The Renaissance: Madbury Club Talks Creation From A Millennial Perspective

Being a creative isn’t about mastering some set of arbitrary skills to earn an academic degree, it’s all about taping into one’s innate ability to be, well, creative. That’s something that defines the Madbury Club to a tee. The collective of eight likeminded individuals — which includes Phillip T. Annand, Ellington Hammond, Bryan Stevenson, Marcus Arman, Vinny Picone, Hyun Kim, Tone Tone and Peter Hironaka — is more SoHo than Madison Avenue and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

While a majority of its members grew up in New Jersey, the Madbury Club realized that their land of opportunity existed outside of their immediate surroundings. Taking a carpe diem approach, they took their big dreams and ideas across the river and set up shop in the Big Apple. Today, the team of self-made men operates from a Brooklyn home base, where they create marketing strategies, curate looks for fashion styling and direct ads for big brands the likes of Nike and Timberland.

Since kicking down the proverbial door, Madbury Club has been sought out by major ad agencies, including DigitasLBi, because of their innovative ideas and fresh perspectives. Most recently, Sprint tapped the collective to produce a three-minute feature on Orlando Magic rookie Victor Oladipo as part of “The Crossover” campaign, which premiered during NBA All-Star Weekend.

As word of the millennials’ knack for staying ahead of most trends grows, the Madbury Club continues to fill voids in the marketplace like caulk thanks to their constant and consistent innovation. With their list of accomplishments expanding exponentially, the Madbury Club seemed perfect additions to the Gentleman’s Project, a campaign, sponsored by Hennessy Black, that exposes readers to trailblazers in their respective fields. Hip-Hop Wired hooked up with Madbury Club members Ellington Hammond, Bryan Stevenson, and Vinny Picone at their Bed-Stuy headquarters to talk all things creative and then some.

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Photo: Margarita Corporan

Hip-Hop Wired: First and foremost, what’s each of your roles in Madbury Club? 

Ellington: I do everything from writing to shooting [photography]. I’ve pretty much been there since day one. Right now, I don’t even think I have a title. We just do so much together that it just kind of all blends into one.

Vinny: I’m the main photographer and videographer for Madbury. I also take on the role of resident chef here at the laboratory.

Bryan: I guess I’d say that I’m one of the creatives, but like Ellington, I do anything that needs to be done to get our vision to where it needs to be. I think we all are kind of like, “Do whatever; make it happen” kind of guys just to make sure that stuff gets done and looks good.

Hip-Hop Wired: Being a team of creatives, how important was it for you guys to work and live in the Big Apple?

Ellington: For me, I always felt like New York was the best move to make, because everything’s here. There’s every type of business in New York. There’s tech… If you want to be a stylist, you can come here and do that. If you want to be a filmmaker, you can come here and do that… You can do everything in New York. You look around and you see people your age doing the same kind of stuff, and it makes you want to work harder. LA is a good place like that too, but it’s different. It’s just a laid back feel there. It’s not constantly on the go like New York is.

Bryan: New York is just the biggest concentration of culture. Everything is happening here first. You go to a club and they’re playing music that’s not going to be anywhere for the next six months. Style, whatever, it’s hard to get away from being first on the wave of everything. That’s just where New York is at.

Vinny: Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to grow up here. I don’t know if I ever want to settle down here, but this is where I wanted to grow up, be it growing up in my 20s or growing up as a kid. I just wanted a lot of my growth and finding out who I am to happen in New York, because it’s so diverse.

Hip-Hop Wired: Now on the subject of growth, what have you discovered in your journeys across New York that has helped mold your worldview?

Ellington: I feel like New York is a place where you can live your whole life and still get lost. There’s just so much going on and we do a lot of photo shoots and we go places that we love, but we also discover places that are completely untapped. I think that every borough gives you something different too. There’s just a whole world out there. You can always find something new no matter if you’ve lived here 10 years or 50 years.

Vinny: The cool thing about New York is all of the hidden gems that it has. You can walk into the most unassuming place, like an Italian restaurant, and they could have the best food you ever had in your life. There’s so much in New York that’s un-walked. Everything is changing so quickly, you can’t really keep up—it’s impossible to have seen all of New York.

Hip-Hop Wired: Fashion is a big part of the city as well; what are some of the out-of-the-way shops you guys have come across and frequent often?

Ellington: I’ve been coming back and forth between New Jersey and New York since I was like 15, so I feel like I’ve known about all the clothing stores. Like you go to SoHo and you have your BAPE and A.P.C., and stuff like that. I don’t really go outside of those stores that much in the SoHo area.

Vinny: Another thing too, brands that have become popular usually start brick and mortar in New York. Brands like Saturday Surf, Self Edge, and super high-end, Japanese denim, a lot of that starts here because those trends started here. And I think that’s the interesting thing about New York—a lot of the demand is here.

Bryan: The pull to New York like when you’re in the 9th grade is like, “I gotta go to New York. I gotta get all this new stuff, because it’s happening here first.” That’s one of the reasons we are together, because we just had an affinity for coming to New York and exploring. I don’t know if there are any shops, we just kind of grew up with the shops and this kind of style, but I did find this tailor who I’d like to put on the map. It’s this Asian man and his wife and they work out of their kitchen, but they’re literally the best tailor that I’ve ever seen. He just knows what he’s doing. I found him on Yelp. It’s this guy who has this dingy door, where you just walk in and it’s his kitchen, and he knows everything about clothes, seams and all of that.

Hip-Hop Wired: Was it a conscious decision for you guys to use your fashion and style as a branding piece or something that came about naturally?

Ellington: Madbury all started out with Phil [Annand] coming to me with an idea for this blog. You know everyone is doing the same thing. Everybody has a “blogspot.com” and all they’re doing is taking stuff from a major site like Hypebeast or High Snobiety and just putting it on their blog. Phil said he wanted to make original content. I liked the idea and I thought it was fun.

At the time I was just starting to get into photography and I like to write, so it was the perfect opportunity for me. It just started out as fun. We’ve done this thing called “The Dailies,” where we would just take pictures of whatever we’re doing that day and post it. It’s not like we purposely wore a certain outfit for that. It’s more about who we are and not so much us trying to say, “Hey this is what’s popping right now?” or “Do this or do that.”

I always felt like we were just regular guys, and that’s our appeal because guys look at us and they’re like, “Hey, that looks like us. We dress like that, and we do these same things. They’re doing stuff that we don’t regularly do, we can do that now,” verses another site you feel so disconnected because you don’t see who’s behind that site.

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Hip-Hop Wired: What about the rest of you guys?

Vinny: For me, I was never as progressive as these guys; as to what I thought about how I looked and what I did. At the point I met Phil, I had just started taking pictures actually. Phil and I went to the same school, so it became easy for us to work together. He needed a photographer; I was looking for stuff to do. I was experimenting with photo or what not. So that’s how we built our rapport. These guys definitely elevated the way I think and made me push myself. The beautiful thing for me is that I’ve made some of the best stuff I’ve ever made as an artist with Madbury, and I’ve learned the most I’ve ever learned as a human with Madbury.

Bryan: I think the style, was essentially how you wanted to assert yourself. And the style became the insight to how we brand ourselves. It’s just how he said, we look like those guys; what we do, the style or the step we put forward informs how we do our work or how we brand ourselves in an unconscious way. And that goes back and informs whoever sees us; it’s pretty reflective. I guess that’s branding, and we take it as such and we put it into our work… I think it’s just who we are.