Exploring Life & Business with Isaiah Pheiffer of White Piano Group

Hi Isaiah , so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?

I didn’t grow up around design; my first real exposure, though I didn’t know it at the time, was watching Allen Iverson play basketball and trying to emulate how he dressed. To me, he was the coolest person I could think of. At eleven years old, I spent all my time drawing sneakers I imagined he would wear, unknowingly laying the foundation of my 10,000 hours for a life dedicated to design.

In 2017, I received a partial scholarship to study apparel management at FIDM. By my second year, I realized the education I wanted wouldn’t come from the classroom, so I kind of built it myself. I persistently reached out to a celebrity stylist who was working with top musicians and, after earning her trust, became her full-time men’s assistant. That period immersed me in a very high level of the industry; I found myself flying to Vegas for red carpet award shows, working late nights on star-studded music video sets, and collaborating alongside some of the biggest artists in the world.

When COVID started, I re-evaluated. Styling revealed the surface of luxury, but I knew I was meant to design products, not just present them. So I took a shot, earned a scholarship to study fashion design in Milan, and moved shortly after.

In Milan, I met my co-founder and CEO, Adam Perry, who had also sharpened his teeth in the same celebrity fashion world I had been living within. Over time, we worked with major fashion houses on multiple projects together, curating shows, styling runways, and casting models. Through shared discipline and healthy competition, we formed both a creative partnership and a close friendship. It became clear that we needed to build something of our own, something that extended beyond fashion alone. That vision became White Piano Group.

While mapping our next steps for the business, we returned to Los Angeles with a couture collection that debuted in September 2024. For months leading up to the show, work began coming in organically, designing and developing products for artists, companies, and organizations across industries. All of a sudden, we were designing children’s toys, apparel, innovative packaging, and corporate brand identities. It became clear that we were always meant to be a design and product development firm. It allowed us to be our most creative, collaborate with other incredible companies, and have a more positive global impact. A few months after the show, a friend who was working with Ye at the time reached out after seeing our design work, and we were blessed with the opportunity to collaborate on an incredible project while continuing to build the firm.

Today, White Piano Group is a global design practice. Internally, we call our approach “life design”, the belief that if something requires the human senses to experience, we have the team and process to design and build it. Since then, we’ve worked with world-class musicians, award-winning wine and spirits brands, major fashion brands, and innovative healthcare companies, designing products, brands, and spaces.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

It has certainly not been a smooth road. Luckily, however, I don’t know one entrepreneur who has had a smooth road. How boring would that be? For everything to go right and exactly as planned, always? Easy to idealize, but how would anything unique occur? In the rough times is when we’ve come up with some of our most creative ideas, ideas about where to head, what to do, and products that could launch.

Without the rocky road, nothing would get shaken up, and things need to be shaken up. It’s like stepping out into the sunshine in the morning, blinding and unclear at first, only to adapt to the new conditions and see clearer than before.

Some of the struggles along the way have been having remote members of the team, where it can be difficult to inspire and motivate when not being in the same room or space. Having a common workplace is such a force multiplier. Ideas can be shared, and there’s a focused energy to feed off of, with everyone around you working like mad.

With members being remote, this is a challenge we’ve had to learn to adjust for by keeping engaging and inspiring conversations more frequent with those members who are more or less isolated.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?

White Piano Group is a global design and product development firm with a vision as expansive as we can imagine it to be: to orchestrate the world’s new symphony. Just as a symphony brings together diverse instruments to create harmony, we unite people, ideas, and disciplines across industries and cultures to create experiences, products, and systems that work together. This reflects our belief that design, or the lack of it, shapes the world, and that thoughtful, coordinated action can help solve the greatest challenges life on Earth faces.

Our team’s origins span Italy, India, Canada, South Africa, Ecuador, and the United States, bringing together a powerful blend of cultural perspectives and beliefs. With experience across multiple industries, this diversity shapes our collective viewpoint and offers a rare global lens on the world, its challenges, and its design opportunities.

We don’t just design how things look; we design how they work, how they’re made, and how they live in the world. Our ongoing goal is to take on and design for the world’s most meaningful challenges, collaborate with exceptional minds, and create positive impact at scale. From cities of the future and urbanization to education and world hunger, philanthropy sits at the core of our mission.

Design is a process of conscious decisions that shape the world’s future, one we will all experience. That responsibility is always at the forefront of our minds.

What were you like growing up?

Growing up, I was highly competitive, like many kids with a bigger, taller, and probably more talented older brother to keep up with. I played nearly every sport before eventually settling on football and basketball in high school. In sports I was never afraid to speak up and often served as a captain on my teams. Outside the locker room, however, I was far more internalized, spending most of my free time sketching and ideating.

One of my earliest friends in kindergarten was an exceptional drawer, and I remember how much it frustrated me that he could look at something and draw it well, at least as well as a kindergartener could, while I couldn’t. I earned solid grades throughout school without ever needing to study particularly hard, but that early frustration pushed me to spend much of my class time learning how to draw, determined to surpass him. I remember being fascinated at a young age by the idea of translating what the eye sees, or what the mind imagines, into something tangible through a pencil and a hand.

For most of my childhood, my interests revolved around sports, personal style, and drawing. Over time, sports fell down the list as drawing and design began to consume all my other hobbies and interests.

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