Stamina keeps designer spicing up world's retail

Google James Schnauer, and with the usual business announcements, you'll find a plethora of marathon and triathlon entries and results.

He's entered this year's London Triathlon (August 1) and is using the event to raise money for Water Aid; he came first in the men's 35-39 division of the Playa del Rey triathlon in California last year, with a time of 1:00:44; he was due to run another last weekend.

The Los Angeles-based Kiwi director of international retail and exhibition design consultancy Spice Group has, by his own admission, "always been very active in terms of playing sport".

And when you talk to him about the physical demands of his industry, it's probably just as well - the word "stamina" crops up a lot.

Four or five times a year, when putting together a show or an exhibition, he and his team can work from 8am to 2am for four to five days in a row. In quite remarkable understatement, he says of his team: "They need to have a lot of stamina ... people get tired."

It may not be an industry for the faint-hearted, but it's easy to understand the excitement and attraction for a can-do, adrenalin-junkie kinda guy. He gets positively excited, for example, when describing the company's long-run contract with Variety, the Hollywood entertainment magazine, to run its presence at the Cannes Film Festival every year.

For two weeks of every year, the magazine's staff - reporters, photographers, the lot _ work out of Cannes. While there, they produce a daily newspaper that's delivered to hotels at 5am every morning, run daily conferences with panels of 10-12 actors and directors, and hold parties virtually every evening.

When Spice arrives, it has to create the entire newsroom, conference and event space, lock down the logistics for everything that happens, and do it all in a fortnight.

As Schnauer says, "You have to make quick decisions on the ground because you are in a live environment and things are changing. If you come up across a problem, you have got to solve it straight away."

And you can't get tired and "kinda lose it in front of the client".

It takes a certain type of personality, and a fair bit of experience, to be able to pull off such tasks. When asked, Schnauer says, yes, he probably is a natural leader - but he's also, in many ways, been training for years in the skills of determination, crisis management and leadership.

You can trace it right back to his days as a boarder at St Paul's Collegiate in Hamilton - a school he and his Auckland-based family chose because of its sporty, adventure-based culture.

It was, he says, much easier to really get into team sports at such a boarding school, "because there was less distraction".

"There were four or five other guys in the same room as you getting up at 5am to go rowing." And then there were the activities throughout school life, but particularly in the fourth form adventure-based school, in building resilience and problem-solving skills - things like three boys being dropped in the bush and having to use their own initiative to make a shelter and survive the night. "You really pulled out a lot of responsibility," says Schnauer. And you also learned the importance of working as a team, "because you are only as strong as the weakest link".

It doesn't take a huge leap to see how those lessons, learned at 14, could come in handy during a crisis in Cannes more than two decades later.

But the road to Cannes, and other high-profile international events, wasn't that straightforward. After school, Schnauer enrolled in a Diploma in 3D Design at Unitec's School of Design in Auckland.

The course covered everything from graphic and jewellery design to furniture - which Schnauer discovered was his passion. But, as he says, when graduating in 1994, "There wasn't much of a local furniture-making industry in New Zealand".

So he headed to Europe for what was meant to be a five-month OE - three months skiing and two months travelling, then back home. But after spending a couple of winters skiing in the French Alps, and finding enough work to keep going, he was having such a good time, he decided to "ride the wave".

A summer job in the south of France - Cannes to be precise - working with what was then Button Group on building temporary structures for the festival convinced him he should try to land a job in London. So he did, and became a retail designer with Button Eventures.

Retail design is, he says, fascinating, because its main purpose is to influence human behaviour, and so it is heavily based on psychology. "Every department store you walk into, the department at the front of the store is the perfumery. People walk in there and there's a nice smell and all of a sudden their senses are alive and people are in the mood for shopping."

His first two years with Button were an interesting time for design, says Schnauer, a time of enormous change in method and process. "When I first started out in Button in London, we had a studio full of drawing boards and one computer. Within a two-year period, there was one drawing board and the rest of the office was computerised."

And here you find another theme of Schnauer's career - hinted at before in his willingness to "ride the wave". More than many of the experienced people he was working with, he could sense the future and the importance computer-aided design would have on the industry so he undertook, in his own time, to learn everything he could in this new technology. When the company decided to expand into the lucrative American market, he was shoulder tapped to be part of the team setting up an office in New York. He thought it would be "a fun place to go and work for a year".

He was there for three years, before he and his Irish wife Bronagh decided to give New Zealand a go again. But it wasn't time to settle - "I felt there were still things I wanted to do in Europe".

So it was back to Ireland, then he was rehired by Button to lead its American office and last year, following a rebranding to Spice Group, he became managing director.

Schnauer says his move into management, and then leadership, has been "somewhat organic". He was never aware that he wanted to move from design into management, it was just always the next logical step.

"The first couple of years you are working under people doing specific tasks. "As you grow in your role you are becoming not just a designer, but somebody who is [dealing with] the contractors on the production side." Soon, you start working directly with clients and managing those relationships. "And having done that for a few years, you are kind of really at the point where you take control of a job." Rather than chasing promotion, Schnauer says he's just chased the projects, and the promotion has come. "Now I want to take on multiple large projects." He's talking mergers, acquisitions, that kind of thing.

Returning to New Zealand is still on the agenda, but probably not for the next five years. And when he does, he wants to either start a business, or buy into an existing one and expand it.

In the meantime, he has some advice for young New Zealanders who aspire to the world of international exhibition design: never stop learning.

"You have to spend a lot of time educating yourself ... It's [about] having a skill set that makes you slightly unique. And the more of those skills that you can merge together, [that] makes you a stronger candidate. Always look to see, is there another aspect that I can learn that will make me more valuable than the person next to me?"

And, of course, work on that stamina.

James Schnauer

1994
Diploma in 3D Design, Unitec School of Design, Auckland

1994-1996
Retail designer, Button Eventures, London

1996-1999
Exhibition designer, Button Eventures, New York

1999-2000
Interior designer, ElleryMuir Associates, Auckland

2000-2002
Senior interior designer - Opperman Associates, Ireland

2003-2008
Vice-president, regional director Button Group US

2008 - present
Spice Group managing director, after rebrand of Button

* Ashley Campbell is a freelance writer. Contact her at www.wordsontheweb.co.nz