The first styling job I ever took was for a band I hadn't yet heard of, due to play Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 48 hours. Could I just come up to 30 Rock and dress them out of the tour wardrobe? Having spent more than a spell in the music industry in my late teens and through my twenties, the answer was an immediate yes.

Two nights later I was in Studio 6B introducing myself to the band. Almost immediately, the lead singer pulled me aside and practically whispered: "I really want to wear this green sequined bomber jacket, but everyone hates it." Everyone, I later learned, meant the manager and the label's head of PR.

This is the kind of challenge I live for — this kid is about to go on national television with a strong vision of how he wanted to look, with absolutely no desire to compromise, yet lacked the mechanics and the advocacy to make it work on his own. I told him definitely, let's go for it, and worked up the rest of the look around the jacket. The manager and publicist looked grim, muttering down at their phones. The lead singer beamed as they walked to the set. They hit their marks, debuted a song called Shut Up and Dance, lit up Instagram the next day — much of it about the jacket — and I worked with Walk the Moon for the next two years.

I like to think it was partially about that jacket.

I came to product development on a path that includes fashion and art. Once I recognized AI as a new medium — and that its possibilities are endless — I saw my lane, and that's smyk.studio. The tech is the tech — complex, but cut and dry. What's not cut and dry is design, styling, brand, the way a product feels in the hand. That's wide open for interpretation, and very few people hit the mark — the way Helmut Lang did in the nineties, the way Virgil did for Nike.

That's the kind of work I'm interested in.

I'm telling you that story because it explains how I work. I'm a creative, non-linear thinker who demands the best from himself and from what he puts into the world. My job is to find the version of your idea that creates a subconscious pull — something a user wants to come back to again and again.

Which means, more specifically: art-led, design-forward, AI-fluent digital products you can have a romance with.

Many AI products today look like they were designed by people who think in spreadsheets. Capable, sometimes impressive, almost never truly beautiful. There's a gap there, and within this gap lives not just style, but taste. People don't fall in love with backend technology — they fall in love with Berluti and KITH. The best AI products of the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to feel like the latter while doing the work of the former.

If you're a founder looking for a real differentiator, take a look at the case studies and see if smyk.studio feels right for you.

Never compromise.