For Duck Duck Goose’s third birthday, we’ve decided to collaborate with two titans of the South African fashion and culture retail industry in Shelflife and Baseline. For us, turning three means that we can avert our attention from matters of survival as a new business, leave the nest and spread our wings towards longevity. Our collaborations with these industry giants, and even the fact that we have the opportunity to make them happen, symbolise this growth.
Shelflife barely needs any introduction, having revolutionised the South African retail space and received international attention and acclaim for their service to the greater landscape of sneaker culture. Since the opening of their first store in Cape Town’s Loop Street in 2006, Shelflife has consistently expanded as a business, a store, and a hub for people who share an interest in street culture. Even with the opening of a second retail space in Johannesburg and international collaborations with the likes of Jordan, adidas, New Balance, Puma, Umbro, Grasshoppers and FILA behind them, Shelflife has managed to maintain the ethos with which it started and stayed true to their original community of street culture enthusiasts. Considering their resume and what Shelflife means to the local community, it’s only natural that we look up to them for what they have achieved. We aspire to emulate their unwavering appetite for collaboration, bringing people together, and staying true to themselves. Shelflife has a very special place in Duck Duck Goose founder Daniel Sher’s heart, since the Cape Town store was the original stockist of his first brand, me.plus.one, making this collaboration even more meaningful to us.
To help me express the significance of Shelflife’s impact on the South African retail industry and street culture community, and to illustrate the importance of this collaboration, I interviewed Shelflife’s brand manager Jake Lipman. Jake has been involved with Shelflife since the store was born. He acted as the store’s first store manager for four years before leaving to pursue a career in music. After a very successful career in the music industry indeed, notably establishing The Cape Town Electronic Music Festival, touring the world with Spoek Mathambo, a six-year stint at Red Bull Studios, heaps of experience in artist management and events coordination, and now still occasionally DJing under the name Jakobsnake, Jake returned to Shelflife in 2021, taking up his current role.
While Daniel’s friendship with Jake has spanned a decade, calling him to walk in Good Good Good runway shows in the past, I didn’t know Jake very well before we did the interview. I don’t think we’d ever had a conversation that lasted more than five minutes, but Jake used his discretion to start calling me endearing nicknames long before we sat down for this chat. Before Jake, no one besides my closest relatives called me “Jossie.” Jake goes early with the endearing nicknames, which makes his presence quite comforting. This interview felt like I was sitting down with my cool uncle who’s bursting to tell me exciting stories about the life he’s lived. It helped that I was genuinely interested in what he was telling me. I’d always been fascinated by what sneaker culture was like before it exploded into the pop culture beast it is today. The culture’s mostly plastic and superficial contemporary state has made me pity those who were involved before it reached this point. Speaking to Jake helped me understand the context of the position that Shelflife holds in modern South African street culture and what it means to stay true to your roots in a world of sameness. He spoke about far more than that, but you’ll have to read the interview to see.
Jossie: Do you have any relation to WWE wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts?
JL: I don’t have an actual familial relationship, but the reason my DJ name “Jakobsnake” came about is because of him.
Jossie: Why?
JL: I’m not telling you. A lot of people know, I’m just not telling you. It’s a widely known fact.
Jossie: How about Jake Lipman, British-born TV producer? Are you aware of her?
JL: I know her stuff. But no relation. I know her through Googling my own name and friends Googling my name over the years. She was top ranked for the longest time, but I managed to dethrone her.
Jossie: She’s still top ranked.
JL: Oh, she’s still top ranked.
Jossie: For now. Maybe after this interview you’ll eclipse her.
JL: Sure.
Jossie: Have you ever met a woman named Jake?
JL: No, never.
Jossie: Are you actually Jacob? Or just Jake? I tried to Google both.
JL: No, my name is not Jacob. It’s just Jake. When people don’t know me, they call me Jacob. When they know me as an artist and not as a human person.
Jossie: I thought it was Jacob Lipman.
JL: It’s not. It’s just Jake Nathan Lipman.
Jossie: How do you feel about your name?
JL: Uhm, I’ve come to love it. How do you feel about Josquin? I’ve never met another Josquin in my life.
Jossie: Me neither. Someone once told me that their name was Josquin but I think they were messing with me. It’s a Renaissance composer’s name – [French pronunciation] Josquin de Prez.
JL: I love it. I’m never calling you anything besides [French pronunciation] Josquin.
Jake has since stopped calling me Jossie and now addresses me with changing variations of the French pronunciation.
Jossie: Anyway, about Jake Lipman, British-born TV producer. I feel like you guys have very similar jobs in that they’re both vague and broad. Like, no one knows what a TV producer does unless you’re a TV producer.
JL: [Laughing] Honestly, [French pronunciation] Josquin, I might just change my Instagram bio to vague and broad. It describes me as a person so perfectly.
Jossie: Can you tell me what it means to be a “brand manager”?
JL: Fuck, that’s so interesting that you’ve asked me that. It’s tricky to answer that question in the realm that I work in. I work much more as a creative director. Although my title is “brand manager”, I realised that, because of the way I work and what the attributes of a creative director are, I work much more as a creative director.
Jossie: What’s the difference?
JL: The difference is a tricky question, and I quite literally Googled it a couple of days ago. It’s tricky in that…
Jossie: In that it’s vague and broad?
JL: It’s tricky in that a lot of the definitions online don’t necessarily pertain to a contemporary idea of what the two do. So, if you were to Google it, it would say that a creative director is somebody whose work is quite art-based, like art direction. Like, being able to be a great graphic designer but also being able to give great direction. But I think if you watch, like, Tremaine Emory speak about it or Virgil Abloh talk about it, or any of these great creative directors, Martine Rose, you’ll get a very different meaning of what a creative director does. Tremaine has this idea that a creative director also has an incredible address book. I think that that, in a contemporary world, is a massive part of what makes a great creative director. The ability to collaborate and to call on certain people in a personal sense and to have work and relationships that precede you that make you capable of making the connections to do more work.
I handle a lot of things at Shelflife, and I think there’s a large, blurred line between marketing director, brand manager, creative director, art director. All of these things are meshed into one role.
Jossie: So, you do a lot of these things at once, much like a TV producer would.
JL: Very much so. I was a creative producer before I got into this role.
Jossie: No ways.
JL: It’s a big word that’s come into the world in the last ten years or so. You have a creative director and then you have a creative producer, somebody who could take an idea and build the necessary things around it to make it happen and get the job done.
Jossie: So, you have both. You have both good ideas and good chat?
JL: And good execution, which I feel is a thing that some of my younger peers don’t necessarily have yet. Like, a pedantic ability to actually execute hard, on-the-ground, get-the-thing-made, phone-the-person, make-it-work kind of stuff.
Jossie: So, how does your day-to-day look?
JL: Every day is different. I mostly handle activations for other brands and our own in our store at Shelflife. Those can range from a 360-campaign like the Birkenstock campaign we just did, where we do a full creative campaign, all the packaging and branding, hosting an activation in Joburg and handling the in-store and social media rollouts, to doing a small video for a new pair of Shelflife shorts that are coming out. Every day is very different in terms of creative, execution, projects I take on.
Jossie: You’ve been at Shelflife for two and a half years now, but your LinkedIn tells me that you worked there for four years over a decade ago.
JL: Yeah, I was there as the very first manager.
Jossie: Did you go straight to manager, or did you have to work the floor and do the dirty work for a while first?
JL: Well, there was no other staff. It was myself, Nick (Herbert) who started the store, and Gary who started the store with him and came on board as a creative director, I guess. There were no real titles. I came on as the shop assistant and I was the only person there. Nick and I worked the shop mostly. I don’t know if I became manager or if I just was the manager, but I was the only shop staff.
Jossie: So, store manager by default. What were you like when you started there in 2007? I was six years old in 2007.
JL: You were six years old!? That’s a fucking nightmare.
Jossie: How old were you then?
JL: 22.
Jossie: Damn.
JL: Uhm, I was very similar to how I am now. My fiancée watched my bar mitzvah video a little while ago. She didn’t know me when I was 13. I think she was 1 or 2 at the time. We hadn’t started our relationship yet for obvious reasons. Anyway, she watched it and she said to me, “you know, you’ve always been Jake Lipman,” and I was like, “yeah, I suppose I have.” Obviously different attributes, different levels of self-awareness and confidence. But I’ve kind of always been me. Back then I was much more involved in the beginning of my career playing music and DJing around Cape Town. Music in Cape Town was very different. I was still playing the drums, and then started a weird little space called Collab with my friends, which was essentially just a room in a building with nothing inside it that we used to throw parties in and do activations for people. I was playing in a group called B-Team at a lot of festivals and stuff. Then I got a call from my friend Spoek Mathambo to come and play the drums for his band. We were good friends at that stage, deeply playing each other’s stuff. I was kind of working at Red Bull Studios as well, doing some projects there. It was all interlinked. And then I left Shelflife to go and work more at Red Bull Studios and to play music full time and tour the world with Spoek and our band.
Jossie: Why don’t you play drums for a living now?
JL: I don’t really like the pressure of what it would mean to play drums for a living now. I feel like that’s something that should be driven by your capacity to enjoy it. Like, if it’s not coming, it’s not coming. I used to hear this crazy story at Red Bull Studios all the time around the same time that kids from the hood stopped wanting to become soccer players and started dreaming of being DJs when they grew up. This weird question started coming up a lot where people would say “what kind of music should I make?” And it’s stuck with me for years, because what kind of fucked up question is that? Make what comes out of you! But that’s the zeitgeist of the time of art becoming a job. Some people learn drums to make money because they see that there’s an opportunity to play in bands. That takes out what I love about playing drums.
Jossie: What was Shelflife like back then?
JL: Fucking amazing. Jesus! You couldn’t get colourful shoes anywhere else. If you wanted a colourful shoe or a specific colour of shoe, you couldn’t just go get it. If you wanted a shell-toe adidas, you couldn’t just go get a shell-toe adidas, because they weren’t making them at that time. You couldn’t search the internet for a pink shoe. People weren’t individuating themselves by the clothes that they were wearing. The people that were doing that, you could tell that it was their main focus. You knew that that’s what they were into, like they dress like this. Dude, it wasn’t like you looked around and people were wearing what they wanted to wear. Shelflife was on the second storey, and it was this little weird nook that you would find in a sea of really plain everything. It wasn’t like walking into some shitty big box store now that’s like “Love Sneakers”. There was none of that. It was very specific. At that time there were no brand activations. People thought “Why do you need an activation? It’s a running shoe. What are you gonna activate?” It was a completely different world. It was fucking crazy exciting for me that that shit was happening at that level in South Africa at Shelflife. I had just come back from London and had seen all this stuff there and was constantly following it online. I had amazing influencers around me teaching me about it. I always gravitated to weird left-of-centre shit musically and fashion-wise, and this whole world was completely left-of-centre.
Jossie: I imagine it was a lot smaller than it is now.
It was a lot smaller. And this idea that you would spend that much money on a pair of shoes was insane, like dude, it’s a pair of tekkies. What are you doing? There wasn’t this popular idea of “buying into something”. But we all knew that lineage. We knew about the collabs, we knew about the guys running shit. Dude, you could not get your hands on a collab – it was impossible. It wasn’t a thing! Why would that painter be collaborating with these shoes? They have nothing to do with one another. It was crazy exciting, yoh.
Jossie: It’s so cute to me that people were just getting excited over colourful shoes.
JL: That’s exactly what it was. The minute you had a different colour of something, it was like “woah, what are you talking about?” Like, even a lace-swap was a major thing. You couldn’t just find colourful laces. People would paint shoes. Customising was a thing. It was a completely different world. Access was way more restricted.
Skateboarding is a great example too. As soon as you saw a person on a skateboard, you would instantly have a kinship with them, because it wasn’t ubiquitous. It wasn’t a cool culture thing. It was really difficult and it was shitty to skateboard. But the people who loved it knew how incredible it was and how incredible the world was that came with it. You had a tribe and a lexicon and a look and an everything. And there were good core skate brands within that world. You see someone going down the street on a longboard and you don’t know what they know about the culture. Sneaker culture was the same. There’s a very famous book that Bobbito (Garcia) wrote called Where Did You Get Those? That’s how the whole thing was. “Jesus, where did you get those? How did you find those? What’s your story?” Now it’s just like “I fuckin went online and I bought them for ten thousand rand.” It was cool. Shelflife was cool. Back in the day. Shelflife is incredibly cool, but that question took me back.
Jossie: When you sold your last tekkie in 2010, were you planning your return to the business as part of an evil takeover plan?
JL: Hahahaha. Interesting question. No, I had no clue. I always loved Shelflife. I left because I had other things to do, and I wanted to see how far I could take the music thing. I loved working there, though. It was amazing and incredible and interesting. And it was retail! I was working in a shop. And then I was presented with the opportunity to do music, which I had loved since I was 10. It was just something I had to do.
Jossie: You left to play music, but you were managing musicians as well, right? How did you convince people that you could manage them?
JL: I was always Jake Lipman, man. When I believe in things, I really believe in them. I love them and I’m willing to sacrifice for them. I feel like I have the gift of foresight when it comes to certain things. And it’s a great gift to have in South Africa because you understand how an artist could become relevant in six months. Or you can see how a style or an artist will become relevant in 12 months, and then you’re too early. I think that was the case with Cape Town Electronic Music Festival. I think we were too early. Not only were the things we were doing ahead of their time, they were too far ahead of their time and it took people here far longer to catch up to techno.
Jossie: Wasn’t it a huge success?
JL: It was a huge success in our minds and for the people that valued it. We brought huge artists and hosted incredible festivals. But was it a huge financial success and did we all become millionaires? No. It just depends on what your version of success is. For me it was successful.
Jossie: So, what motivated you to go back to Shelflife?
JL: Uhm, the opportunity presented itself. And COVID had just happened. I had weathered the storm through COVID…
Jossie: Congrats.
JL: Thank you, and to you. And I had just finished setting up an company with my friend Jesse called Caretaker., which was about special projects for brands, where I was like a freelance creative director. And then, when COVID hit, all the niche special projects got knocked off the table. Everybody forgot about it and went back to ground roots, focusing on selling product. There were no activations, or getting people into rooms together, or parties. There was no extra budget to do that niche marketing and all the shit that I specialise in. I had been hustling for years and years and years, and I kind of got a bit tired of the hustle. The idea of having a solid, stable job became more enticing to me. So, the opportunity came up in an industry and in a brand which I loved for more than a decade.
Jossie: So, did they approach you?
JL: No. I was doing some creative jobs for them and I had always maintained my relationship with Nick, who’s one of my best friends, easily. And then the job came up and I told Nick “Dude, I think I’m going to apply for this.” We carried on talking more and more about it gently. And eventually he said “get your CV in.”
Jossie: So, you still had to go through the whole process?
JL: Yeah! Still had to go through three interviews with all the CEOs. It was just meant to be, man.
Jossie: What’s the biggest change between Shelflife now and what it was when it started?
JL: It’s a difficult question to answer without taking hours and hours. Obviously, sneaker culture has become pop culture. There are lots of people who have moved into the space without doing all the years of understanding the context. I’m obsessed with context. Sneaker culture has context in that it came from a place where you couldn’t buy a colourful pair of shoes and finding a kinship with people over that. There have been years and years of bad people and brands coming in and fucking it up, looking to make a quick buck. Understanding all that context informs what we do now. Everything that we do is informed by the context that has come before us.
You understand that making a pair of big pants is not just to make a pair of big pants. There’s context. There’s understanding of fit and form and function and fashion and culture and borrowed culture and spun culture and all that kind of stuff, so it allows you to stay the course and make the decisions not based on someone else that’s making big pants, but on you making a certain fit of pants. And the same is true of techno and DJing. All these bad apples that have come in haven’t realised that culture and love and interest are the focus, and that money is the byproduct. A lot of people have come in saying that money and fame are the focus, and so their context is completely different to ours and they don’t understand how to make certain decisions, so they’ll follow what others are doing. They don’t make decisions with foresight and insight. That’s a very interesting thing to navigate for Shelflife now. There are so many emulators. There are so many people calling themselves “royalty of sneakers”. But there are also innovators who are trying to inject substance into a pair of shoes. It’s a fucking pair of shoes at the end of the day. It’s leather and rubber, but it’s context that makes it exciting.
Jossie: How has Shelflife adapted to that change in culture?
JL: It’s very interesting to explain to brands why we need to do certain things that don’t have a direct ROI in terms of sales. You put fifty thousand rand into this campaign, do you get fifty thousand rand back? No. But in the next two years, you’ll get a million rand out. We need to incubate ideas. We now have to explain things to people in their own lexicon, in terms of business and sales and marketing, especially in South Africa, because Shelflife is still so ahead of the curve locally.
It’s changed in that we have much more staff, we have much bigger stores, we have big ambitions. We’re moving our brick-and-mortar store in Cape Town to a space that’s three times bigger in March of next year. It’s amazing that Shelflife has grown up to become an incredibly sustainable business, not only making decisions based on culture and throwing commercials to the wind.
Jossie: Are you a hypebeast?
JL: I think I’m an original hypebeast, for sure. When that term came around it was so cool. And now it’s a completely dirty word. Even the word sneakerhead – I cringe, because it’s been usurped. It’s the same as when someone asks, “are you into techno?” I almost cringe, because we are not into the same techno. You wouldn’t book me at your party. Unless it’s someone who’s like-minded, because then you can have a conversation. But if it’s this cheesy version of pop culture, then no. But am I a hypebeast? With somebody who gets that term, I would say “yeah totally.” That word was so fire, dude. It was how we explained ourselves. This idea of highsnobiety – it was like, “yeah I’m snobby.” Josquin [French pronunciation], you are snobby. And that’s almost the term that I wanna use now. But if you tell me “yeah, I also only like these certain Yeezys,” it’s like “No, dude… Different conversation here.”
Jossie: What are three of the coolest projects you’ve worked on? In both the music and the fashion industry.
JL: I’ll probably kick myself for not remembering something. In this very moment, things that stand out to me? I’m very proud of CTEMF, what we did and what we accomplished in terms of having a vision for a festival and then bringing international artists that we love to South Africa and giving local artists a platform, and convincing massive venues that we were cool and that we should be in their space. I really am proud of that.
I’m really proud of the work I’m doing at Shelflife. I’m really proud that a lot of brands don’t make us pitch. They just say “We’ve got this product coming out, these are the directives we want. Come up with something.” 95% of the time we come up with ideas that are fifty steps out in the ether. And when I pitch them, I think “Yoh, how are we gonna pull this off?” And we’ve pulled off all of them. The brand has got to a point where we can execute those things and it’s amazing. We’re an agency now. One of the best in the country, if not the world. When we go to Paris Fashion Week, they say to us “Wow, the work you guys are putting out is insane.”
I’m really proud of my friends, man. I love what my friends are doing. I’ve seen people have really big, ambitious ideas and risk everything for them to make our whole little ecosystem better. Some of them have “failed” and not been a success, but I think the people that I’ve gravitated towards and luckily met, who are of my ilk, have done stuff that’s really moved the needle. And it gives me great pride to be a part of that.
Jossie: When did you meet Daniel (Sher)?
JL: I think Daniel and I crossed paths a bunch of times in high school.
Jossie: Were you at the same high school?
JL: Yeah, we’re from the same community in Joburg. But I only properly became aware of him when he was doing me.plus.one. He was working with people that I knew and who I fucked with. And then I probably got introduced to him properly when he moved to Cape Town. We realised that we had a kinship and a sort of tribal affinity. We obviously knew each other, but when I saw he was doing cool ambitious things I think I recognised him properly.
Jossie: What do you make of his barefoot shoes?
JL: I think it fits his aesthetic. He’s really stuck to his guns. I’m really interested in the psychology that happens when you see something for the first time and it doesn’t fit in with what works in your mind. Remember the first time you saw cropped pants, and thought “that looks so stupid”, but also thought “but maybe they’re not so stupid.” That’s kind of what Daniel’s barefoot shoes have become for me. It’s a look that I expect from him. I’m interested in what he’s gonna wear. Is it the Vivo’s? Is it the Keen? Josquin [French pronunciation], you would LOVE the Keen. I think he’s stuck to his guns and he’s made it cool.
Jossie: Is Daniel a good DJ?
JL: I don’t know. I’ve never properly seen him play.
Jossie: Would you manage him?
JL: No. I think Daniel would be a fucking nightmare to manage.
Jossie: Are you excited for your back-to-back set with Daniel at the Duck Duck Goose Third Birthday Party at One Park?
JL: I’m not playing back-to-back with Daniel. Point blank no.
Jossie: What has given Shelflife the legs to live for 17 years and counting?
JL: Care. I think everyone that comes into the business really cares. Really cares about the brand, really cares about what we do and the decisions we make. Really cares about being at the forefront. Really cares about community. About the culture and community that surrounds our little ecosystem. It changes all the time. Different things become cool, different people become cool. As long as you care for these things and people then coolness isn’t the main objective. It’s just about kinship and building a community. Not many things have been around for 17 years and have stayed the course. And the course is love for Shelflife. I think we seek out the passionate people in our community who want to learn more and be more interested and contribute in substantial ways.
17 years. I mean, think about how many different people you’ve been in the last 17 years, but there are certain things about you that have stayed the same. Shelflife is like a person. We’ve liked different things over 17 years but we’ve stayed the same person.
Jossie: Why do you think this collaboration is important?
JL: I think it’s time now, more than ever, to bind together with like-minded people. Because this thing is not gonna last forever. This sneaker culture being the most popular thing in the world is not gonna last forever. Rap music, three years ago, was the biggest, hypest, most pop culture thing in the world, and we’re already starting to see it transform, you know? Shelflife didn’t start because we knew that, one day, it would be massive and make all this money. We just did it because we loved it. Been here, still here. Bind together with people who understand the same idea. Shelflife might not last forever, Duck Duck Goose might not last forever, but you guys will. Your nature will and our nature will and Baseline’s nature will.
Jossie: Lastly, what advice would you give to Duck Duck Goose?
JL: Keep nurturing the Goose. Keep nurturing the Goose. The Duck and the Duck are good. The Duck and the Duck and the Goose are equally as important as one, but there are two Ducks and only one Goose. The Goose is enduring. The Goose is enduring.
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Interview with Shelflife’s Brand Manager, Jake Lipman
For Duck Duck Goose’s third birthday, we’ve decided to collaborate with two titans of the South African fashion and culture retail industry in Shelflife and Baseline. For us, turning three means that we can avert our attention from matters of survival as a new business, leave the nest and spread our wings towards longevity. Our collaborations with these industry giants, and even the fact that we have the opportunity to make them happen, symbolise this growth.
Shelflife barely needs any introduction, having revolutionised the South African retail space and received international attention and acclaim for their service to the greater landscape of sneaker culture. Since the opening of their first store in Cape Town’s Loop Street in 2006, Shelflife has consistently expanded as a business, a store, and a hub for people who share an interest in street culture. Even with the opening of a second retail space in Johannesburg and international collaborations with the likes of Jordan, adidas, New Balance, Puma, Umbro, Grasshoppers and FILA behind them, Shelflife has managed to maintain the ethos with which it started and stayed true to their original community of street culture enthusiasts. Considering their resume and what Shelflife means to the local community, it’s only natural that we look up to them for what they have achieved. We aspire to emulate their unwavering appetite for collaboration, bringing people together, and staying true to themselves. Shelflife has a very special place in Duck Duck Goose founder Daniel Sher’s heart, since the Cape Town store was the original stockist of his first brand, me.plus.one, making this collaboration even more meaningful to us.
To help me express the significance of Shelflife’s impact on the South African retail industry and street culture community, and to illustrate the importance of this collaboration, I interviewed Shelflife’s brand manager Jake Lipman. Jake has been involved with Shelflife since the store was born. He acted as the store’s first store manager for four years before leaving to pursue a career in music. After a very successful career in the music industry indeed, notably establishing The Cape Town Electronic Music Festival, touring the world with Spoek Mathambo, a six-year stint at Red Bull Studios, heaps of experience in artist management and events coordination, and now still occasionally DJing under the name Jakobsnake, Jake returned to Shelflife in 2021, taking up his current role.
While Daniel’s friendship with Jake has spanned a decade, calling him to walk in Good Good Good runway shows in the past, I didn’t know Jake very well before we did the interview. I don’t think we’d ever had a conversation that lasted more than five minutes, but Jake used his discretion to start calling me endearing nicknames long before we sat down for this chat. Before Jake, no one besides my closest relatives called me “Jossie.” Jake goes early with the endearing nicknames, which makes his presence quite comforting. This interview felt like I was sitting down with my cool uncle who’s bursting to tell me exciting stories about the life he’s lived. It helped that I was genuinely interested in what he was telling me. I’d always been fascinated by what sneaker culture was like before it exploded into the pop culture beast it is today. The culture’s mostly plastic and superficial contemporary state has made me pity those who were involved before it reached this point. Speaking to Jake helped me understand the context of the position that Shelflife holds in modern South African street culture and what it means to stay true to your roots in a world of sameness. He spoke about far more than that, but you’ll have to read the interview to see.
Jossie: Do you have any relation to WWE wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts?
JL: I don’t have an actual familial relationship, but the reason my DJ name “Jakobsnake” came about is because of him.
Jossie: Why?
JL: I’m not telling you. A lot of people know, I’m just not telling you. It’s a widely known fact.
Jossie: How about Jake Lipman, British-born TV producer? Are you aware of her?
JL: I know her stuff. But no relation. I know her through Googling my own name and friends Googling my name over the years. She was top ranked for the longest time, but I managed to dethrone her.
Jossie: She’s still top ranked.
JL: Oh, she’s still top ranked.
Jossie: For now. Maybe after this interview you’ll eclipse her.
JL: Sure.
Jossie: Have you ever met a woman named Jake?
JL: No, never.
Jossie: Are you actually Jacob? Or just Jake? I tried to Google both.
JL: No, my name is not Jacob. It’s just Jake. When people don’t know me, they call me Jacob. When they know me as an artist and not as a human person.
Jossie: I thought it was Jacob Lipman.
JL: It’s not. It’s just Jake Nathan Lipman.
Jossie: How do you feel about your name?
JL: Uhm, I’ve come to love it. How do you feel about Josquin? I’ve never met another Josquin in my life.
Jossie: Me neither. Someone once told me that their name was Josquin but I think they were messing with me. It’s a Renaissance composer’s name – [French pronunciation] Josquin de Prez.
JL: I love it. I’m never calling you anything besides [French pronunciation] Josquin.
Jake has since stopped calling me Jossie and now addresses me with changing variations of the French pronunciation.
Jossie: Anyway, about Jake Lipman, British-born TV producer. I feel like you guys have very similar jobs in that they’re both vague and broad. Like, no one knows what a TV producer does unless you’re a TV producer.
JL: [Laughing] Honestly, [French pronunciation] Josquin, I might just change my Instagram bio to vague and broad. It describes me as a person so perfectly.
Jossie: Can you tell me what it means to be a “brand manager”?
JL: Fuck, that’s so interesting that you’ve asked me that. It’s tricky to answer that question in the realm that I work in. I work much more as a creative director. Although my title is “brand manager”, I realised that, because of the way I work and what the attributes of a creative director are, I work much more as a creative director.
Jossie: What’s the difference?
JL: The difference is a tricky question, and I quite literally Googled it a couple of days ago. It’s tricky in that…
Jossie: In that it’s vague and broad?
JL: It’s tricky in that a lot of the definitions online don’t necessarily pertain to a contemporary idea of what the two do. So, if you were to Google it, it would say that a creative director is somebody whose work is quite art-based, like art direction. Like, being able to be a great graphic designer but also being able to give great direction. But I think if you watch, like, Tremaine Emory speak about it or Virgil Abloh talk about it, or any of these great creative directors, Martine Rose, you’ll get a very different meaning of what a creative director does. Tremaine has this idea that a creative director also has an incredible address book. I think that that, in a contemporary world, is a massive part of what makes a great creative director. The ability to collaborate and to call on certain people in a personal sense and to have work and relationships that precede you that make you capable of making the connections to do more work.
I handle a lot of things at Shelflife, and I think there’s a large, blurred line between marketing director, brand manager, creative director, art director. All of these things are meshed into one role.
Jossie: So, you do a lot of these things at once, much like a TV producer would.
JL: Very much so. I was a creative producer before I got into this role.
Jossie: No ways.
JL: It’s a big word that’s come into the world in the last ten years or so. You have a creative director and then you have a creative producer, somebody who could take an idea and build the necessary things around it to make it happen and get the job done.
Jossie: So, you have both. You have both good ideas and good chat?
JL: And good execution, which I feel is a thing that some of my younger peers don’t necessarily have yet. Like, a pedantic ability to actually execute hard, on-the-ground, get-the-thing-made, phone-the-person, make-it-work kind of stuff.
Jossie: So, how does your day-to-day look?
JL: Every day is different. I mostly handle activations for other brands and our own in our store at Shelflife. Those can range from a 360-campaign like the Birkenstock campaign we just did, where we do a full creative campaign, all the packaging and branding, hosting an activation in Joburg and handling the in-store and social media rollouts, to doing a small video for a new pair of Shelflife shorts that are coming out. Every day is very different in terms of creative, execution, projects I take on.
Jossie: You’ve been at Shelflife for two and a half years now, but your LinkedIn tells me that you worked there for four years over a decade ago.
JL: Yeah, I was there as the very first manager.
Jossie: Did you go straight to manager, or did you have to work the floor and do the dirty work for a while first?
JL: Well, there was no other staff. It was myself, Nick (Herbert) who started the store, and Gary who started the store with him and came on board as a creative director, I guess. There were no real titles. I came on as the shop assistant and I was the only person there. Nick and I worked the shop mostly. I don’t know if I became manager or if I just was the manager, but I was the only shop staff.
Jossie: So, store manager by default. What were you like when you started there in 2007? I was six years old in 2007.
JL: You were six years old!? That’s a fucking nightmare.
Jossie: How old were you then?
JL: 22.
Jossie: Damn.
JL: Uhm, I was very similar to how I am now. My fiancée watched my bar mitzvah video a little while ago. She didn’t know me when I was 13. I think she was 1 or 2 at the time. We hadn’t started our relationship yet for obvious reasons. Anyway, she watched it and she said to me, “you know, you’ve always been Jake Lipman,” and I was like, “yeah, I suppose I have.” Obviously different attributes, different levels of self-awareness and confidence. But I’ve kind of always been me. Back then I was much more involved in the beginning of my career playing music and DJing around Cape Town. Music in Cape Town was very different. I was still playing the drums, and then started a weird little space called Collab with my friends, which was essentially just a room in a building with nothing inside it that we used to throw parties in and do activations for people. I was playing in a group called B-Team at a lot of festivals and stuff. Then I got a call from my friend Spoek Mathambo to come and play the drums for his band. We were good friends at that stage, deeply playing each other’s stuff. I was kind of working at Red Bull Studios as well, doing some projects there. It was all interlinked. And then I left Shelflife to go and work more at Red Bull Studios and to play music full time and tour the world with Spoek and our band.
Jossie: Why don’t you play drums for a living now?
JL: I don’t really like the pressure of what it would mean to play drums for a living now. I feel like that’s something that should be driven by your capacity to enjoy it. Like, if it’s not coming, it’s not coming. I used to hear this crazy story at Red Bull Studios all the time around the same time that kids from the hood stopped wanting to become soccer players and started dreaming of being DJs when they grew up. This weird question started coming up a lot where people would say “what kind of music should I make?” And it’s stuck with me for years, because what kind of fucked up question is that? Make what comes out of you! But that’s the zeitgeist of the time of art becoming a job. Some people learn drums to make money because they see that there’s an opportunity to play in bands. That takes out what I love about playing drums.
Jossie: What was Shelflife like back then?
JL: Fucking amazing. Jesus! You couldn’t get colourful shoes anywhere else. If you wanted a colourful shoe or a specific colour of shoe, you couldn’t just go get it. If you wanted a shell-toe adidas, you couldn’t just go get a shell-toe adidas, because they weren’t making them at that time. You couldn’t search the internet for a pink shoe. People weren’t individuating themselves by the clothes that they were wearing. The people that were doing that, you could tell that it was their main focus. You knew that that’s what they were into, like they dress like this. Dude, it wasn’t like you looked around and people were wearing what they wanted to wear. Shelflife was on the second storey, and it was this little weird nook that you would find in a sea of really plain everything. It wasn’t like walking into some shitty big box store now that’s like “Love Sneakers”. There was none of that. It was very specific. At that time there were no brand activations. People thought “Why do you need an activation? It’s a running shoe. What are you gonna activate?” It was a completely different world. It was fucking crazy exciting for me that that shit was happening at that level in South Africa at Shelflife. I had just come back from London and had seen all this stuff there and was constantly following it online. I had amazing influencers around me teaching me about it. I always gravitated to weird left-of-centre shit musically and fashion-wise, and this whole world was completely left-of-centre.
Jossie: I imagine it was a lot smaller than it is now.
It was a lot smaller. And this idea that you would spend that much money on a pair of shoes was insane, like dude, it’s a pair of tekkies. What are you doing? There wasn’t this popular idea of “buying into something”. But we all knew that lineage. We knew about the collabs, we knew about the guys running shit. Dude, you could not get your hands on a collab – it was impossible. It wasn’t a thing! Why would that painter be collaborating with these shoes? They have nothing to do with one another. It was crazy exciting, yoh.
Jossie: It’s so cute to me that people were just getting excited over colourful shoes.
JL: That’s exactly what it was. The minute you had a different colour of something, it was like “woah, what are you talking about?” Like, even a lace-swap was a major thing. You couldn’t just find colourful laces. People would paint shoes. Customising was a thing. It was a completely different world. Access was way more restricted.
Skateboarding is a great example too. As soon as you saw a person on a skateboard, you would instantly have a kinship with them, because it wasn’t ubiquitous. It wasn’t a cool culture thing. It was really difficult and it was shitty to skateboard. But the people who loved it knew how incredible it was and how incredible the world was that came with it. You had a tribe and a lexicon and a look and an everything. And there were good core skate brands within that world. You see someone going down the street on a longboard and you don’t know what they know about the culture. Sneaker culture was the same. There’s a very famous book that Bobbito (Garcia) wrote called Where Did You Get Those? That’s how the whole thing was. “Jesus, where did you get those? How did you find those? What’s your story?” Now it’s just like “I fuckin went online and I bought them for ten thousand rand.” It was cool. Shelflife was cool. Back in the day. Shelflife is incredibly cool, but that question took me back.
Jossie: When you sold your last tekkie in 2010, were you planning your return to the business as part of an evil takeover plan?
JL: Hahahaha. Interesting question. No, I had no clue. I always loved Shelflife. I left because I had other things to do, and I wanted to see how far I could take the music thing. I loved working there, though. It was amazing and incredible and interesting. And it was retail! I was working in a shop. And then I was presented with the opportunity to do music, which I had loved since I was 10. It was just something I had to do.
Jossie: You left to play music, but you were managing musicians as well, right? How did you convince people that you could manage them?
JL: I was always Jake Lipman, man. When I believe in things, I really believe in them. I love them and I’m willing to sacrifice for them. I feel like I have the gift of foresight when it comes to certain things. And it’s a great gift to have in South Africa because you understand how an artist could become relevant in six months. Or you can see how a style or an artist will become relevant in 12 months, and then you’re too early. I think that was the case with Cape Town Electronic Music Festival. I think we were too early. Not only were the things we were doing ahead of their time, they were too far ahead of their time and it took people here far longer to catch up to techno.
Jossie: Wasn’t it a huge success?
JL: It was a huge success in our minds and for the people that valued it. We brought huge artists and hosted incredible festivals. But was it a huge financial success and did we all become millionaires? No. It just depends on what your version of success is. For me it was successful.
Jossie: So, what motivated you to go back to Shelflife?
JL: Uhm, the opportunity presented itself. And COVID had just happened. I had weathered the storm through COVID…
Jossie: Congrats.
JL: Thank you, and to you. And I had just finished setting up an company with my friend Jesse called Caretaker., which was about special projects for brands, where I was like a freelance creative director. And then, when COVID hit, all the niche special projects got knocked off the table. Everybody forgot about it and went back to ground roots, focusing on selling product. There were no activations, or getting people into rooms together, or parties. There was no extra budget to do that niche marketing and all the shit that I specialise in. I had been hustling for years and years and years, and I kind of got a bit tired of the hustle. The idea of having a solid, stable job became more enticing to me. So, the opportunity came up in an industry and in a brand which I loved for more than a decade.
Jossie: So, did they approach you?
JL: No. I was doing some creative jobs for them and I had always maintained my relationship with Nick, who’s one of my best friends, easily. And then the job came up and I told Nick “Dude, I think I’m going to apply for this.” We carried on talking more and more about it gently. And eventually he said “get your CV in.”
Jossie: So, you still had to go through the whole process?
JL: Yeah! Still had to go through three interviews with all the CEOs. It was just meant to be, man.
Jossie: What’s the biggest change between Shelflife now and what it was when it started?
JL: It’s a difficult question to answer without taking hours and hours. Obviously, sneaker culture has become pop culture. There are lots of people who have moved into the space without doing all the years of understanding the context. I’m obsessed with context. Sneaker culture has context in that it came from a place where you couldn’t buy a colourful pair of shoes and finding a kinship with people over that. There have been years and years of bad people and brands coming in and fucking it up, looking to make a quick buck. Understanding all that context informs what we do now. Everything that we do is informed by the context that has come before us.
You understand that making a pair of big pants is not just to make a pair of big pants. There’s context. There’s understanding of fit and form and function and fashion and culture and borrowed culture and spun culture and all that kind of stuff, so it allows you to stay the course and make the decisions not based on someone else that’s making big pants, but on you making a certain fit of pants. And the same is true of techno and DJing. All these bad apples that have come in haven’t realised that culture and love and interest are the focus, and that money is the byproduct. A lot of people have come in saying that money and fame are the focus, and so their context is completely different to ours and they don’t understand how to make certain decisions, so they’ll follow what others are doing. They don’t make decisions with foresight and insight. That’s a very interesting thing to navigate for Shelflife now. There are so many emulators. There are so many people calling themselves “royalty of sneakers”. But there are also innovators who are trying to inject substance into a pair of shoes. It’s a fucking pair of shoes at the end of the day. It’s leather and rubber, but it’s context that makes it exciting.
Jossie: How has Shelflife adapted to that change in culture?
JL: It’s very interesting to explain to brands why we need to do certain things that don’t have a direct ROI in terms of sales. You put fifty thousand rand into this campaign, do you get fifty thousand rand back? No. But in the next two years, you’ll get a million rand out. We need to incubate ideas. We now have to explain things to people in their own lexicon, in terms of business and sales and marketing, especially in South Africa, because Shelflife is still so ahead of the curve locally.
It’s changed in that we have much more staff, we have much bigger stores, we have big ambitions. We’re moving our brick-and-mortar store in Cape Town to a space that’s three times bigger in March of next year. It’s amazing that Shelflife has grown up to become an incredibly sustainable business, not only making decisions based on culture and throwing commercials to the wind.
Jossie: Are you a hypebeast?
JL: I think I’m an original hypebeast, for sure. When that term came around it was so cool. And now it’s a completely dirty word. Even the word sneakerhead – I cringe, because it’s been usurped. It’s the same as when someone asks, “are you into techno?” I almost cringe, because we are not into the same techno. You wouldn’t book me at your party. Unless it’s someone who’s like-minded, because then you can have a conversation. But if it’s this cheesy version of pop culture, then no. But am I a hypebeast? With somebody who gets that term, I would say “yeah totally.” That word was so fire, dude. It was how we explained ourselves. This idea of highsnobiety – it was like, “yeah I’m snobby.” Josquin [French pronunciation], you are snobby. And that’s almost the term that I wanna use now. But if you tell me “yeah, I also only like these certain Yeezys,” it’s like “No, dude… Different conversation here.”
Jossie: What are three of the coolest projects you’ve worked on? In both the music and the fashion industry.
JL: I’ll probably kick myself for not remembering something. In this very moment, things that stand out to me? I’m very proud of CTEMF, what we did and what we accomplished in terms of having a vision for a festival and then bringing international artists that we love to South Africa and giving local artists a platform, and convincing massive venues that we were cool and that we should be in their space. I really am proud of that.
I’m really proud of the work I’m doing at Shelflife. I’m really proud that a lot of brands don’t make us pitch. They just say “We’ve got this product coming out, these are the directives we want. Come up with something.” 95% of the time we come up with ideas that are fifty steps out in the ether. And when I pitch them, I think “Yoh, how are we gonna pull this off?” And we’ve pulled off all of them. The brand has got to a point where we can execute those things and it’s amazing. We’re an agency now. One of the best in the country, if not the world. When we go to Paris Fashion Week, they say to us “Wow, the work you guys are putting out is insane.”
I’m really proud of my friends, man. I love what my friends are doing. I’ve seen people have really big, ambitious ideas and risk everything for them to make our whole little ecosystem better. Some of them have “failed” and not been a success, but I think the people that I’ve gravitated towards and luckily met, who are of my ilk, have done stuff that’s really moved the needle. And it gives me great pride to be a part of that.
Jossie: When did you meet Daniel (Sher)?
JL: I think Daniel and I crossed paths a bunch of times in high school.
Jossie: Were you at the same high school?
JL: Yeah, we’re from the same community in Joburg. But I only properly became aware of him when he was doing me.plus.one. He was working with people that I knew and who I fucked with. And then I probably got introduced to him properly when he moved to Cape Town. We realised that we had a kinship and a sort of tribal affinity. We obviously knew each other, but when I saw he was doing cool ambitious things I think I recognised him properly.
Jossie: What do you make of his barefoot shoes?
JL: I think it fits his aesthetic. He’s really stuck to his guns. I’m really interested in the psychology that happens when you see something for the first time and it doesn’t fit in with what works in your mind. Remember the first time you saw cropped pants, and thought “that looks so stupid”, but also thought “but maybe they’re not so stupid.” That’s kind of what Daniel’s barefoot shoes have become for me. It’s a look that I expect from him. I’m interested in what he’s gonna wear. Is it the Vivo’s? Is it the Keen? Josquin [French pronunciation], you would LOVE the Keen. I think he’s stuck to his guns and he’s made it cool.
Jossie: Is Daniel a good DJ?
JL: I don’t know. I’ve never properly seen him play.
Jossie: Would you manage him?
JL: No. I think Daniel would be a fucking nightmare to manage.
Jossie: Are you excited for your back-to-back set with Daniel at the Duck Duck Goose Third Birthday Party at One Park?
JL: I’m not playing back-to-back with Daniel. Point blank no.
Jossie: What has given Shelflife the legs to live for 17 years and counting?
JL: Care. I think everyone that comes into the business really cares. Really cares about the brand, really cares about what we do and the decisions we make. Really cares about being at the forefront. Really cares about community. About the culture and community that surrounds our little ecosystem. It changes all the time. Different things become cool, different people become cool. As long as you care for these things and people then coolness isn’t the main objective. It’s just about kinship and building a community. Not many things have been around for 17 years and have stayed the course. And the course is love for Shelflife. I think we seek out the passionate people in our community who want to learn more and be more interested and contribute in substantial ways.
17 years. I mean, think about how many different people you’ve been in the last 17 years, but there are certain things about you that have stayed the same. Shelflife is like a person. We’ve liked different things over 17 years but we’ve stayed the same person.
Jossie: Why do you think this collaboration is important?
JL: I think it’s time now, more than ever, to bind together with like-minded people. Because this thing is not gonna last forever. This sneaker culture being the most popular thing in the world is not gonna last forever. Rap music, three years ago, was the biggest, hypest, most pop culture thing in the world, and we’re already starting to see it transform, you know? Shelflife didn’t start because we knew that, one day, it would be massive and make all this money. We just did it because we loved it. Been here, still here. Bind together with people who understand the same idea. Shelflife might not last forever, Duck Duck Goose might not last forever, but you guys will. Your nature will and our nature will and Baseline’s nature will.
Jossie: Lastly, what advice would you give to Duck Duck Goose?
JL: Keep nurturing the Goose. Keep nurturing the Goose. The Duck and the Duck are good. The Duck and the Duck and the Goose are equally as important as one, but there are two Ducks and only one Goose. The Goose is enduring. The Goose is enduring.
Jossie: Thank you very much.
JL: Thank you, Josquin [French pronunciation].
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