Jacob Riis Beach | 2025

I moved to New York in 2021 for a dream design gig. I didn't have many good reasons to leave the life I had built in North Carolina, but I was young enough, and I guess wise enough, to know that I'd always wonder if I didn't. It took that move for me to realize how powerful a little curiosity can be.

The move was, of course, life changing. I understand why people never leave New York. I also understand why people don't even like having layovers here. There is a perpetual hum in Manhattan that most of us here find addicting, but it can be tough to turn off for some of us transplants. Maybe it was just because I grew up surrounded by corn fields, but the moments where I can manage to tune out The City remain really special.

During this season the work weeks were a true grind, but I loved it. I was reverse commuting from Chelsea to Long Island City four to five days a week. On the weekends, my Wife and I found ourselves naturally gravitating toward the parts of The City that that reminded us of back home to recharge. That's part of the magic of this place. It's a hundred worlds wrapped up in a few zip codes. We'd go for a walk through Brooklyn Heights, have a quiet lunch in Red Hook, or take the trip out for a picnic Riis Beach in the off-season. 

If you aren't local, I'll let you imagine what one of the closest beaches you can access by subway is like during peak season. However, In the cooler months,  it looks like the Outer Banks. The noise of the city disappears completely, but you can still catch the skyline on the other side of the sound. At Riis, there is a massive, old, beautiful brick bathhouse, an ornate clock tower at the end of a long walkway overlooking the beach, and a monstrous half-mile-long empty parking lot that feels like a concrete desert in the winter. On one of our first trips out, long before Ballard began, I decided that whenever the day came to take that first step toward launching the brand, this was where I wanted the first proper shoot to be. It felt like back home, but the magic of New York was right there. 

Fast forward three years to later to April 2025. I had launched the Salter a few months earlier. The proof of concept worked, we had a business. I had spent the previous six months developing what I would consider to be the perfect oxford for product number two. It was loosely inspired by a series of images of Paul Newman deep sea fishing in an OCBD. There's a juxtaposition to it I've always loved. I was planning a proper campaign for it's launch. The name was going to be the Mother-of-Pearl Oxford, and a shoot on the coast began to feel almost too obvious. It was the perfect excuse to take Ballard out to the Rockaways. 

My budget was beyond minimal. Embarrassingly minimal. My friends pulled together their time resources, and talent and we set off to try to build a world around this stripped-down oxford. We had the day planned down to the minute, but on the drive out, Chris Boyle, who was shooting and producing, called worried about weather. Our sunny, empty New York-meets-North Carolina beach shoot was seemingly cooked. We had all taken off work. We had bought the film and found the sliver of overlap in our 7 schedules. At that point, everyone was just praying it wouldn't downpour on us. 

As we pulled over the Gil Hodges Bridge, we were greeted with a thick fog. The visibility was maybe two hundred feet. We pulled into said half-mile-long parking lot and began unloading. I was on the phone with Mike, whose 1984 G-Class we were borrowing. He was lost somewhere in the field of fog. Eventually, you could hear the old, rickety German purr of the Mercedes getting closer. I was guiding him to us solely on sound and then the headlights slowly emerged through the fog, and I swear the whole crew let out a unanimous, "Oh shit."

The entire day got flipped on its head. The fog wasn't the problem anymore. It essentially became a paid actor. It took almost of all the context out of the location in a beautiful way. All of a sudden, we could have been anywhere, on any beach, any runway, and you could feel the calm I wanted the shoot to evoke in an almost tangible way. The change of schedule led to a level of collaboration I'll always strive to emulate and the outcome was a shoot we all left really proud of. 

These moments are why I love this business and where I have found the most joy in building a brand. I chose to build a company around incredibly refined, intentional products and place them in worlds that mean something.