Dmitri Siegel, Urban Outfitters

💭 Thoughts on Liquid Death, Radiooooo the app, and the impact of technology on taste.

Dmitri Siegel is a Santa Barbara-based creative executive with over fifteen years of experience leading and modernizing brands, driving growth, building teams, and making change. He has held leadership positions at Patagonia, Sonos, and Urban Outfitters. Dmitri has published widely on the topics of Design, technology and digital culture and lectured at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Maryland Institute College of Art, and ArtCenter College of Design among others. He earned his MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University.

🎯 Current focus

A big part of what I do is being an anthropologist of the consumer. Learning from them, listening to them. For Urban Outfitters I’m deep diving on Gen Z and I have to say this customer gets me really inspired and excited for the future. They are the most diverse generation in American history, they are incredibly empowered digitally and economically, and they are resilient. Gen Z is an extremely challenging consumer because they are so skeptical of brands, but I love that challenge and that mirror it holds up to companies.

📲 The impact of technology on taste

I spend a lot of time thinking about the impact of technology on taste. I’ve spent my life navigating culture and sub-cultures, trying to connect to, and in my best moments even create culture. Algorithmic mediums have become so ubiquitous that I’m hearing young people say things like, “I’m not even sure if I actually like this or if I’ve been trained to like it.” It’s disturbing. They feel the relentless pressure to consume based on TikTok trends that emerge, get productized and die in a matter of weeks or days (Cottage core > Balletcore > Blokette > etc.).

Young people are not naive or helpless, they are going to respond to this echo chamber they’ve been shoved into. There’s some really interesting responses from archeological exploration of bygone platforms like Tumblr to creating a sort of Dada nonsense culture designed to short circuit the algorithm and flummox AI.

📚 All Fours by Miranda July

I’m dyslexic so I don’t read a lot of books but I just finished All Fours by Miranda July. Most of the women I know have read it but not enough of the men have. They should. It’s so wholehearted and honest and funny and no one talks about perimenopause or the realities of middle age practically at all.

🎶 “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend’” by Kenny Logins and Stevie Nicks

I have lived in Santa Barbara and I have experienced true love. If you haven’t done either or both of these things you can listen to this song and pretty much get the idea.

🧑🏼‍🎨 Making opportunities for others to be challenged and creative

I’ve worked with so many great folks over the years. But Joy Howard who is currently CMO for Back Market is an important friend, mentor, collaborator. She and I worked together at Patagonia and Sonos and we started a brand together called Early Majority which we sold this Summer. What I love about her is that she insists on the work being smart. The work has to be intellectually stimulating and challenging or she’s out. It’s easy to rationalize doing this work in a superficial way, but that path is boring for her and just not personally acceptable. (And the reality is emptiness does get through to the customer ultimately). She’s fun, she’s bad-ass. She makes opportunities for people like me to be creative. Yeah. Go Joy.

☀️ The first cup of coffee in the morning

I am always looking forward to the first cup of coffee in the morning. It’s 3pm right now and I can’t wait to get the evening over with and go to sleep so I can wake up and have that first cup of coffee.

📻 Radiooooo

My current favorite way to consume content is an app called Radiooooo (that’s five O’s). It’s a map interface so you can tune into music from any country and then you can pick a decade, so like right now I’m listening to music from Argentina in the 70s. It’s so fascinating to navigate through time and space via music (and vice versa).

🎧 Audio, visual culture, the currency of memes

I’m into audio in general. I’m finding visual culture and entertainment really tiresome at the moment because it’s so much about speed and the sole value of something is just knowing about it. The value of a meme is simply that it is new and your role as the audience is simply to have seen it. So much of the conversation emerging from social media is just “I saw the newest thing, I know what the new slang means, I know what that is referring to.” The actual content isn’t really a part of the culture (let alone any sense of context). It’s just, “Oh, that phrase comes from these guys who make videos about shopping at Cost Co and then this other person did a stitch where they added the word “cream” to it at the end.” The currency is knowing where something comes from but for the most part, that’s actually meaningless.

Anyway, so I love audio because it puts you in your place. You have to listen to the sounds as they were arranged by the musician or writer. There is enough negative space in there for you to think and synthesize. You can look out the window or cook or whatever and sound is part of existence not a replacement for it.

💧 Liquid Death

I’m continually impressed and entertained by Liquid Death. I think they have a great formula going and more importantly they seem to be having fun. Some of the aspects of that brand are pretty flimsy but the collabs and the way they use products as content is just brilliant and hilarious.

Follow Dmitri on Linkedin & Instagram and check out his website here.

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