Los York: A Starship Enterprise Reborn

Los York is a business unique in its inception. Traditionally a new venture is a thoroughly thought-through and researched proposition; boxes are ticked, visions are laid out, plans are examined and, at the very least, the business partners know each other.

Not so Los York. Dexton Deboree and Seth Epstein started Los York out of the embers of a failing Los Angeles-based motion graphics enterprise called Stardust. Deboree had just started working there and Epstein occasionally did directing jobs through the company but over the course of one weekend in November 2012 they went from employees who had briefly met, to business partners. “The [previous owner] wanted out, literally over the course of a weekend,” explains Deboree, “and Seth and I came together and just sort of said, ‘shall we do this?’. There was no business plan, no vision; on the Friday we were colleagues who didn’t know each other very well, on the Monday we were business partners in a company. And it was like, now what?”

Like me, you might be thinking, well, why did you decide to make such a seemingly rash decision? The pair say that the company was near to closing and that it owed money to both employees and vendors so they wanted to do whatever they could to save it. Plus, says Deboree, “owning a business isn’t rocket science. I mean, it’s hard, it has definite challenges, but we had both run other companies before and it was something we both felt like we were equipped to do.” “To be honest,” adds Epstein, “at that point, even if we’d done most things wrong we could still get it right, more so than what was happening at the time, anyway.”

Maybe this unusual and surprising genesis is why the company ethos is based around two words; holy shit. “That’s the absolute centre of everything we do,” says Epstein, “our fundamental DNA; how do we make it so when people see things we’ve done, they have that guttural, visceral reaction of ‘holy shit!’?” Deboree, Epstein and Los York, which only fully transitioned to that name from Stardust in mid-2015 – “it was sort of a cross-fade,” says Epstein – were to be, somewhat unwittingly, at the vanguard of the new model of working in the industry, blazing a trail as what was sometimes bafflingly referred to at the time as a (insert air quotes here) content agency.

They steadied the Stardust ship and rebuilt the company’s reputation but from motion graphics they segued into being a one-stop content shop. There were, they admit, no rules for the company at that point and when they were approached by an old friend of Epstein’s who was running a new shoe brand called Ahnu who wanted a film made they agreed that the project should be run through their newly acquired company. “They had $20k,” explains Deboree, “and they wanted us to write the script, come up with the strategy and then make the film. I didn’t know if we could do it for that money, I’d never done it before.” Luckily, as a freelance director, Epstein had, and eventually not only did they deliver the film, but for less than the budget, and it picked up awards too.

It got the pair thinking that, actually, the old way of working is no longer the only way. The patterns, layers and rules that had been built up over the many years could be broken down and with Deboree and Epstein realising that a brand’s need for content would soon be overwhelming they started approaching things in a different way; they purchased cameras when they could and they made a point to hire people who had experience in multiple disciplines, people who could concept, strategise and execute. It wasn’t easy, especially the staffing, as few people had that multi-skilled approached (“it was painful at times,” says Deboree. “We basically had to train most people.”) but brands started to notice their approach and contact them directly. “Are we an ad agency?” asks Epstein, rhetorically. “Yes. Are we a production company? Yes. Are we a design company? Yes. Are we an experiential company? Yes. Can we do strategy? Yes. Clients lean on us in different moments and in different ways.”

One of those clients is Jordan, the Nike-owed, Michael Jordan branded shoe company. Deboree had a friend that was intrigued by the Los York business model and when that friend took a job at Jordan he approached Los York to work for them. Instead of engaging three different companies to fulfil their usual brief of a product demo, celebrating the shoe and its technology, a documentary-style interview with the athlete and shoe designer and a point of sale digital experience, Jordan commissioned Los York for all three. “In the old system,” says Deboree, “none of these three distinct companies spoke to each other. The client had three separate conversations with three different companies but we took three different briefs and moulded them into one which we gave back to them saying ‘here’re all the inefficiencies, here’s the central thread of what you’re trying to say, let’s focus on that.”

Jordan wondered why they hadn’t done this before, and now Los York is an agency of record for the brand, along with others including Motorola and Fitbit. Los York’s recognition of the changing landscape and the demand for content sees them sitting at the head of that particular table. As the pair explain it, a traditional client would ask for around four TV spots per year, but now they might need one per month, one per week, some even need daily content… “but your marketing budget isn’t going to multiply numerous times,” says Deboree. “It’s probably not going to grow at all, you’re just going to have to dice it up. And how’s that going to work? Well, if you know how to make lean films which still look like TV commercials, that’s one way.”

When Epstein and Deboree took on the company in 2012 they had five employees, including the two of them, and $1M of debt. Now they have 35 people at Los York and in 2015 turned over more than $15M. It’s a miraculous turnaround. “We wouldn’t exist is the current system was perfect,” says Epstein. “We’re not saying we have all the answers but we are highly collaborative and we’re questioning everything. The current system is 50 years old and it works to a certain scale but when that scale changes and everything moves faster, and the platforms change but the agency model hasn’t changed, well, that’s the game we’re into.”

And it’s a game they’re currently exceling at. Recent work from the company has included a Jordan campaign called The Last Shot which was an immersive, experiential campaign which allowed fans to relive Michael Jordan’s most famous on-court moments, recreating his famous shots in front of a reactive digital audience, which went alongside an interactive digital museum. There was also a campaign for Nike Running, Force of Nature, which brought the terrain and landscape of eight different locations, including Iceland, Hawaii and the US South West, to Nike Town New York, where huge, 6K resolution screens allowed runners on calibrated treadmills to feel like they were running through those places. These campaigns, alongside more traditional but equally stylish film work, including the Deboree-directed Jordan Melo 12 Built for More spot mean that Los York’s output is almost as unique as its inception. Almost.