Less Hulk, More Bruce Lee

Jager, who was and still is obsessed with snowboarding, saw he had a chance to not only help invent a culture but also crank his own creative dial to 11. "You can look back and say it was experimentation and challenging the paradigm of traditional identity, which is cool," he says. "But the reality is, at the time we were asking, What can we get away with? Why can't we run an image of Charles Manson with a Burton logo on his forehead? Why can't we take a page out of Madonna's Sex book and make it a poster and T-shirt? Who gives a s--t if Warner Bros. calls us?"

Despite its growing status as a cult hero among boarders, JDK was hemorrhaging nearly $60,000 a year in working with Burton, leaving it to rely on early clients such as Converse to help underwrite Jager's "snowboard-design addiction." Not that JDK's design counsel to even that old-school client was remotely traditional: Jager worked with Baysie Wightman and DeeDee Gordon (prototypical cool hunters who helped inspire Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point) to pull dead products--the Dr. J, for example, and the One Star--out of the archives and repackage them with a retro-modern look. They launched a guerrilla campaign that plucked New York hipsters off the street, photographed them in a Larry Clark (Kids) documentary style, and then manipulated the images to create jazzy Blue Note--inspired album covers that became the centerpieces of the ad campaign. The early years also included work for an obscure local division of IBM, a relationship that eventually produced a JDK classic: a postmodern take on the iconic Paul Rand pictogram poster (an eye next to a bee, followed by an M--get it?), which transformed the bee into an animated, chrome, Terminator-esque avatar for a Web redesign.

The Anti-McKinsey

In many ways, JDK defies tidy definition. It is not a pure design firm or management consultancy or ad agency so much as it is a combination of the three. "As a consultancy, it is the anti-McKinsey," says Burton marketing chief Bryan Johnston. "It is not trying to run a company based on mathematical data or distilled versions of consumer logic. Michael utilizes all the hard information available, plus he has a deep understanding of culture--pop and everything else--that can't be taught."

The JDK crew is a bizarro creative hit squad that helps clients zero in on their psychographic id.

Asked for his influences, Jager responds with a list that runs from the Amsterdam-based Droog Design Collective to German artist Joseph Beuys (who saw society as a single great work of art) to eco-design hero Victor Papanek and former Clash singer Joe Strummer. "Hell, influences--they're endless," he says. "Influences rush in when you invite them."

More than anything, the JDK crew is a bizzaro creative hit squad that helps clients zero in on (and at times unearth) their psychographic id. "It's like we've given them the keys to our car and asked them to drive a bit because we're a little lost," says Duke Stump, chief marketing officer for Seventh Generation, an eco-conscious products maker and JDK client. Once the brand GPS is reset, JDK digs in to amplify its identity through a design offensive that covers the industrial design of the product itself, its online presence, advertising strategy, in-store merchandising, and trade-show displays.

But while JDK puts each client through a similar analysis, the end result is not some cool-pill-induced, cookie-cutter "personality." JDK looks instead to peel back the layers that may be concealing some inner kernel of zeitgeisty appeal. For backpack manufacturer Eastpak, it commissioned a Roman Coppola (son of Francis, brother of Sofia) video: The spot shows a backpack perched on a suburban mailbox, with a 1970s topless Ford Bronco barreling down on it. In the backseat, a teenage girl wielding a baseball bat delivers the pack a brutal thwack. Then the Bronco screeches to a halt, punches into reverse, and runs back over the bag. The passenger then picks it up, the Bronco burns rubber, and it's off to school. With Levi's, JDK invited creative directors from around the world for a two-day "collaboratory" summit in New York. One afternoon, a creative director from London was smashing jeans covered in plaster on the sidewalk and got a vision for a new way to distress denim; because a fabric specialist from Italy was there as well, they were able to discuss whether it was even possible. "It's amazing how many times the process we use gets people in the same room who have never met or only know each other from email," Jager says. "Together, they had an idea and figured out a way to pull it off."