Sporty & Rich Founder & CEO: Emily Oberg – Originality, Nostalgia, & the Real Dream
The Gstaad Guy PodcastShow Notes
The Gstaad Guy sits down with Emily Oberg, founder and CEO of Sporty & Rich, who turned a Tumblr mood board into one of the most imitated brands in fashion. Before the store on Place des Lices in Saint Tropez, before Selfridges, Lacoste, Hôtel du Cap and Le Bristol, there were twenty sweatshirts she packed and posted herself. Ten years on, she is clear that the stretch in between is the part nobody films, and that the day during lockdown when a single drop did fifteen times its usual figure only reads as a beginning because the decade in front of it is invisible.
What follows is an unusually plain account of what the work asks of her. She creates selfishly, on the conviction that you have to know what people will like before they know it themselves, and she romanticises the past without apology, from the O.C. campaign to the Carolyn Bessette shoot in Tribeca four years before anyone else arrived there. She is candid about the rest, that running the company is the least glamorous job inside it, that there is no right decision and only decisions and consequences, and that ninety five percent of this is the work while the outcome lasts a day. What she keeps returning to is originality, having an opinion of your own in a culture built on copying, and protecting the reason you started. She still makes everything for her fifteen year old self, and she still believes the Ralph Lauren line that you have to accomplish your dream before you find out what the real one is.
Filmed at The Maybourne Beverly Hills Garden Suite.
Chapters:
(00:00) Intro 🎙️✨
(01:42) The Supreme Line Videos That Started It 🧢📱
(03:05) Leaving Kith And Betting On LA 🌴🎲
(04:07) The Idea Was Just A Mood Board 📌💡
(07:04) A Boutique On Place Des Lices 🇫🇷🛍️
(07:42) Ten Years, And The Brands That Called 🤝⏳
(09:30) Why The Word Rich Makes People Flinch 💬💰
(10:28) Paris, Then Back To LA ✈️🌴
(11:42) Going Digital First, And Why She’d Say Don’t 💻⚠️
(13:14) When Discovery Became Pay To Play 📉💸
(14:33) The First Touch Of A Product 🛍️✨
(15:51) The Lockdown Day That Changed Everything 📦🔄
(17:49) Selfridges, And Why It Still Counts 🏬✨
(20:08) Who Sporty & Rich Is Actually For 👥🎯
(23:41) What Being A CEO Actually Involves 🗂️💼
(27:41) The Least Glamorous Job There Is 🧹😏
(29:33) There Is No Right Decision 🎲⚖️
(31:30) Dating When The Business Comes First 💍💼
(32:48) The King Or The Prince? 👑🤔
(35:41) Observer, Storyteller, Builder 🔭📖
(38:31) Why She Hates The Word Creative 🎬❌
(40:10) The World She Wanted To Live In 🚙🌍
(41:25) What People Are Really Chasing 💰🔍
(43:11) The Rhetoric That Follows Successful Women 🗣️⚡
(45:25) The Biological Clock And The Company ⏱️💼
(46:58) Setting Boundaries Early 🧱💪
(51:39) And Then What? 🧭💭
(54:57) Choosing To Be The Brand 📸✨
(56:34) Ralph Lauren And The Real Dream 🌅👔
(60:30) À La Poubelle vs. Fantastique 🗑️✨
Try Granola for free at: https://www.granola.ai/GSTAADGUY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from The Gstaad Guy Podcast
The Gstaad Guy sits down with Devon DeJardin, the visual artist working across painting, drawing and sculpture, whose Guardian figures have travelled from a friend’s apartment floor in North Hollywood to private collections and the cover of a number one album. Devon had never picked up a brush. He had a world religion degree, five hundred dollars to his name, a mattress he folded into a laundry closet each morning and a stack of unsold jackets when a stranger in Indiana paid him a hundred dollars for a ten minute phone call to tell him he was meant to paint. Six months later some of the most prominent collectors in Los Angeles were emailing his studio.
The Gstaad Guy sits down with Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the man on the rostrum for many of the largest sales in the world, to explore what thirty two years at the same house teaches you about objects and the people who love them. Oliver joined as an unpaid intern in 1993 after Christie’s turned him down, and reflects on a career built on one unplanned afternoon, an eye trained by looking rather than reading, and the conviction that the greatest auctions are celebrations of culture rather than transactions.
The Gstaad Guy sits down with Gary Vaynerchuk, chairman of VaynerX and founder and CEO of VeeFriends, to explore what two decades of watching attention move has taught him about people. Gary built a career on seeing platforms before anyone else took them seriously, and reflects on a trajectory defined by conviction, self awareness, and a willingness to say the thing nobody in the room wants to hear, including about himself.
The Gstaad Guy sits down with Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC and one of the most prolific investors and podcasters in Europe, to explore what separates the people who say they want it from the people who genuinely cannot do anything else. Harry started a podcast from his bedroom at seventeen with no university and no network, built it into an audience of millions and a fund with around a billion dollars under management, and reflects on a career defined by seeing early that media would become venture capital's real differentiator.
The Gstaad Guy sits down with Éric Martel, CEO of Bombardier, at the company's completion centre in Montreal with the Global 8000 behind them, to explore how a snowmobile inventor from a small Quebec town became the foundation of one of the world's great aerospace companies. Éric reflects on a career that began on the factory floor and a company whose defining trait is a willingness to take on things it has never done before, from building metro cars without ever having built a train to inventing the regional jet.