Todd Snyder traces his relationship with Todd Snyder vinyl records and collectibles back to the same place he traces everything else: to the values hammered into him on a farm in the American midwest, where money was scarce and every purchase meant something. In a wide-ranging conversation with GQ for its new Profits & Losses series, Snyder moves between childhood paper rounds, corn-detasselling wages, a beloved vintage Land Cruiser he regrets selling, and a Tribeca store with a back-channel booking arrangement at one of New York’s harder tables.
From $25 Skateboards to Todd Snyder Vinyl Records
Both of Snyder’s parents grew up on farms. Money was not plentiful, and when a young Snyder wanted a skateboard, his mother’s answer was direct: when you earn your own money, you can buy what you want. He took that literally. At eight years old he got a newspaper delivery round, saved what he made, and bought the board. His estimate: somewhere around $25 to $30. It was a Roller Derby XK, the one that mattered at the time.
The first real payday came detasselling corn, work that brought in $500 a week. He was thrilled. The work ethic that followed him out of Iowa is also, by his own account, inseparable from the business advice his father gave him: work hard, innovate, but above all be nice. ‘You’d be surprised at how many people screw that last one up,’ his father would say.
The vinyl obsession arrived roughly 20 years ago. Snyder describes the appeal plainly: hearing music on record is interesting, but it also feels more tangible than streaming. His favourite record is Boxer by the National. Matt Berninger, the lead singer of the National, later reached out to Snyder because he liked his clothes, which Snyder describes as one of his proudest moments. Pokémon cards sit alongside the records as a second active collection, though Snyder does not elaborate on the scale of either.
The Liquor Store and a J.Crew Connection
Snyder’s most talked-about retail space is The Liquor Store, his store in Tribeca. According to Haberdasher, the shop sits at 235 West Broadway in Manhattan. The building has a longer history than many customers will know: as Tribeca Citizen reported, the space is a landmarked former liquor store building that previously housed a J.Crew store. That connection is not incidental. The Cut reported that Snyder used to work for J.Crew before establishing his own label, so taking over a space with that lineage carries a certain weight.
The store’s proximity to Frenchette, which Snyder describes as ‘an amazing restaurant that’s really hard to get into,’ gave his team an opening. His manager and sales staff partnered with the maître d’ at Frenchette to create an exclusive arrangement: customers who come from Todd Snyder get seated and receive a special menu, with part of the course covered by Snyder’s side. It is the kind of detail that is easy to miss but hard to replicate.
On Luxury, Loss and the Vintage Archive
Snyder’s definition of luxury is worth sitting with. He does not frame it in terms of price. ‘Luxury is a taste,’ he says, ‘something that’s acquired through time,’ coming through curiosity, travel, experience, books and architecture. A good espresso qualifies. A bespoke suit, by contrast, is something he considers overrated: you can buy vintage, he argues, and find something admired and well-made without the spend.
The object he values most is his father’s set of golf clubs, re-gripped after his father’s death more than 20 years ago and still in use. The object he most regrets losing is a rebuilt vintage Toyota Land Cruiser he sold because he had nowhere to park it in the city. He believes it has probably doubled in value since. He does not dwell on it, but it clearly still stings.
His vintage archive, held in Iowa, has grown to what he estimates at around 5,000 pieces. Collaborations, he says, are what keep the creative work breathing, and he shows no sign of slowing either the collecting or the designing. ‘We’re just getting started,’ he says, ‘as I always say.’
