finding white space

This week, Todd Snyder opened a new store in Nashville. It's a brand I've always been drawn to. The store is a beautiful space. Concrete floors meet warm wood-paneled walls. Roman and Williams fixtures hang from the ceiling. It feels refined, but not precious—cool, but not try-hard.

I'm always fascinated by the origin stories of successful creatives. I’ve admired Todd Snyder's work for a while. I'm not sure exactly what it is, other than I like a lot of the pieces they put out. Our tastes are aligned.

He launched his eponymous brand after stints at Ralph Lauren, Old Navy, and finally J.Crew, where he helped pioneer the liquor store concept and launched some of their most successful collabs. That's when he realized he could do his own thing.

So he created it. A world is full of Paul Newman cool, vintage military tailoring, old Land Rovers, and classic watches.

He's obsessed with the details. He once said that on a good watch, the difference between great and okay is just a hairline. A few millimeters in the wrong direction and you’ve lost the magic.

That level of detail obsession is evident in everything he creates.

I was chatting with clients a couple of days ago about faucets.

We were talking about how the difference between the premier and a middle-of-the-road one isn’t always huge. It might be a slight difference in the curve, finish, or how it feels in your hand.

But it shows up massively in the pricing. The value of taste & brand positioning based on taste is really apparent.

People pay it because you can feel when someone cared enough to sweat the milimeters.

In design, the details are the product. Snyder obsesses over the stitching of a pocket or the curve of a lapel and the drape of the garment. You can see it, but more importantly, you can sense it.

I frequently highlight the power of small details in interior design, such as door knobs, light switches, and fixtures.

Sweating the small stuff makes all the difference. No matter how small, you can feel it.

where design is heading

There’s a quote I keep coming back to from Snyder’s interview with Throwing Fits:

“We’re always looking for white space.”

Here, he's referencing where his brand can go creatively and in terms of price positioning. A design principle—but it’s also a business principle, and honestly, a life principle. Where is the white space? What hasn’t been done yet? What corner of the market—or your mind—is sitting there, unexplored?

That question feels more urgent now than ever, because we’re in a moment where execution is getting easier. AI is making things possible that used to require entire teams. What used to take months can now take hours.

Which means ideas matter more.

Taste matters more.

Because when execution is cheap, the people who win are the ones with something worth making.

AI will never replace taste. People don’t hire designers just for renderings or sample boards. They hire us to have opinions. To edit. To notice what they don’t. That’s not going away.

But it does mean that if you have taste—and a good idea—you can do more with it than ever before.

I'm watching the execution start to get easier in real time.

Tools are being developed to enable almost anyone to launch a furniture line, one piece at a time. Low overhead, easy AI-based visual design. Image generators can now make specific images. You can upload a picture of a couch and get it reupholstered in a specified fabric. You couldn't really do this a month ago.

Additionally, shopping online for items and assembling them into a cohesive design for an interior is quite disparate. Everything is siloed. It's very time-consuming and hard to do. The closest thing is Pinterest, which is not that great. It's going to get much easier to do this - to build out a great room and exceptional interiors.

Architecture is going to become easier and less technical, just as writing code is becoming much easier and less technical with tools like "vibe-coding" tools like Replit and Cursor.

The barriers to execution are falling.

Taste & judgment remain.

Which brings me to Rick Rubin, who continually pops up in this newsletter as one of my favorite creative sages.

In a recent video clip, Rubin talks about “vibe coding” as being analogous to punk rock, where all of a sudden, anyone who knew three chords could become a musician.

Rick doesn’t read music or play instruments well, but still became one of the most successful producers in the music industry over the last 35 years, because he knows how something should feel. He listens deeply and feels what a song should be.

And he directs from that feeling. In the same way, the creative advantage today isn’t technical skill—it’s the ability to sense what’s missing and build something that fills the gap.

That’s why I keep asking myself—and I’ll ask you too: