TELLING STORIES

Words :: Will Jones // Images :: Lancton & Magda Siwicka

“I stood in the hospital waiting room clutching my chest and feeling pretty groggy. There were folks everywhere who looked like they’d been there much longer than me, but all of a sudden a doctor appeared and shouted, ‘Steve Edge, where’s Steve Edge?’ I jumped up and grimaced. ‘Here,’ I said, and the doctor burst out laughing. ‘Come with me’, he beamed, and waved me into a cubicle. ‘It is my last week before retirement and I just had to take your case. I thought I’d seen it all – but tell me, how did you come to get run over by an iceberg?’”
Steve Edge is a phenomenon in the elitist circles of luxury brands such as Cartier, Sunseeker Yachts and Lock & Co, milliner to the Queen. He’s a designer and branding guru who mixes with the bigwigs of British business, takes lunch with Kate Moss and hobnobs with fashion royalty such as Vivienne Westwood and Zandra Rhodes.
Edge is also an adventurer, serial swanky dresser and consummate storyteller. His iceberg incident happened while fly-fishing the raging meltwaters of the Umbra River on Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Playing the salmon of a lifetime, Edge was facing downstream when a huge chunk of ice that was floating down river hit him and broke three of his ribs. “We fished on for the rest of the week; nips of whisky kept the pain away,” he laughs. “And then there was the time a native Canadian Indian tribe honoured me with the name Eagle Dancer. You see, what happened was…” This propensity for telling stories is what Edge thrives on, and also what he believes is the secret of success when creating a winning brand. “Brands are sold on the stories they tell, the dreams they create,” he says. “If the story is memorable then the brand will achieve longevity. But you can’t just make something up; you have to discover the essence of the brand, its DNA. Then you must meld it into something that homes in on the subconscious of the buyer, a tale that they can’t resist. Think of the most successful brands in the world: Ferrari, Ralph Lauren, Tiffany’s. Each name has a story to it, a romance and mystique. Consider the most successful people – architect Zaha Hadid, Richard Branson, even the musician Prince – they are very different, but similar in the fact that each has an intriguing story and they all hold something back, keeping us guessing, yearning to know more.”
Edge can count himself among those with an unusual backstory. He was brought up in the rough streets of London, UK; his mum was an artist, his dad a meat packer. Edge struggled at school and was eventually diagnosed dyslexic. After that his parents schooled him in a rowdy house full of boisterous brothers and a collection of pets that included ferrets, a kestrel, owls and a chimpanzee called Primo.

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