Studio invention with Andrew Coulter Enright, Senior Director of Creative Operations and Production at Cole Haan

The Editors
Creators and Creatives
9 min readFeb 10, 2017

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The creative operations expert shares the story behind the development of the Cole Haan creative studio.

When Andrew Enright first joined Cole Haan three-and-a-half years ago, the venerable American lifestyle brand was at a crossroads: it had just emerged as a private, independent company after 25 years of ownership by Nike. “It was like I had walked into an abandoned city. My first week, I literally pushed around a cart collecting design workstations one display and keyboard at a time,” says Enright. “But it was an awesome opportunity, a rare combination of brand equity and a radically clean slate. We had become a startup overnight! So much institutional knowledge had been lost or made irrelevant, and there was a huge influx of smart new blood from a wide variety of global brands, agencies, and industries.”

Reborn in 2013.

He was the third leader hired to shape a newly-formed creative group with a different approach, and a new mandate: “Historically, we had a creative services department, but for many brands, ‘creative services’ isn’t creative. It’s pure execution based on very established brand standards,” he explains. “We changed that. Cole Haan deserved a proper, in-house creative agency.”

Portrait of Andrew Enright by Carlo Van de Roer, as part of the Portrait Machine project.

At the time, the nascent team knew that they needed a “production person” — but they weren’t sure what that meant exactly, nor how much it could mean. Adding to the sense of absence that first week was a critical campaign shoot: everyone else on the creative team was on-set working with Daniel Jackson and a truly stellar cast, all 85 years old. The product was Cole Haan’s first advertising campaign as an independent company, celebrating their 85th birthday: Born in 1928.

“It’s a rare pleasure to shoot 85-year-old people when you’re in the fashion industry,” Enright adds. “And we had the best: Maya Angelou, China Mercado, Elliott Erwitt and Captain Jim Lovell.” When the team returned from the shoot, “they told me, ‘You know production, let’s start releasing the ads!’ I had to explain that no, it doesn’t quite work like that….” Within days Enright had recruited critical talent from his prior studio and assembled the capacities to produce advertising of the caliber required to honor such imagery and talent.

The path to a career in creative operations.

In the ’80s and ’90s, “Production” meant something very specific: print production. As a result, “most people who’ve found their way into today’s production roles came from that background,” he says. “Honestly, I chose printmaking because it was the most punk rock major,” says Enright. “It was about understanding and owning the means of production and thus being able to shape our reality.” After graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art, he, like so many others, “moved to New York the next day without a job and little money” but soon found an opportunity at Martha Stewart. “It was a great place to cut your teeth; they had pretty rigorous standards back then,” he says, laughing.

“Most in-house creative shops — especially if you’re in beauty, retail, or really any brand in which you need to make actual, physical things — will eventually develop a production and/or creative operations capacity,” says Enright. With many of those studios centered in New York, a close-knit community of creative ops professionals has developed. “I think of our ‘studio’ as bigger than any single brand. Many of my peers work for brands that don’t compete, so we’re free to share tools, best practices, and most importantly, culture.”

“As you come up through the ranks on the ‘production side’, Enright says, “you have creative expertise, and certainly opinions, but aren’t the ones making the creative decisions, per se. As you grow into leadership, you’re less close to the making — you have people on the team who can do that, and well — you mature into a driver of process, the ‘how’ of a studio.” At some point, he explains, the role becomes “deliverable agnostic” — it doesn’t matter if it’s a mobile landing page, an out-of-home campaign, or a beach ball. “At the end of the day, our workflow has basically the same stage-gates.”

As a result, Enright contends that there are two approaches to creative operations leadership that predominate: “you either have your way, which you think is right (‘it’s worked so far!’) and you try to replicate it over and over again throughout your career, or you’re constantly adapting, testing, tweaking, and looking for new ways to do things, the next way to do things,” he says. “Both strategies must react to change. You can probably guess which one I evangelize.”

Building a culture of tool building.

Creative operations and production leaders contend with more challenges than just the ever-changing landscape of creative expression and its audiences. “Production people tend to be pretty curmudgeonly,” says Enright, laughing. “It’s a job that self-selects for perfectionists, naturally adept at detecting error on the part of other people. You can leverage that talent to great ends, but it needs to be both structured and balanced.”

For Enright, the answer lies in the fundamental culture you establish and grow within the team. “With folks like that, there’s an advantage to empowering a culture of tool building,” he says.

We face an ever-growing workload with fixed resources, so sometimes you need to say ‘Time out — if we were to write a script or think about this differently, could we get 10 hours of work done in two? Instead of grinding it out, maybe there’s an opportunity to automate, to build something that provides ongoing efficiency.’

Choosing to build a tool can be risky — you have to keep a close eye on allocation of resources, and not let the project spiral beyond its scope — but according to Enright, “if you have a solid gut that it’s going to be more efficient, that’s a fun risk to take.” Essentially, you want to provide “just enough freedom to fan the flames of a good idea.”

In such an environment, it’s essential to empower the whole team, regardless of their technical skills, with a means of building tools on their own. “One of the reasons why we’re using a tool like Airtable pretty heavily, and we do love the product, is because it allows us to rapid-prototype a solution — even one we may need to procure from another provider in the future,” says Enright. “We’re creatives not developers, but we trust that as content experts we’re best suited to craft our own tools, and in a corporate environment, being able to do that independently allows you to leverage IT a little bit less, to grow increasingly agile.”

This allows the team to maximize bandwidth and free-up the time required to make better work: “Traditionally, IT folks aren’t solutions providers or workflow consultants,” explains Enright. “They provide user-level support and advocate our needs, but aren’t decision makers intimate with the intricacies of how a growing creative team needs, and wants, to work in 2017. As creatives, we’ve always fought this fight; it used to be Mac vs. Windows. Tools like Airtable allow us to define our own stack, and iterate, without the overhead. Integrations are key here; Airtable wouldn’t be a critical component in our workflow if it weren’t integrated with Slack, Dropbox, Google Apps, O365, etc.”

An example of an Airtable base used by Cole Haan for casting.

Is there a gap between design and execution? Not if you do it right.

In developing Cole Haan’s creative studio, Enright has managed to address one of the specters that can haunt creative operations and production teams: the “wall” between design and production. “In industries like publishing, production is often, literally, on a different floor. Design sends their work a few floors down, and they pray their work will be honored along its path to manufacturing — that’s scary and often heartbreaking for design,” he explains.

But Enright contends that when it comes to design and production, “it’s not a dichotomy, it’s a spectrum. If you run an integrated shop, there’s no need for that fear, or for nearly the level of translation. This studio model, both as an idea and a living, breathing entity, rounds the corners off of any conflict.”

This attitude, which is evident even in the way the team talks about their organization (“We’re constantly calling it ‘the shop’”), needs to start at the top. At its core, Enright believes it’s built on a very simple principle.

If you’re on the execution or process side, the number one thing is to honor the work. It’s your job to make it real.

As production experts, it’s important to take the time to educate your partners in design. “Most designers don’t know how to make the stuff; they simply don’t teach it in schools. Production is virtually absent as a discipline if you’re agency-side. They know how to make a beautiful and strategic picture of the solution to a given creative problem. But if you’re making an umbrella, or a case-bound book, or whatever, you need to know how to make the actual mechanicals, the files that inform creation at the factory-level. Just because you’ve seen a representation of the solution doesn’t mean that it’s done. There’s both an art and a science to the translation from approved design to final mech, and ultimately, physical QA. So we educate, and that really helps, both short- and long-term; we see it as an investment in individual careers and the success of both our studio and those our culture can spread to. It’s about having a vigorous respect for the talents in each portion of the greater creative team, and the responsibility of carrying those torches all the way to the audience.”

Choosing to be an inventor, not an artist.

Although he beelined for art school intending to make fine art, since rising to lead creative operations and production for Cole Haan, Enright has found that he no longer has time, nor the focused energy, to pursue his own artwork. He doesn’t regret the change, though: “I learned pretty quickly that I didn’t want to be part of the fine art and gallery world. Selling expensive, one-off objects to rich people just wasn’t my thing.”

In fact, he no longer refers to himself an artist. “I’m closer to an inventor. What I care about is staying slightly ahead of the pack and coming up with something new that gets made. The few personal successes I’ve had were about innovation, and when I was more productive in that capacity, I considered that my art. Ultimately, it’s semantics.”

Those “few personal successes” include being the original designer of Cover Flow, the ubiquitous UI purchased by Apple to bring album cover art back to iTunes:

He’s also been involved in the development of numerous physical products and objects over the years, including the development of original accessories and fixture systems during his time at the prestige hairdressing company Bumble and bumble. “I’ll always be interested in making stuff and gaining a full understanding of how our reality is crafted,” says Enright.

The Bandball, created in collaboration with Piet Houtenbos.

Even now at Cole Haan, he continues to find opportunities for invention. “The projects I choose to work on at home, in the evenings and over weekends, they aren’t deadline-driven — they’re about changing our crew’s lives. Time allowing, those are the kinds of things that I find most engaging.”

When he’s not in the studio, Andrew Enright loves to cook (and drink). (“It’s one of life’s great pleasures,” he says.) He applies many of his professional strategies in the kitchen, maintaining complex spreadsheets (soon to be Airtable bases) in the quest for, say, perfect cornbread (“proper Southern cornbread, tweaked slightly for Northerners raised on Jiffy”) or optimal punch, leveraging Dave Wondrich’s research. “I can accurately assess ABV, ice dilution over time, volume/guest and of course, the ratio between punch’s five key ingredients: citrus, sugar, water, spirit, and tea/spices. The word ‘punch’ is derived from ‘five’ in Hindi,” adds Enright.

Andrew’s cornbread experiments base.

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