An Interview With Noah Tepperberg

L.G.: And this was Conscience Point in Southampton.

N.T.: That's right. So we opened that in the summer of '99. I'd graduated college in the summer of '97, opened Conscience Point in the summer of '99. About two years after college, I opened my first place.

L.G.: And so things went pretty well there for a while.

N.T.: Yeah, we were successful for a seasonal Hamptons club. We had the club for '99, 2000, and '01. So we sold it, after the summer of '01.

L.G.: After the summer of '01. And let's not forget to mention that Conscience Point became very famous in the popular culture and will forever be associated with the immortal line, "Fuck you, white trash."

N.T.: You said it, not me.

L.G.: I didn't say it. Lizzie Grubman said it.

N.T.: Lizzie was our publicist. And she got the club a lot of publicity.

L.G.: She sure did. [On July 7, 2001, Grubman, the daughter of powerful entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman, apparently angry at being ordered by security officers to move her car, backed her dad's Mercedes S.U.V. into a crowd outside Conscience Point, injuring 16 people, then fled. She ended up serving 37 days in jail.] And that whole incident was really a tabloid melodrama. And I remember that somebody put out a crazy computer game on the internet, in which there was a Lizzie icon in a car that would be running over people and repeating that line every so often. Did you ever see that?

N.T.: Yes, I did.

L.G.: Hours and hours of fun and amusement. But, in any event, did that whole thing hurt or help business? Or was it business neutral-or what?

N.T.: I really don't want to talk about the whole thing. Can we just leave it in peace? [Laughs]

L.G.: We're off the actual incident now, but I'm just wondering what the impact of it was.

N.T.: Well, I just don't want to be quoted about that. I never do think about that situation.

L.G.: Not even to the extent whether it had any impact on your business?

N.T.: Well, yeah, it's hard to say. It had a small impact.

L.G.: But let me just stipulate here that I know Lizzie, and I like her, and she's very good at what she does. Obviously, that was not a great moment in her life. But she seems to have recovered from that and seems to be doing well and is a mom.

N.T.: Business was different after that, that's for sure. There were only a couple of weeks left in the summer-and then we sold the club. We sold it after that summer.

L.G.: So then what?

N.T.: In between the opening and the closing of Conscience Point, we opened a restaurant called Luahn, a restaurant-lounge which we had for a year. And then after Luahn closed, in 2000, we started Strategic Group. We had basically stopped promoting, except for maybe one club, and stopped almost all of the club-land activity and started Strategic Group. At the time, we had two employees and we had an office above Luahn, a one-bedroom apartment. It was Jason and me and two others, and our first clients were Guinness beer and Smirnoff Ice and Stuff magazine. And we started doing events. We started doing the idea of "influencers" for marketing-getting noteworthy people, or influencers, to try products, and getting those sightings mentioned in the newspapers. You know, figuring out a way to take these brands and kind of make them cool, helping these clients navigate the world of nightlife and fashion and just popular culture. And we saw that as a really amazing sort of opportunity. At the time, there were not many people doing it.

L.G.: This was in 2000, so this was a relatively unpopulated business at that point.

N.T.: Yeah, there weren't any real agencies doing what we do. We moved into a much bigger office in early 2001. We hadn't really been doing much work in the club business for a few months. And then, kind of randomly, some friends of ours came to us and asked us to get involved with a new bar that they wanted to open. Jay and I went and we looked at it. It was tough not being in the nightlife business. The phones would ring every night, great people wanting a place to go, and we'd have no place to take them. So we kind of got back into the business after getting out of it for a few months. And we took over a place for which we actually came up with the name. It was called Suite 16. Jay and I did a management deal where we ran the place, we operated it. And we created Suite 16. It was on 16th Street and Eighth Avenue. It was right around the time that Bungalow 8 and Lotus opened in Chelsea. It was a small bar, a small renovation. It had been a Re-bar. And we opened this place—it was a huge runaway success. I mean, this place for three years was one of the best and hottest places to go-between 2001 and 2004.

L.G.: And what made it so hot?

N.T.: We had a great crowd, tons of celebrities, tons of girls. It was a beautiful crowd there. The energy was great. We had all these wonderful nights. Monday nights, Samantha Ronson moved her karaoke night from Moomba to our club. Tuesday night, we had these really great promotions, a really edgy downtown thing. And Thursday was, like, a line around the corner. The weekends were great. I mean, that's the club where Britney [Spears] and Justin [Timberlake] first ran into each other after they broke up! And we used to have—literally every star in town would come there. It was a very cool bar-lounge.