shortly after, we had Ryan Grant of the Greenbay Packers, who was already a JUMP fan, check out the new line.
Again, at this show, the heavy hitters are the Vanquish and of course the new Zeto that will be in stores for August. What we did was take these two items and really blow them up to offer our customers a lot of options. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the new Vanquish that Courtney from American Rag picked out for her stores in the West Coast.
So after such a successful first day of show, we didn’t feel guilty partying hard after the second day of the show at our store in SoHo. We had the usual fare, Serrano Ham (which always leaves me hungry for more the day after I have it), cocktails sponsored by Red Bull and of course, Johnnie Walker.
We had a fantastic turnout.
There’s me, Harry Chen and Lawrence Chen.
Click on people’s faces in the photo to tag them.
Here’s Michelle Suh, Bloomingdale’s Art Director and Cara Diorio, Bloomingdale’s Asst. Buyer.
Here we are with Don Calder, owner of Local Celebrity and his friend.
Some random Austrian people who were lucky enough to be walking down Spring St.
Starr Ferguson, Saks Buyer and my old Lord & Taylor colleague, getting herself the Vanquish in Green Purple Reflex Patent.
Herman and our homeboy Eric Yang, handbag manufacturing magnate.
Lerny and friend.
Xiao-li, Saks Assistant Buyer and Shawn, our Saks Buyer.
Diana Tse, Steven Alan buyer and Lana Wong.
Larry with a random cougar from the street.
Don’t know who those two dudes were but they got MINGED.
There’s Darius, YRB editor on the right with some friends.
Here’s Tahirah, owner of Krisol in LA, and I.
Ed Bennett, brought his friends, Faye Ly, actress and model and Tora Brava, musician to join the festitivies.
Some of our lovely staff manning the liquor.
Here’s Alex, certified ham slicer and Joy. We conquered that ham.
And it looks like it was a big week for parties in SoHo as the next night Guess had a big opening party around the corner from us.
Lydia Hearst and Michelle Trachtenberg were there.
And the darling Amber Rose was looking fly.
We took this picture together after the interview but my boy, Henry, was all nervous and it came out like this. She told Henry and I we were cute. That’s why I’m blushing.
The following night was another event! THE CENTER hosted the Midsummer Night’s Salon with my buddy’s Ed Bennett and Dusty Wright. Following all the real performances we had a jam session where we did our rendition of Hound Dog.
FFANY stands for Fashion Footwear Association of New York. It’s like the mini fashion week for shoes. Honestly, it’s not usually very exciting though I hear in the old days it was something else. However, this season’s has been something special. It started when I received some shoes I’d been waiting for night and day for weeks. We’ve had and continue to have amazing success with the Vanquish in all the beautiful materials. A while back when I’d met Taboo and The Black Eyed Peas, he mentioned we should do a collabo. Light bulbs flickering and Boom Boom Pow, I kindly asked Larry to put some of our best materials on our newest and soon to be hottest style, the Zeto for Tab. And boy did he deliver. Here are the results.
And Captain Lawrence outdoes himself again. So after what turned out to be a really productive afternoon (read wine and cheese consumption) at the showroom with Zappos, I had to meet Taboo at the store to present him with these shoes for our project and on the way I saw Shawn Pean, my buyer from Saks waiting for a cab with two of his colleagues so Marco, Chris and I scooped him and his crew up in the Jumpmobile (an old school Benz ML). Mind you, I had only seen these the day before and so they were truly making their debut but of course I had to show Shawn and of course, he loved them! More light bulbs and we we decided we’d have to do an event with BEP at Saks and introduce these looks there. Brilliance.
When we got the store, Taboo showed up and we showed him the new illness. He literally said, “OH FUHSCHNIZZLES.” Just kidding. He said something else and was totally floored. I told him about introducing our collab at Saks and he was all over it.
There he is in the throne wearing the Zeto in Grey Ivis Patent and Nappa.
Here he is with the Green Purple Reflex Patent and something dope combo I don’t even know what to call yet.
And of course, here’s the whole team.
This is going to be a long post. Afterwards we had our company dinner at Antique Garage down the road and as you can see here, had a great time as usual.
Harry, our CEO is crazy. Gotta love him.
And then the shots happened.
After that we hit up Richie Rich’s party for Chris Coffee at Garden in the Sky at the Cooper Square Hotel. Great party, open bar and the weather was perfect for it. I’d been wondering what the building was. It’s got a really interesting design.
So last night we hit up the Black Eyed Peas album release party at Griffin (old PM) in Meatpacking which was another dope party. Taboo was kind of enough to put me on the list to an otherwise completely exclusive event. Top shelf open bar and we saw just about every celebrity in the world there and I got to introduce Shawn and the Saks crew to the Peas. Great karma.
Kanye rolled thru.
Rihanna came too and later performed with them onstage.
Tab introduced me to Fergie who was a sweetheart.
Wilmer Valderrama had come to the store earlier that day and wore our boots!
It was an interesting couple of days. Now I need some rest!
I had the chance to hang out with Andrea Chung and Richie Rich last night at Safran. We got to talking and decided we have to do a dope ass collaboration together! If it’s anything like the things he’s done before I think it’s going to be one hell of a project. I’d always thought he brought a different sort of fun and crazy inventiveness to the scene back in the Heatherette days and now with his own line it’s at another level throwing in the likes of Jenna Jameson and Aubrey O’Day. Check out this clip from his last show in Miami with Pam Anderson.
Andrea is currently putting together a reality series about Richie and you’ll get to have a glimpse of some of our collaboration. Watch out for it!
Zappos has been an excellent retailer to work with and their progressive business model only continues to evolve and shape the industry.
“When Jump first began working with Zappos, it struck me that their innovative business model and method of buying was revolutionary. Essentially, they allow vendors to be fully partnered with their organization by training us to learn their systems to manage and increase our business. All the new-age tools and applications online companies typically employ to increase interactivity with their consumers, Zappos does with its vendors. It’s fun and interesting to watch your business grow as Zappos grows. Having worked as a merchant for a number of years, I could tell that Zappos’ systems, inventory management and style of buying was something that would not only change the world of online retailing but perhaps the whole of merchandising itself.”
After having met Dusty Wright (the man behind Culture Catch) and Ed Bennett (founder of VH1) at my friend’s mom’s birthday party (random, but cool), they kindly invited me to their Culture Catch events. Each of which have been very intimate invitation-only performances held at some amazing townhouse or some other crazy loft. Last week’s was at the residence of Joe Scarpinito in Tribeca. The event featured Henry Butler, a blind pianist from New Orleans. I introduced him to the Monderer for Jump Gatsby in Black Dentelle and when he started feeling it, he was immediately impressed. He could tell through his hands that it was a special shoe.
Also in attendance were a host of characters from The Sopranos, notably Michael Imperioli who made the introduction for Henry and who also flipped for the Vanquish Grey Nappa.
His performance was amazing. The things he was doing with that piano without the ability to see was breathtaking. Must’ve been the shoes. Check out Complex’s writeup on him.
My hair’s shorter now.
My homies, Ed and Dusty.
That’s Norena, Henry’s manager, Michael, his wife Victoria and Dusty.
The caterer was wearing one of our shoes from last season, completely unsolicited.
Dope view from the roof.
Joe had quite a collection of artwork. I recognized this piece from a Chinese artist, Yue Minjun. As usual, it was quite a unique event. I’m certainly looking forward to the next one!
The cool thing about traveling is that you meet a lot of people. I think that’s really the main thing about it because otherwise traveling is really tiring. Out at Project in Vegas, a boutique called Sole from Atlanta introduced me to a hip hop artist named Kia Shine. Prior to that I’d met Don Calder who runs Local Celebrity at Project NY. So imagine the coincidence when Don emails and tells me he’s going to be in NY with a dude named Kia Shine. We all met up at the store where Don also introduced me to Nobu, his Japanese distributor.
They liked the Vague.
Watch out for Jump in Kia’s next video. In the meantime check out “So Krispy”.
We’ve been getting a slew of NFL players in the store recently and they seem to really be into our kicks. Here’s us with Leon Washington from the Jets.
Fred Bennett of the Texans and Ryan Grant from Greenbay.
