While most of my interviews with experts start with my having a grasp of my column’s direction and a relevant list of questions, my favorite interviews jettison off to lands unimagined, unexpected and as yet unexplored. Such was my conversation with Edward Leaman, chief brand officer for California Closets, and a continuing studies instructor of brand building at Stanford University. Here I thought Leaman and I would talk generally about, oh, the ways the world of organizing have changed since California Closets came on the scene in the late 1970s, and a bit about the brand’s five-year-old annual magazine “Ideas of Order,” which just published The Belonging Issue.
Instead, Leaman opened the interview with a monologue about, what else? Love. “Do you know what standing in love means?” he asks dumbfounded me. “We all know what falling in love means and what being in love means, but standing in love is when you stand with the person, for them, as they go through their life.
” I have no earthly notion what this has to do with home organizing, but I’m interested, so I let Leaman take the reins. Somehow his commentary on love segues to a discussion of the feeling of belonging, how we are supposed to feel at home. And that morphs imperceptibly into our relationship with our belongings, what we surround ourselves with, which loosely, though not overtly, ties to systems to store and display these belongings.
Ahh, I get it. “That feeling of belonging starts with makin.
