Saturday With Spike Jonze & Opening Ceremony’s Founders

A new two-part video interview on VBS.TV features director Spike Jonze talking shop with Carol Lim and Humberto Leon--the brains behind the Opening Ceremony empire.

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In the video, the duo shows off their talent for talking in unison: “I’m really obsessed with twins and two people speaking similarly,” Leon laughs. Lim and Leon, who now oversee a total of four stores as well as a shop and blog, divulge what it was like to start their brand. Basically, it boiled down to laziness, an urge to travel and $20,000 (the pair could only get a bank loan to match as much as they’d saved: $10,000). With that money, they jetted off to Hong Kong to buy up wares to stock as part of a rotating focus on various countries, just like the Opening Ceremony, which inhabits a new nation every four years.

“Within the first 2-and-a-half weeks nearly everything had sold out. So we had to go back and double our buy,” they say of the total 16 trips they took that year to buy up more stock. “The momentum just became this thing where if you didn’t buy it at Opening Ceremony then you wouldn’t get it,” Leon says of the business model that turned a sleepy Soho store into an international sensation. In years since, Leon and Lim have continually filled their shops with wares you can’t find anywhere else: be they exclusive imports or one of a kind OC collaborations (from Chloe Sevigny and Keds to Levi’s).

The second part of the interview also entails a tour of the newly opened OC store in the Ace Hotel. There’s toothpaste from Japan, Opening Ceremony condoms (customized by the likes of Jeremy Scott), the entire Criterion Collection and a pretty amazing pizza chair with removable pepperoni chairs. There’s also a touching last few minutes that includes lots of platonic love spouting, tears and a three-way hug.