He will be missed, but Herb will be remembered fondly by many, including Robert and I.
G+M (Gerstman+Meyers, a leading package design firm in New York City) was one our first jobs, and was a key foundation not only to our careers, but to our lives. We had shared the following thoughts with Dick (Richard Gerstman, at right in photo) and Herb a few years ago. Our years at G+M were not only important design and learning experiences, but the place we made many great friends and countless memories. We grew up in that townhouse, and later a bit more in the new studio, both on West 55th Street, in the heart of the city.
It is said that luck is when opportunity meets timing. It is very difficult to comprehend actually how lucky one is when it is actually happening. We can see it so clearly now. Walking into Gerstman + Meyers as a High School of Art and Design student was intimidating and humbling. Within a simple, elegantly quiet town house on West 55th street in Manhattan was a global and culturally diverse collection of remarkable talent, all engaged in the art and business of making brands, creating markets and crafting possibilities. As aspiring young designers it would have been simply overwhelming if not for the way Dick and Herb ran the company. Surely it was the most organised and ‘buttoned up’ creative business we have ever experienced and yet it was a very humble culture, one of family, full of camaraderie and vision. These are much lauded human resource principles today, but at G+M these foundations were not much talked about but lived, on a day by day basis. The embracement of eager, hopeful, passionate designers to be was an extraordinary gift. The ability to live and learn in an environment where nothing was impossible as long as you had the passion and ambition to make it possible set a indelible foundation which by no exaggeration, was life changing. How lucky one is when given such an opportunity at such an important time in one’s life.
And so we came eventually to go out into the world and learn to work in different ways as each studio has its own footprint, but we always were thankful for the strong basis from G+M, and it helped us to push ahead, as in the end design is only as good as the final execution and business around it. Our studio started small, just Robert and I and my sister, also a designer who was our Studio and Office Manager. And we kept it small, by design, working intimately with our clients and our team of designers, building a very loyal clientele. We chose to only accept a limited number of projects each year so that we would be able to work on each project and dedicate the time and effort needed to create beauty and success. We expanded to Los Angeles, then to Jakarta (the largest agency we had), then to Hong Kong (now to Beijing), and also began to help to grow related businesses, opening a bar and a lounge in Hong Kong. Today we have a base in New York and Hong Kong (and Beijing), but we are headquartered in Santa Monica and log well over 100,000 miles a year, circling the globe. We work for years on the brand strategy and creation, thinking, writing, long before any of our designs are produced. What was once the be all and end all for us — a beautiful business card, a delicate cake box, an exciting signage program, is even more fulfilling now as we may have named the brand or product and worked on the concept before there was a design, before the walls went up on the hotel and it was still a dirt lot. Our foundation, ourselves, our love of travel and people and cultures all have helped to shape our destiny and we always remember that G+M was one of the earliest steps on the road.
