Sporty & Rich Founder & CEO: Emily Oberg – Originality, Nostalgia, & the Real Dream

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 ✈️🌴