Danny Seo: Environmental Lifestyle Expert

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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All That Glitters Is Green (cont.)

APPEARING GENUINE—wait, rewind: appearing legitimate—is everything in the world of eco-hipster marketing. And Danny Seo's legitimacy can be traced back to his birthday: April 22, 1977—Earth Day. Hard to get more auspicious than that. It's nothing less than a sign, the entry point for a tale of ambition that Danny tells with such droll self-awareness that when he veers into seriously geeky concern for some enviro issue, or drops names faster than Liz Smith, you stick with him.

And why not? His legend's got legs.

"I didn't want to be an activist anymore. I kept feeling there was something more I could contribute. I was thinking, is it me, or does this green-chic lifestyle have potential to it?"

Take, for instance, the Genesis component. On the eve of his 12th birthday, Danny watched Morton Downey Jr. shred PETA cofounder Ingrid Newkirk on his talk show. The next day, at his birthday party, he returned his friends' gifts and informed them that he was starting an environmental group for kids. The only gift he wanted was their support.

It worked. Danny started Earth 2000, which over the next six years grew to 25,000 members and actually accomplished a few things, like saving a forest area outside Reading from real estate development, initiating boycotts of seafood from the Faroe Islands (where whaling is still practiced), and getting Eddie Bauer and the Limited to stop selling fur. ("I hear it's back," he chuckles.)

By 18, he had dissolved Earth 2000, but his days as an activist weren't over. He skipped college and set to work on two books, Generation React: Activism for Beginners (1997) and Heaven on Earth: 15-Minute Miracles to Change the World (1999), while holding down a day job as a lobbyist for Save America's Forests, a legislative organization that works on forest-protection bills. He lived simply, figuring out ways to soup up his apartment, or those of his friends, with recycled furniture, thrift-store finds, and minimalist utilitarian objets that looked cool and had an environmental slant. The more he focused on his home life, the more his budding career as a professional activist began to bore him.

"The weird part was, I didn't want to be an activist anymore. I kept feeling like I was wasting my time, like there was something more that I could contribute, something bigger?" he says, that little Orange Julius interrogatory uptick creeping in. "I was thinking about that, and I go, Is it me or does, like, this green-chic lifestyle have potential to it?"

Time to get reborn. Danny incorporated Danny Seo Media Ventures in 2000. His first project was Conscious Style Home, which he pitched to a number of publishers before St. Martin's bit, and even then he had to convince them it wasn't simply a "niche" idea. Once he clued them in to his high concept—how to "create a comfortable, elegant living space without harming the planet"—and the growing green market, they got it. "It was a real test for me," he says. "I think I was doubting if I actually had the talent to pull it off. Because the book was solely about taking a home—my parents' home—and renovating it."

Danny woke up every morning at 4 a.m. to lay sustainable bamboo flooring, till the gardens, research deer-resistant plants and energy-efficient appliances, slather the walls with volatile-organic-compound-free paint, and reupholster the furniture in hemp fabric. And he wrote all the copy himself, a point of pride. "That was my transition to lifestyle, but it was also my transition into the whole concept of authenticity," he says. "Authenticity is really important to me. I don't want to pretend to be something, because it's going to catch up to you."

Even before Conscious Style Home came out, in September 2001, he was using it as his calling card to establish relationships in Hollywood. He introduced himself to Debbie Levin, and she invited him to a Vanity Fair party that year, where he got to know actress Amy Smart, an EMA board member and "seriously environmentally conscious girl," says Levin.

Danny had already established street cred through his involvement with the cooler-than-thou fashion label Imitation of Christ, known for its creative reuse of thrift-store duds, and pretty soon Levin had him set up as a style consultant for the presenters at the annual EMA Awards. "He dressed Amy, he dressed Wendie Malick, he dressed me for two years," she says.

He quickly learned how to leverage publicity into a respectable revenue machine. He charges $2,000 a day to style an event, earns $15,000 per speech on the lecture circuit, and resides comfortably in the six-figure salary range. To explain how his eco-makeover schtick caught on, Danny invokes the tipping point again. "So I dressed Amy for an awards show and it got all this press," he says, referring to Smart's Trash-à-Porter recycled-cashmere top and vintage denim skirt. "And then more celebrities called and asked me to style them. And then, like, stories were written about it. And then they get forwarded. And then publicists and agents and managers talk. And then I just have to answer my e-mails.

"I don't want people to think I'm a starfucker," he adds. "They call me."

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