Spotlight features an interview with members of the Retail Advisory Board. Established in 2021, the volunteer board is composed of executives from the luxury retail, footwear, and apparel industries. The board meets throughout the year to lend their expertise and thought leadership to further inform Enwoven, to share market trends, and network.

Interviewer: Tell us about yourself and your story (career progression)

As a kid, I was always good at art and math. However, my dad was an artist and he wasn’t present during my childhood, so my mom always tried to steer me away from art. While she identified my natural talent, she continued to remind me of my aptitude for math, saying things like, ”Oh, you're so good at math. Maybe you could be an engineer or an architect?”

I was fortunate to have a relative that was a principal architect in Southern California. After I graduated high school, I did an internship at his firm. It was an amazing experience because I realized the time it would take to bring a building to life - in some cases five to ten years, and the specialization of contributors - maybe you specialize in the windows. I was like, “oh my gosh, that's insane!” So that kind of scared me about architecture, all this hard work, and then you don't get to see any output.

While I was doing that internship, I had to organize their library, and I stumbled upon industrial design (product design). And I was like, “Oh, this is so cool!” an adjacent field with the same principles as architecture, but you could make furniture, light fixtures, and things like that. I fell in love with industrial design and pursued it in college at Pratt Institute.

I ended up designing housewares and kitchen products for a number of years after college. I really enjoyed industrial design because of the problem-solving mathematical aspect, but also the aesthetic, creative side of it, and I was able to see my products come to life.

In 2007, a friend reached out and was like,” Hey, you have such a great background in industrial design, would you want to come and design luggage?” So I ended up working at this fashion company that did manufacturing, licensing, and private label design of luggage. I started designing the hard cases and then began designing soft goods like duffel bags, backpacks, and things like that. I realized you can create products made even quicker.

For me, even more so than industrial design, the fashion world is where you're able to create at a totally different pace. I designed luggage for a while, worked with a bunch of different brands, and really started to understand the fashion industry, in terms of it being more trend-focused, yet there are still practical/functional things to solve - definitely a nice mix of the artistic aspect and the problem-solving.

In 2011, someone I had worked with went to Coach to head up the menswear design team and he hired me to lead a men’s accessories division. I was there for about six years. By the time I left, I oversaw all men's accessories design and helped grow the men’s category from a 100 million dollar a year business to almost a billion; that was cool to see that transformation. Over that time, I was a part of the evolution of menswear - from a very traditional style to one that includes men wearing colorful sneakers. Following Coach, I joined Michael Kors and led their men's accessories design division for a few years. And more recently, I started my own company doing accessories design for a number of different brands which range from smaller start-ups to medium-sized fashion brands.

images of brands and accessories worked on by Rob Price

Interviewer: Can you share some of the brands you are currently working with?

Yeah, I'm working with a brand Psycho Bunny right now, which has been really fun to design for and also working with a brand Faherty doing a sustainable accessories program. It's been nice to design for some of these brands in meaningful ways. For example, I’ve played with sustainable aspects for all the brands that I've worked with, but when a brand’s ethos is really built around sustainable practices the design approach can be really meaningful, rather than an afterthought.

Interviewer: How important is creative storytelling to your work?

Creative storytelling is so important. Sometimes it’s thought of as someone else’s job - like the marketing team's job to pull all the pieces together, put the campaign together, package it, and sell it. But I think it's so important through every stage of the design process to have everything anchored around stories. And the reason is, stories resonate with people. There are so many designs and they don't really mean anything until they're attached to something bigger.

Especially now as I'm working with a lot of different brands, to be able to put product designs together into a story shows what it can truly be. If I just shared the first half of a product evolution it doesn’t do it justice, you really have to show it in its best-case scenario.

For example, I had a great meeting the other day for a project I was working on for the brand ECCO. In the presentation, we showed this new collection of products that were still very conceptual but what we did in the presentation was show how it would be presented in this environment and how it could be shot in an ad campaign. You have to help support what the future vision will be and stories are crucial to do that and help connect the dots.

Interviewer: What do you like about being a Retail Advisory Board (RAB) member?

What's really cool about the RAB community, which I think Enwoven’s done an incredible job creating, is that it exists within an environment that's very modern - everyone is thinking about the future of fashion.

The people that are in the RAB are also amazing, not just because they’re at senior levels at big-name brands or their talent and experience but because of how down-to-earth they all are. It’s such an all-star team and a fantastic group of human beings, as well.

interviewer: Tell us about a project you worked on this year that really stood out.

Yeah, one recently was with Enwoven and in partnership with BK Style Foundation, which does Fashion Week Brooklyn and supports emerging designers. It was amazing to work with both organizations and put together a platform for emerging designers to learn 3d fashion design in the metaverse. It was a great project because we were able to work with these young fashion designers, train them in 3D software and then at the end, they created NFT designs that they sold in a live auction.

Deconstructing the Metaverse Event for BK Fashion Week with Rob, Enwoven team, and Designers

Interviewer: What about technology platforms like Enwoven, make you excited for the future?

I think fashion just by nature is a very old-fashioned industry. And somehow, it's managed to dodge the technologies of the age that have disrupted so many other industries. Now I think it's finally catching up to fashion, which is a good thing.

Utilizing technology in a more holistic way is really going to transform the future of fashion. I don't know if the metaverse will completely disrupt the industry, I think that new platforms for people to be creative and change the conversation of fashion will be instrumental. I already see the silos breaking down, attracting people from different industries, and bringing knowledge, new materials, and sustainable approaches into fashion in a more fluid way. And that's going to be a big game changer.

Interviewer: When you're not working, what do you like to do?

I spend a lot of time with my two kids and my wife in Brooklyn. We bike, attend local events, and do a lot of creative stuff. It's important to be creative with my kids or see them being creative. That's a huge source of inspiration for me.

Interviewer: That's great. Yeah, kids are the best. How they interpret the world around them and really present it to you in ways that are so elegant and simply make sense and just can sometimes be seen by that kind of novice.

Yeah, my daughter has no resistance in terms of what can be done. And she's always just like, “hey, let's make some things.” So yesterday she had this toy and she asked “can you help me deconstruct this? I want to make it into a miniature cotton candy maker.” Okay. So, she took some cotton balls and she took these little deconstructed components, wrote “cotton candy machine” on this little block, and then made a little string with a bead at the end and two wires for the outlet. It was so detailed and so thoughtful and she did it in like 30 minutes. If I were going to make a miniature cotton candy maker, I would get the blueprints going and it’d become a week-long project but for kids, there are no walls.