From Ralph Lauren to Coworking: What Design Taught Me About Building Spaces People Want to Be In (and What Didn't Transfer at All)

For seven years, I designed clothes at Ralph Lauren. Today I run Work Heights, a network of seven neighborhood coworking spaces across Brooklyn with around 300 members. On paper, those two careers don't have much in common. In practice, almost everything I know about making a space feel right, I learned designing jackets.

Here's what carried over, what didn't, and why I think more people should make a leap like this.

Beauty is in the details

I was hired at Ralph Lauren to do outdoor design for RLX, the company's technical sports line. We designed for snow, snowboarding, tennis, golf, running, and fitness, and the manufacturing was intense: laser cutting, welded and bonded seams, different kinds of down fill.

The skill that stuck with me most was the tech pack. A tech pack is the architecture plan for a garment. Every seam, every measurement, every material callout, documented so precisely that a factory on the other side of the world can build exactly what you imagined. You learn quickly that a vague plan produces a bad product.

That discipline followed me directly into construction. When I bought 1037 Dean Street in Crown Heights in 2010, I spent four years renovating it on nights and weekends while still working full time. I approached it the way I'd approach a jacket: every surface, shape, and proportion considered and planned.

Learning to make new things feel old

After RLX, I moved to Polo, and it was a completely different education. Polo is a world of vintage. I learned how to wash and treat garments so a new jacket looked like it had been worn for decades, and how to create trims from scratch that looked like they came off something made in the 1800s.

The lesson there was that authenticity lives in the details. People can't always tell you why something feels real, but they can tell when it doesn't.

That shaped our first location, MACHINE, more than anything. I built it almost entirely from reused and salvaged materials. The conference room windows came from a farmhouse in Maine. The original cubicles were clad in salvaged tin ceiling. Friends, family, and I hauled 140 cubic yards of trash out of what used to be a backyard junkyard and laid reclaimed brick by hand. Eight desks opened, and within a year there was a 125-person waitlist.

Designing for how things feel

Most of a fashion designer's job is paying attention to how a material makes you feel: how it moves, how it sits against your skin, what it signals before anyone reads a label. There's real psychology in texture.

A workspace is the same. Members touch the desk surface all day. They notice the weight of the door, the warmth of the wood, the quality of the light. None of that shows up in a listing, but all of it decides whether someone wants to come back tomorrow.

My approach has evolved over eight buildouts. I rely less on upcycled material now and design more of each space from my imagination. The spaces have gotten more modern. But texture is still at the center: I cut my own moldings and woodwork, and have custom glass and metal fabricated for each location. I want every space to feel handmade, because it is.

Telling one story, well

Ralph Lauren is a master class in storytelling. Every collection, store, and campaign builds the same world.

The story I've been telling since day one is simpler: work alongside your neighbors. Work Heights locations are in the neighborhoods where our members live, not in a downtown tower they have to commute to. You're working next to people from your block. Every design and business decision gets measured against that story.

What didn't transfer: the distance from the customer

Here's the part of fashion I never loved. As a designer, you create the product, and then it moves through merchandising, then through retail channels, and eventually lands with someone you'll never meet. The end user is almost completely removed from your day.

At Work Heights, there's no distance at all. I design and build the space, then I meet the people touring it, sometimes sell them a membership myself, and then hear directly from them once they're members: what they like, what they don't, where we can do better.

That changed how I think about "finished." In fashion, a collection ships and you move on to the next season. A coworking space is used every single day for years. Each location starts as an original canvas on opening day, and we keep working on it as members give us feedback. None of our spaces are finished, and I don't expect them to be. That constant iteration has made the product far better than anything I could have designed alone.

What no design job prepares you for

The hardest part of what I do now has nothing to do with design: managing people. Every person is different. Learning what makes someone tick, then leading them in the direction the company needs to go, is a skill I'm still building. When it goes badly, it's painful. When it goes well, it's the most rewarding part of the job.

Change careers. Seriously.

I left Ralph Lauren because I wanted more than a corporate ladder could offer, and I consulted for smaller fashion startups before Work Heights grew into my full-time work. It was scary. It was also the best thing I've ever done.

If there's something pulling at you, especially if it scares you, or if you see a need nobody is filling, go after it. There are no rules. The idea that we'd have one career in our lifetime makes no sense to me. I think most people should have at least three.

I'm on my second. I'm still a designer. I just design for my neighbors now.