Lower East Side Street Guru

For the sneakerheads and streetwear fanatics of New York City’s Lower East Side, there is one name that stands above all the rest when it comes to street culture. That name is Jeff Staple or as he prefers it jeffstaple, an entrepreneur, clothing and product designer, founder of New York design studio Staple Design and owner of retail store Reed Space in Lower East Side. The story is pretty much the same for most of the people that have made it big in the industry and Staple was no exception, starting out as a graphic designer making t-shirts of his own but even before doing that he had already switched quite a few different jobs including pizza delivery, busboy and a photo film developer. He even created, as far as art direction went, a book on the hip hop culture of Cuba in 2005, shot entirely by Estevan Oriol and Angela Boatwright. What separates Staple from the rest of the bunch today is the fact that besides still being a designer himself he also got involved in the whole process of retail by running the Reed Space, which includes the neighboring Reed Space Annex, hosting a variety of pop-up shops, the most recent one being the Mighty Healthy pop-up shop, plus a Reed Space in Japan and Hawaii. In addition the Staple Design studio has collaborated with various brands and companies of different backgrounds on quite a few projects in the last few years including designing sneakers for Nike, New Balance and Converse, as well as co-branding gadgets from Lomo cameras up to cars for Japanese manufacturers Kia. Despite the success of these collaborations, the big breakthrough for Staple and the studio was Staple’s ‘Pigeon’ design for the classic Nike Dunk sneaker in 2005 which turned into an instant hit among the inner circles of New York’s street culture enthousiasts. Evidently pigeons turned into some kind of a trademark for Staple who started putting them on pretty much everything from shoes and cameras to hats, and even a mini fridge the same way Ralph Lauren had been using the polo ponnies. If you go back here you can actually have a look at what happened outside the Reed Space the day the Pigeon Dunks where released