From fashion shows to films, music videos, artworks, and retail, PLAYLAB, INC. knows no creative bounds. Founded in 2009 by Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeff Franklin, the LA-based studio is driven by ‘an extremely multidisciplinary’ vision and hunger for experimentation, collaborating with the likes of Bottega Veneta, Louis Vuitton, Post Malone, Nike, and many more. This years marks PLAYLAB’s 20th anniversary, two decades of incredible growth which Archie shares at length with designboom. ‘The vision and the intention for the studio has never changed. We wanted a freeing place for ourselves, and eventually others,’ he says.
Ateamof twelve creatives, PLAYLAB, INC. has concocted over the years an eclectic portfolio that bursts with colors, energy, childlike whimsy, and soul. Some of its most iconic works include a series of immersive set designs forLouis Vuittonin the care ofVirgil Abloh, each one more show-stopping than the next; a giant installation forMarc Jacob‘s iconic ‘The Tote Bag’, squeezed into an NYC alley; a pop-colored retail interior forMadhappy‘s West Hollywood store; a dreamy creative direction forRimowa‘s SEIT 1898 exhibition and, more recently, a trippy collaboration forJustin Timberlake‘s 6th studio album ‘Everything I thought It Was’.Read on as co-founder Archie shares his honest and heartfelt story of building PLAYLAB’s twenty-year legacy in an exclusive designboom interview.
INTERVIEW WITH CO-FOUNDER ARCHIE LEE COATES IV
designboom (DB): Walk us through how PLAYLAB was founded and what drives your vision as a team.
Archie Lee Coates IV (ALC): In a studio at Virginia Tech Architecture School, I met my partner and best friend, Jeff Franklin. You know how architecture schools can be a really rigorous environment — and as a young kid, at 18, your brain is sort of exploding with possibilities. You’re getting all this new intake of information, you’re learning all these new references. Jeff and I had struck up this friendship in our second year design studio, and we were there all the time. We only left for other classes, and pretty much slept at the studio half the time. You’re just living this very dedicated life to design, and we kind of realized how intense it was. So we would leave the campus, and we would go downtown to this coffee shop. We would draw on napkins, and we would get ideas out very quickly, because we were taught to iterate very quickly. And so it was at 19 years old, exactly 20 years ago, this year, that we came up with PLAYLAB; I learned HTML and built playlab.org. We made it look like a really professional design studio and started taking on projects in college. I then moved to New York, right after Jeff graduated college, and got a tiny studio, and just kept building; it was sort of off to the races from there.
The vision and the intention for the studio has never changed. We wanted a freeing place for ourselves, and eventually others. Now we’re twelve people and growing quite fast. But for a long time, it was just Jeff and I. We wanted to frame a place for us to try anything that we wanted to, within art and design; to not necessarily be boxed in by a category or discipline or a skillset or a tool or anything like that, which means that all of the work has to be centered around an idea or concepts — and we have to be extremely interested in it. And we have to have healthy relationships with the people that we’re working with, whether they’re clients or collaborators, or partners, or all. So that’s why we call it PLAYLAB, almost very naively.
I remember in 2010, we didn’t want to name it PLAYLAB anymore. You know, it just feels so corny. But a close friend of ours had told us that the name has a meaning and significance; you have to keep its naivety alive with it. And so Jeff and I have worked very hard to build and protect the idea of the studio and the team that sits inside of it. It’s just extremely important to us. And the way we run the studio is quite unique, which maybe is clear from the output. But really, the beauty of the studio is what is inside and these incredible people that we have here. It’s to learn and to listen to them, and to try new things and see what they want to make.
It’s a safe place to fail. We do fail and make mistakes. And we’re trying to get better at that all the time. I wake up every day, Jeff wakes up every day, and we’re excited to come into this place. It means everything to me that I’m afforded the opportunity to have this studio and be with these people and go into the unknown — not knowing what we’re going to make or achieve or see. Jeff and I had this analogy in the early days of PLAYLAB. In 2007, we got our first studio in Brooklyn, New York; it was a closet-sized space that had no heat. Jeff said: ‘The whole goal is just to climb the mountain. So that when we get to the top of one mountain, we can see the top of the next and then go back down and then back up‘.
We were reflecting with a new client the other day. He’s a very spiritual guy, and he asked: ‘Hey, Jeff, when did you see the moment that Archie grew professionally for the first time?’ Jeff had all these moments. And I had all these moments for him. I’m just very thankful for the health of the relationship and the dedication that he’s had, and hopefully I’ve had, to try to see this through to the end. And we don’t know what it’s going to look like, I don’t know how big it’s going to be. I don’t know what we’re going to make. But that’s the point. I just want it to be a good and an educational time for the people that are here, when they’re under our roof.
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