POETS' Founder Gino Iannucci Talks Skateboarding and Honing his Process

With its cobblestone streets and nautical views of the East River, Manhattan’s Seaport District is an anomaly. Flanked by high rises and financial buildings, it calls to mind the quaint port towns of Long Island or even coastal New England. Even with its tourist attractions, it feels slow. When I meet POETS founder and professional skateboarder Gino Iannucci there, I’m reminded that skateboarding was one of the only reasons I’d been to the Seaport save a random dinner or occasional free concert at the pier. With several spots in its proximity including the Brooklyn Banks and a lack of foot traffic and moving vehicles, the Seaport and its wooden benches topped with angle iron became a hub in the late-’90s into the early 2000s. 

“You remember how it used to smell skating down here,” Iannucci says about the fetid odor that would waft from the fish markets over to the benches, especially during the summer. “I always liked that it was quiet down here—it was less stressful.”

Along with working on POETS’ collections and mining ideas for new products, Iannucci spent most of 2020 working on capsules with JSP, including a bold, luxury flip on the Padmore & Barnes P500 shoe. In a way, working during the pandemic independently and free of the industry’s antiquated model of trade shows, tight release schedules, and seasonal production, POETS can breathe and move organically. There’s less of an emphasis on planning each line or collection based on time, but rather feel and inspiration. A vintage boxing poster or scene from a movie could be a reference for a T-Shirt graphic or the start of a larger deep dive into involved cut-and-sew pieces such as the Tinker Jacket the brand produced, or the Tomato, a piece handmade in Bergamo, Italy as homage to the movie Rocky. The disparate calls to Rocky, hockey, and the oddly surreal stop-action animation of Davey and Goliath all find a way to coalesce into the POETS aesthetic and make the pieces personal and fluid, rather than rigid or overthought; something Iannucci is aware of.

“I remember going to Los Angeles and seeing Huf’s (Keith Hufnagel’s) office and how he was just working all the time,” he says. “It was so proper and he was so professional but I realize I can’t really work that way. (Having a brand) It’s almost like skating. If you aren’t working on a video or project, it can be really unstructured and to be honest, sometimes I need deadlines because I can get lazy (laughs). With POETS, I don’t feel pressured that every line has to have some detailed piece that takes me months to source and figure out. I don’t search that stuff out, I just do it when I’m inspired. I could reach out to people but I’d rather just let collaborations happen on their own. Sometimes I find myself thinking, ‘Should I be getting up and working on this for five hours or whatever,’ but I’m just not that kind of person.”