B Chief
Brand curator
STEVE ELTON TELLS THE STORY OF BROWN JORDAN
VISION
B Y WA Y N E T T E G O O D S O N
30 | exterior design
ack in 1990, before any sleek marketing executives had uttered the words “brand ambassador,” Steve Elton became one. He knew a good story when he heard one, and he began telling the world about Brown Jordan, a brand that he unabashedly believes in nearly three decades later. “I’m 63 years old, and when I’m talking with you about Brown Jordan, I’m getting goose bumps,” Elton reveals. “That’s how it still affects me to this day.” Having just received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Casual Furnishings Association, the self-proclaimed “Mr. Brown Jordan” still has a tale to tell. How does Brown Jordan connect with the design community? Brown Jordan is classic elegance, with lines in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, all the way into the 2000s. One of our best-selling collections, Venetian—one of the many that Richard Frinier did for us—came out in 1 8 . We just put it at the Ritz in Paris. Still to this day it’s relevant because we’ve done more forward-thinking finishes. or the design community, it’s not just about the product. We think we’re a fashion brand, so we’re looking at what’s the new color, what’s the color of the year. We spend hours and talk to major people about what we’re going to introduce as far as color. And we’re fortunate to have the relationship that we have with Sunbrella. It’s about pushing the envelope on what we do, looking at what the next innovation is and what the quality is, and what the experience of Brown Jordan is. Brown Jordan is arguably the only outdoor furniture with consumer brand-name recognition. How did you help accomplish that? Back in the ’40s, one of Robert Brown’s first hires was outside the factory: a PR firm in New York. He said, ‘We’re a West Coast brand that sells to the design community, and if we want to build a brand, then we have to make the East Coast want what the West Coast has.’ So we got fortunate with an article that The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker and The New York Times got hold of, and they wrote about how this cool little West Coast company was really design-oriented selling to Hollywood stars and doing salvage material, the Walter Lamb line made from salvaged brass tubing
