If you weren’t there to experience the cultural impact of The Madbury Club, you might not even know it happened. Today, if you type madburyclub.com into a web browser, you’ll be redirected to an Indonesian gambling site.
Sure, you could piece together Madbury lore from their dormant Instagram, scattered videos, or archived Hypebeast articles. Or, you could search for their alums on LinkedIn at the likes of Jordan Brand, Wieden + Kennedy, and Aimé Leon Dore.
But to truly understand what made The Madbury Club special—from its launch in 2010 to its abrupt end in 2018—you really had to be there.
Led by OG influencer Phillip T. Annand, The Madbury Club laid the blueprint for a modern content house: a blog that became a creative agency, then a lifestyle brand, then a full-blown production studio. Since Annand didn’t care for labels, he called his crew a “Dysfunctional Studio Experiment.”
They were a small, eclectic gang of like-minded, get-shit-done twentysomethings who went from posting in streetwear forums to shooting T-shirts and sneakers with borrowed DSLRs to producing campaigns for Nike, Gap, Timberland, Microsoft, and other brands in pursuit of “Madbury cool.” Along the way, Madbury achieved what every millennial dreamed of: to make dope shit with their friends and get paid for it.
The Madbury Club rose at a crossroads in internet culture. By 2010, hip-hop and streetwear had fully converged. Print media was fading, the blog era was booming, and a new movement was just beginning: the dawn of Instagram ushered in the age of DIY content and influencer clout. Madbury sat at the center of that Venn diagram, slow-cooking quality online content while putting their individual personalities at the forefront. The spark of their youthful creativity attracted fans of all kinds, from Fortune 500 companies to aspirational kids to one Virgil Abloh.
But what happens when your dream job starts to feel like a job? As Madbury’s brand deals got bigger, so, too, did the pressure and the obligations. And the more creative control they relinquished, the further Annand felt they got away from what drew people to their work in the first place. A tale as old as the internet.
And yet, the Madbury influence can still be felt today, from the stunt drops of MSCHF to the free-spirited energy of AMP. As Annand describes it now, Madbury was a “weird, strange adopted family against the industry.” We gathered Annand and most of Madbury’s core team—each well past 30 and still largely working in creative fields—to reflect on the rise and fall of The Madbury Club, and what it all meant.
THE BIRTH OF MADBURY
Hailing from an ordinary New Jersey suburb, Phillip Annand grew up in the golden age of streetwear. A rabid fan, he regularly posted fit pics on the Hypebeast forum (handle: LOCHNESS) and started his own brand, The Award Tour, while in high school.
As a freshman at Rutgers University, Annand began formulating the plan for his next big idea: The Madbury Club. It was to be “an online publication which is hopefully gonna redefine the way people look at content online,” as he said at the time. Annand hit up his friend Ellington Hammond—a fellow Jersey native and streetwear enthusiast—and the wheels started turning.
PHILLIP ANNAND (founder, Madbury Club): Ellington was the only other person I knew who was into streetwear and sneakers. I went to him first and was talking about some kind of magazine. We got into a groove on it and we were like, “Yo, let’s just try to shoot some photos of the shit we like.”
Chance encounters with kindred spirits brought new members to Annand’s crew. When he put out a Facebook request to see if anyone had a sewing machine he could borrow, he ended up at the home of Vinny Picone.
VINNY PICONE (founding member): He came to my parents’ house and was sitting at my kitchen table while my mom was sewing tags into his Award Tour tees. That day, Phil basically explained the idea for The Madbury Club to me.
Annand met another soon-to-be Madbury regular at a Rutgers club volleyball tournament …
BRYAN STEVENSON (founding member): It was really kind of a chance thing. I had Bape socks on. And you know how the world is. Like, “Oh, you got the same kind of taste.”
PA: I think I had [Nike Air] Yeezys on and he had on Bape socks. So I was like, “Yo, if you know about this, you should try to write something.”
… and another at Best Buy the day Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released. The Madbury team would ultimately grow to 10 people.
MATTY YU (Studio Producer): I had on my white G-Shock, a gray Bape long-sleeve shirt, Naked & Famous denim, and “Shadow” Jordan 1s. I was like: “This is the fit.” I got to the register and it was Phil, Ellington, and Vinny. They had Yeezys on—who the hell has these in the middle of New Jersey? Phil turns around and he’s like, “Hey man, can I take a picture of you with the Kanye album?” I didn’t ask any questions because I was so shy, I had no confidence back then. So Vinny comes around with his Nikon D1—it was like a five-second thing. He snapped the photo and then after, he was like, “I don’t know if you’ve heard about this thing called Madbury Club.”
HYUN KIM (Executive Producer): Me and Hawaii Mike [Salman] used to have [streetwear magazine] LTD, we had this great space. And Phil used to come around—he was maybe 18 or 19—and just hang around. Then, the Haiti earthquake happened [in 2010] and he made these hats for the Award Tour that he was selling to donate to charity. And I just remember thinking, ‘That’s a little different,’ because not a lot of kids his age in this world are really like that. And we just kept hanging out.
VP: There was never any kind of formal invitation. We never felt like we needed to bring somebody inIt was very organic—everybody just kind of naturally flowed in.
THE INVITATION VIDEO (JUNE 2010)
As the group started to round out, it was time to formally introduce The Madbury Club to the world. The announcement came in the form of a two-minute video in which a mysterious card is handed to tastemakers like Marcus Troy, 40oz. Van, Andrew Chen, Joe La Puma, and Ouigi Theodore. The card read “Invitation Extended” on one side and “Welcome to The Madbury Club” on the other.
VP: The video was done by this guy named Kellen Dangler. I wasn’t even considering video at that point.
PA: We put it on Twitter and Tumblr and, I think because I had been running around the city for a couple of years, when people saw it, it just kind of built up a little bit. I think Frank Ocean [reblogged] it and it did something like 100,000 notes.
MARCUS ARMAN (Language Designer): I was a forum kid just hanging out on Hypebeast Forums and ISS [Instyle Shoes] and I saw a video on one of them where they were basically handing out this membership card and I was like, “That looks fucking cool. I wonder what it is?” It instantly sort of intrigued me.
BS: That was the formal version [of the launch]. Internally, that’s a different story because it was definitely a thing before that.
The Madbury Club hit the ground running. There were no boundaries to what they could create—and no official roles or responsibilities to pigeonhole them.
BS: It really started out as a streetwear thing, grabbing stuff from our closets to shoot lookbooks. So I did a lot of styling, then it blossomed to cultural journalism, writing, photography, filmmaking, and image-making.
PA: At some point, it shifted from doing shit literally in the guest bedroom in my parent’s house or on campus at Rutgers to going up to the city and shooting more editorial, bigger seasonal stuff.
VP: One of the first things Madbury did was this big Autumn style guide editorial that was really meticulously designed to feel like spreads. And we called them spreads.
VP: Our main decree was originality. So every photo that we took, every word that we wrote, and every layout that was designed was done by one of us, or in collaboration between us in some capacity—and we did whatever the hell we wanted.
BS: We were young men full of energy and somehow, we got stuff done. I wish I could say there was a method, but it was just madness. The way it all started was very organic and it just always was.
HK: We never did any of these things before. A lot of us were just making it up as we went along. We were just trying to do it in a way that was a lot of fun and everyone did get a chance to figure out how to do everything.
BS: It was just having that power to make our own image and tell our own story using whatever Internet tools we had.
MATTHEW TRAMMELL (Madbury Music Writer/Editor): Everybody was throwing ideas out for everything and trying to show up to everything that they could.
MY: There was a lot of experimentation. I was really inspired by Vinny, so I actually bought a cheap DSLR and was like, “Hey Vinny, if you don’t want to shoot today, just tell me what I have to put my settings on and I’ll shoot it.”
MA: We headed out to Belize together and we shot a video and looking back, it’s real loose, right? We’re just like, let’s go out there, have some fun, shoot some things, and figure it out.
PA: We came back, edited it, and were like, “Yo, I don’t even know what to do with this shit.” I feel like if we had doubled down and went more in that direction, we probably would have burned out faster. We were basically trying to become YouTubers, but we didn’t understand.
HK: There was a lot of learning to be done during the process and sometimes learning can be very painful.
Although every Madbury member wore multiple hats, Annand was the clear leader.
MT: Phil was wise beyond his years. He just had a sense of how to lead multiple people and work outside of his skill as an artist or graphic designer or creative filmmaker. He knew how to apply all of these personalities and how to delegate. He was always doing more than anyone else. That was crucial and very powerful leadership. We were all in school, finishing papers and shit. He’s re-coding the site with the programmer because something was broken, staying up all night, and firing off emails to us.
VP: It would be 2:00 a.m. and Phil would text me like, “Yo, what are you doing in the morning? So-and-so just sent us this product. Are you down to come back to campus to shoot?” We’d find an interesting spot on campus, shoot product real quick, go back to Phil’s place, load the photos on the computer, edit them in real time, and he would start working on the spread. We were intentional about everything, but there wasn’t this dreaded amount of overthought.
PA: It was a lot. I was definitely doing the kind of magazine-editor-type role. We would have these massive email threads going with 12 of us on there, just like, “Yo, I need all the shit by tomorrow morning, send me whatever you got.” Then I would just stay up all night, do a couple days’ worth of work, and put it all together. By the time we all moved to New York, then it was like “OK, now we all live together, we work together,” and that’s when the agency work and the strategy side came in.
As the brand’s popularity reached new heights, they knew they couldn’t rest on their laurels—they had to continue to innovate.
PETER HIRONAKA (Web Developer, Producer): I was in the media department at Wieden + Kennedy at the time, but I’ve always done web development as a hobby. They were having some issues with their website because they were doing bigger editorials. I reached out saying I’d love to help out, I’m a big fan, it would be cool to work with you guys on the site. That relaunch was huge.
PA: We started trying to do more editorial, bigger seasonal stuff right around when Twitter was hitting an upswing, then Tumblr, and we started to understand it a little bit. All of a sudden, we had editors from magazines we grew up reading, retweeting, or checking it out and hitting us up. So you kind of get this self-awareness like, “Oh, people are paying attention.” But it still felt like it was really for us.
MT: One of my personal memories is Virgil Abloh being like, “Madbury is the standard,” or something like that.
VP: The coolest messages we got would be from kids, like, “I’m reading this spread in class right now. I should be paying attention but I’d give anything to leave this classroom and go do this with my friends.” That’s still the craziest thing to me.
BS: It was pure freedom. That was when Madbury was at its strongest.
Meanwhile, Madbury Music carved out its own lane as a go-to rap blog. An interview with a young Tyler, the Creator around the release of Goblin was a notable turning point.
MT: That was when I feel like people really started to take us seriously. It was really nice for me, personally, to meet an artist at that stage in his career and have a conversation about his goals, then see those goals happen. From then it was like, “OK, that’s what that looks like when that happens.”
PA: I remember we did this thing for the Watch the Throne release, really hyping it. It must’ve made its way to a couple of rap forums or something. I think people thought we had some exclusive that we didn’t. It was a totally different era of analytics, pre-likes and shit, but I remember we were doing so many pageviews, like hundreds of thousands. We couldn’t even understand where it was coming from at the time.
BS: Everything started on the blog. The voice part was definitely something I was most passionate about. Early on it was really about us having a voice, especially for our music reviews, that really resonated with people.
PA: Once we started doing more with music, that’s when we started getting meetings with Noah and Joe at Complex, or people from The Source, or other established New York rap print media. Brooklyn Circus paid for us to go to Coachella [in 2011] and we did a whole Madbury Club x Coachella microsite just to talk about it. That was the first time Kanye headlined, so that was a cultural breaking point. That was when our bubble really expanded because we started posting multiple times a day, bigger spreads and big interviews, more like a traditional magazine.
HK: It was a super innocent time in their lives, too, because they were all in college and had never seen anything like that. I just remember Ellington being like, “Yo, is that Angela Simmons in the VIP?” Just super excited.
The site was humming and the audience was growing. As with anything that captures a young, plugged-in crowd, brands soon came knocking.
PA: I have to give a lot of credit to Hyun and Hawaii Mike. They really just straight up explained to me how shit worked that I just hadn’t ever really thought through. They were like, “You don’t do this for free. This is how this world works.”
HK: When I came in, I was like, “What are you trying to do?” Because they had this site, the guys were really talented. Are you trying to make money? Phil was like, “I’m just trying to have fun, just trying to do cool things with my friends.”
PA: Timberland gave us $5,000 to do a video of some boots they had coming out. We did this little video in my guest bedroom in an afternoon. That was kind of eye-opening. [Our] first big campaign was the Puma CHAZEBRALOPE campaign [in 2013].
BS: When we did the CHAZEBRALOPE project, it just felt like we had this crazy synergy around where everyone was at. The kind of thing that we wanted to do, everyone was on board, gung ho. We were creating stories outside of the actual demands of the client. That was a big one.
PA: That was the first agency-like creative work we did. That rollout was a pretty big one because people weren’t really doing that kind of content with all these different corridors to roll out a product like that. I think that that kind of proved what we could do and then brands really started reaching out. At some point, Hyun brought us in to pitch something to Footaction.
HK: ] I told [the Madbury crew] we need to put together a deck and they were like, “What’s a deck?” [Laughs.]
MY: We were walking into corporate pitching for business. These dudes were doing it without a college degree. They were skipping class and sitting in a room, going up against Team Epiphany for the Footaction account, talking about a $20,000-a-month retainer. This was the world to us.
Once they secured the Footaction account, Madbury’s business activities accelerated, which increased the money and travel—but curtailed the freedom.
PA: When we got that contract, that’s when I stopped going to school and started to focus exclusively on Madbury.
VP: I think I still have a photocopy of the first real check I got at my parent’s house. That was never necessarily supposed to become our livelihood, but like my friend Marty once said: “Money is not the motivation, but it is the confirmation.”
PA: Pretty soon after that, we got a few Nike contracts running Nike Sportswear and Nike Basketball’s Instagram accounts. This is basically when Instagram just came out, which was a game-changer.
VP: We got to go to Hong Kong for Native footwear. Billy, Matty, and I went to Italy for Diadora when we were doing a lot of work for a store called Ubiq in Philly.
PA: We went on a shoot, working with Wieden + Kennedy, actual agency people and one person is like, “I’m the strategist and I only do that.” Or, “I’m the copywriter and I only do this.” We’re learning this in real time and we’re baffled by this. But we kept getting jobs and opportunities because we were young and we looked cool, like the audience they’re trying to sell to.
VP: The allure to keep making money is attractive, but it’s a little bit easier to lose sight of why we got to where we were. It started to feel more like an agency. On paper, we were an agency for certain brands, but we never really chose to call ourselves that.
HK: I feel like there’s been moments where I’m like, “Damn, that’s when I killed the fun.” [Laughs.] Money started coming in then you’re not just doing it for the love at the time.
PA: The clothes were an afterthought. We literally just made clothes for ourselves. We used to wear them on shoots or when we’d go do brand work, and then we started sending them to our clients at the end of the year. The drops at the very end started to hit, when we actually started trying, so people really think we had a [clothing] line. But we really just did one big drop at the end and made a bunch of money. And we’re like, “Fuck, this is so much work.” Because we shipped and fulfilled everything ourselves. We probably left like a couple million dollars on the table with those Madbury “Bullshit” sweatpants. We made 300 pairs. And I’m saying this in the most humble way possible.
With more clients coming on board, The Madbury Club hit an inflection point. Would they pivot into a full-time creative agency and abandon their editorial mission?
VP: There was a lot of purity around what we were doing—there wasn’t a lot of influence on us. It genuinely started from what we were interested in and what we thought would resonate. And then people approach you to do it for them. You don’t realize it, but you’re turning your interest into a business. It’s really attractive when a brand comes to you and goes, “We saw that thing you did and we really like you, can you do it for us?” That sounds great, but the more you get into it, you have to do the thing their way, which is inherently no longer your thing.
MY: We were all making six figures at one point in like 2017, 2018. To accumulate that much money, that was the influencer before influencers. I think we got a little bit off track because we became more interested in creating things for others before we were ready to create things for ourselves. It felt like it was losing authenticity.
PA: We would get together for a long weekend retreat to try and figure out what we were doing. Goals had probably changed throughout, but a consistent one from the beginning was probably to not have jobs. We were on some pirate shit.
MA: I don’t think we ever really left those conversations fully on the same page. Some people thought we should be a film studio. Some thought we should be this media conglomerate. But I think that was the magic of Madbury, that existential question of “Who is Madbury?” We never wanted to be thrown in a box. We just wanted to continue having fun and ducking the responsibilities of real life.
VP: Client work became a little bit of a contentious thing. There’s a part of me that is still curious as to what it would’ve done for us if we had said no to some stuff and made ourselves a little bit uncomfortable in terms of income, shutting down client work and focusing more on original ideas.
PA: I remember at some point when we had the M158 warehouse in Brooklyn. It was 5,000 square feet and you went upstairs to see cubicles. Everyone had a desk and shit. We had CEOs coming in and treating us like responsible adults. My whole impetus for doing this was to avoid becoming a responsible adult. The last two years, it really expanded and we did a fucking internship program. That’s when I really became a boss and I was like, “I gotta get the fuck out of here.”
PH: At one point, we were all going to move to LA and it only ended up being Phil and I.
HK: When Phil moved to LA [in 2018], I think it hurt people on a personal level. Like, “Why are you leaving us?” I think for him, it was honestly just to get away. Most of these guys were still in their early to late 20s. It was just really hard to balance the business, the art, and the commerce.
Ultimately, all good things must come to an end. On December 29, 2018, The Madbury Club made their final video, announcing their dissolution: “The dorm room dreams were achieved. The dropouts got the job done and never compromised along the way.”
PA: I was done, because from age 18 to 28, I had already done so much corporate brand work, sort of unintentionally. I was just excited by the prospect of not being in that world any longer.
BS: I think people were ready to start going in their own direction. I was curious about my own path outside of Madbury, trying to do other filmmaking. It was just sort of an organic end.
PH: I really wanted this thing with Madbury to be it. Honestly, it would be so cool to just work with those guys now. That was the dream, to keep going for as long as we can, make as much money as we want, and live this free lifestyle. But when it’s 100% production work all the time, it’s pretty grueling to manage as a business.
VP: I’m still kind of in mourning. I miss the camaraderie daily. I would almost liken it to being an athlete. You get to do the thing that not a lot of people do and that people admire, and you do it with your team. I heard somebody say that athletes die two deaths: the day they actually die and the day they stop playing. And to me, that’s kind of what it felt like.
BS: It was a brotherhood. We were super close. It was a fraternity and it leaked into everything from home life to work life.
Even though the Madbury team split up and went their separate ways, the magic of their brotherhood lives long in the memory. Their joyful, adventurous, and earnest spirit inspired many to pursue their passions.
MA: Phil had a really sharp vision. I would consider him a visionary. It felt like a team of star athletes, a super team from the blogging days. It was constantly like a fountain of inspiration and you have people who were just willing to do anything. People who were just plugged in immediately and like, “Yo, let’s figure this out.”
PA: The more we did it, the longer things went on, the easier it became to manage. Everyone was just super talented and you could see it by where everyone is now and what they’re doing. I think I was just willing to try fast.
BS: I think the idea of an organic brotherhood, especially from Black men who make content about their lived experiences, is something that speaks volumes. Not that we necessarily influence someone like an RDC or AMP, but there are spiritual links. But that kind of fraternity aspect, I think it’s something we had the blueprint for. Everyone has their group of bros, but now it’s very possible to stream your way into an empire. It was a beautiful, beautiful experiment.
MY: The jaded side could really come out here, but I think there’s a few examples where the Madbury brand is probably more outwardly influential through names of certain brands like 18 East: recycling fabric, stitching them together, vinyl pressing text onto the bag, adding ripstop straps as handles. Phil and everyone at Madbury had such a deep visual library. I think you had people shooting their lookbooks similar to Madbury, like when talking about the layering and when you look at that evolution from streetwear to menswear in 2013-2014.
HK: When I joined Madbury, on a personal level, it was something that I really needed because, being older and having been in New York and having worked at different publications and a little bit of marketing—you stay long enough and you just end up being bitter, jaded. Being around them kind of reminded me that this is awesome.
MA: The process of what we were doing, the end product ofwhat we ended up shooting, all of it was just beautiful. It always told a story like, you can be a kid who has no idea what you’re doing, but you love something, are a fan of something, and are just trying to figure out how to express that. I think if that’s inspired any kid today, that’s so cool.
PA: I’m grateful we closed the doors abruptly when we did, because I feel like things don’t end anymore. It burned hot and then we disappeared. It left the door open for everybody to go do the amazing things they’re doing now. I think that’s the coolest legacy of Madbury.
Where They Are Now:
- Philip Annand (@philiptannand) – Founder of Heavy Form Works and High Wizardry
- Bryan Stevenson (@yanville) – Filmmaker
- Vinny Picone (@vinnypicone) – Photographer/Filmmaker
- Matty Yu (@matty_yu) – Head of Marketing Operations, Hinge
- Marcus Arman (@marcus_arman) – Global Director of Brand Concepts & Innovation, Jordan Brand
- Hyun Kim (@hyun.wk) – Founder of Marketing Consulting Agency DNST
- Matthew Trammell (@matttrammmellllll) – Writer, GQ
- Peter Hironaka (@peterhironaka) – Web Developer