Bureau St. James

Sixty-four hours a week cutting tobacco on a southern Maryland farm, every summer, since he was old enough to hold a machete. Bought his own car at sixteen with cash from the fields. The first education had nothing to do with a classroom.

A decade inside the URBN portfolio. Grew the store planning and design operations to support the fleet scaling from roughly 140 to over 400 locations across eight countries. Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Free People, Terrain. Built the in-house design team. Named a retail design influencer two years running.

Posted a manifesto on his dorm room door at UMBC about why American universities are broken. Dropped Political Science the next week. Used the money he had saved from the farm to buy a one-way ticket to Milan. Studied fashion design at Marangoni. The experience opened a world he did not know existed.

Member. 46 East 70th Street. Completed a 211-mile sea, air, and land challenge alongside former Navy SEALs. Escorted by Crow warriors through the Little Bighorn. Solo canoed 35 miles into the Boundary Waters to document indigenous cliff paintings.

Applied to the EMBA in 2019 without an undergraduate degree. Multiple interviews, a ridiculous number of essays. Matriculated in sub fusc at the Sheldonian Theatre. Started during COVID, finished in person at St Hugh's College. The operational mind finally met the design eye in a room that demanded both.

Joined two weeks after the CDO started, the first call he made. Built every process from scratch. Ran store planning and design through the international expansion, eight countries, three continents. IRDC Retailer of the Year, back to back.

Continued chasing the dream he found in Milan. Got into LCF before the money and the visa ran out. Life drawing, pattern cutting, the discipline of training your hand to see. That eye, the one that formed in those studios, is the same eye that runs everything since.

COO of an international real estate advisory practice. Eight offices, three countries, forty people. Built the data science division, led the technology transformation, ran capital markets through a nine-figure European disposition. Managed operations across the US, UK, and Netherlands through COVID. The job where design instinct met operational discipline and neither flinched.

It is not what happens when everything is going right. It is what you do when everything hurts and the horizon is not in sight. Two-hundred-mile races. Ten-mile open water crossings. Exhibitions on the wall. Songs on the piano at 2am. The dawn always comes. One foot in front of the other.

You probably haven't heard of him. That part is by design.