There is an hour in New York when the city seems to gild itself. The light drops between the towers on Sixth Avenue, the gold statue above the Rockefeller rink catches fire, and even the steam rising from the street turns briefly luminous. People who work here learn to notice it, because beauty in New York is not a backdrop. Rather, it is a working condition. Few people understand that better than Poppy Haryadi, a brand and experiential designer based in New York whose job, quite literally, is to build moments the city will stop for.
Ask her about the city, and she talks about texture before she talks about work. The Beaux Arts stonework above a deli awning, the ballet of a crosswalk at rush hour, the way winter light lands flat and silver on the Hudson. For a designer, she insists, this is not scenery. Instead, it is a daily masterclass, and it explains why so many creative people accept the rents, the noise, and the pace. Because the city gives as extravagantly as it takes.
Haryadi, whose full name is Noer Giovanda Poppy Haryadi, arrived by way of Indonesia, where she trained in interior architecture and ran her own studio. Since then, she has worked on some of the most visible brand experiences in the city. She contributed to the American Express Gold Card x Luar launch at Rockefeller Center during Fashion Week, supported builds for Art Basel Miami, and designed luxury mailers for names like NARS, L’Oréal, Carolina Herrera, and Neutrogena. Her path was anything but straight. However, that is precisely why her advice lands. She has tested every rule below against the most demanding professional city on earth, and she has done it while falling steadily in love with the place.
What sets her apart is the shape of her talent. She designs at two scales at once, rooms people walk into and boxes that arrive at their door, and she treats them as one discipline. Her concepts tend to carry a single elegant idea. For Neutrogena’s Ultra Sheer campaign, for example, she used UV-activated ink so the message appeared only in sunlight, a box that behaved exactly like the sunscreen inside it. Colleagues describe her instinct as strategy moving at the speed of feeling, because her moodboards already contain the audience thinking a deck would later explain. Meanwhile, her standard stays stubbornly physical. A piece must hold up on screen and feel right in someone’s hands, and she will chase a material, a finish, or a fold until it does.
That sensibility did not appear from nowhere. It grew from a training in interior architecture, which taught her to design for the body and not just the eye, and from years of running her own studio, which taught her how ideas survive budgets, clients, and deadlines. So when she talks about creativity, she talks about craft and commerce in the same breath. Few designers move between a fashion week build and a beauty unboxing with equal ease. However, she does, and that range is exactly what New York rewards.
So we asked her a simple question. What does it actually take to navigate professional life in New York City? Her answers came back generous, practical, and unmistakably hers. Here are seven of them, in her words and ours.
One more thing before the list. Haryadi resists the idea that she ever conquered the city, because for her the relationship works differently. “I didn’t arrive anywhere. I just kept following the part that interested me until it turned into a career,” she says. New York, in other words, is less a summit than a current. So the advice that follows is not a map to the top. Rather, it is a guide to swimming well.
1. Let the City Reset Your Definition of Hard
Everyone warns you about the pace of New York. Still, nothing quite prepares you for it. The city runs on ambition the way other places run on weather, and newcomers either find their stride or get swept along. Haryadi’s first piece of advice is to stop resisting that current and let it retrain you.
“New York didn’t teach me to work harder. It rewired what I thought hard even meant,” she says. During her early years in the city, she was studying, building a portfolio, and applying for roles all at once. Later, she ran luxury beauty mailers at one studio while supporting a mass market activation at another, often in the same week. Because everyone around her was stacking commitments, the stacking began to feel normal.
Her point is not that burnout is a virtue. Instead, it is that the city quietly raises your ceiling. Surround yourself with people who move fast and finish things, and you will discover capacity you did not know you had. So take the early call, accept the ambitious brief, and trust the adjustment period. Eventually, the pace stops feeling like pressure. It starts feeling like home. And once it does, something better follows, because the confidence you build here travels with you into every future room.
2. Treat Every Past Chapter as Capital
New York attracts people with clean, straight career lines. Meanwhile, it also attracts everyone else. Haryadi spent years worrying that her winding route through interior architecture, business school, marketing, and design made her look uncertain. The city taught her the opposite.
“I spent years thinking I was behind. Turns out I was just taking a longer route to the same place,” she says. Her spatial training now shapes how she designs environments people move through. Her marketing degree tells her who a piece is for before she chooses a single color. Running her own studio taught her budgets, clients, and delivery. In New York, where every project moves quickly and touches many hands, that range became her sharpest edge.
Her advice for anyone arriving with an unusual CV is therefore simple. Do not hide the detours. Instead, translate them, and show exactly how the odd chapters make you more useful in the room. Because in a city built by reinvention, the person who has already reinvented herself once holds a quiet advantage. After all, half the city arrived as something else. The bartender is a playwright, the analyst is a ceramicist, and nobody blinks. So your winding route is not a confession here. Rather, it is a credential.
3. Make the Work Undeniable, Then Knock
Talent alone does not open doors in New York, because the city has too much of it. Haryadi learned this during a stretch when rejection arrived weekly. Her response was twofold, and she recommends both halves.
First, build a portfolio aimed at the exact world you want. When she retrained in design, she made sure her book included packaging and technical craft, not just pretty concepts, because she wanted experiential agencies to picture her doing the job. Second, once the work is strong, put it in front of people relentlessly. “The work opens the door, but you still have to knock on it,” she says. “Nobody finds a great portfolio that stays hidden.”
She spoke to what felt like a million people, messaging, connecting, and jumping on calls until an agency took a chance on her. That one yes led to Rockefeller Center. So her rule for the city is blunt. Make the work undeniable, be easy to say yes to, and then keep going until someone does. Rejection, she adds, is simply the weather of the city, so dress for it. Every no costs a little, but the one yes changes everything.
4. Say Yes to Opposite Registers
New York rarely lets a designer specialize in comfort. One week, Haryadi was shaping a luxury fragrance keepsake, and in the same week she was supporting a playful, mass market activation built around branded delivery trucks. Moving between those registers taught her more than either could alone.
“I am not really switching aesthetics. I am switching audiences,” she explains. Luxury work demands restraint, precision, and objects that feel like promises. Mass market work demands warmth, immediacy, and zero barriers to entry. Because she learned to read what each audience actually needs, she stopped forcing one style onto everything.
Her advice is to welcome the whiplash. Take the project outside your lane, because the contrast will teach you to see brands clearly. In a city where a single subway ride carries you past a dozen worlds, range is not a luxury. It is the job description. Moreover, the clients here can tell when a designer has it. Versatility isn’t a bonus, it’s the proof you actually understand who you’re designing for.
5. Get Close to How Things Get Made
New York is a city of makers as much as thinkers. Print shops in Long Island City, fabricators in Brooklyn, florists loading vans before dawn. Haryadi believes designers should spend real time near that world, because the screen hides almost everything that matters.
“On screen, you can convince yourself of almost anything. But in your hands, the truth is obvious,” she says. Working beside production teams taught her how ink sits differently on every surface, how paper weight changes the way color reads, and how a logo one size too large starts shouting. Early on, she often revised designs after seeing how they would actually be produced. Now that knowledge lives in her hands, so she designs for the finished object from the first sketch.
Her advice, then, is to visit the press check, ask the fabricator questions, and stay for the packing. Because in a city this competitive, the designer who understands the making earns a trust that a beautiful file alone never will. New York makes this easy, since the entire supply chain lives within a train ride. Few creative cities put the maker and the dreamer so close together, so use the proximity while you have it.
6. Design for the Person, Not the Brand
Every client in New York arrives with a brief, and Haryadi’s instinct is to widen the frame. “It’s not only about what the brand wants,” she says. “It’s also about what their customer needs – because the two are really the same goal.” Whether the aim is engagement, sales, or affection, it’s the customer who decides whether the work lands, so she designs for the brand and the person on the other end at once.
That lesson scales to professional life in general. The colleague reading your email, the director reviewing your deck, and the stranger opening your mailer are all specific people with specific hopes. Therefore, she treats every deliverable as a small act of hospitality. Who receives this, and what should they feel in the first three seconds?
In her experience, New York rewards that empathy quickly, because the city is one enormous audience. Read the room correctly, and the room remembers you. Meanwhile, the discipline keeps your ego honest, because the question is never whether you love the work. The question is whether the person it was made for will.
7. Let the City Feed Your Eye
Finally, Haryadi’s last piece of advice has nothing to do with hustle. It is about beauty, and about letting New York give back. The city is a living archive of design. Brownstone cornices, hand painted signage, the tiled hush of an old subway station, the gold hour at Rockefeller Center. She treats all of it as free education.
“Most people see a room. I see the one thing that isn’t sitting right, and then I can’t see anything else. And that’s the fun part of being a creative,” she says. Walking the city sharpens exactly that instinct. So she wanders on purpose, collects references, and lets neighborhoods argue with each other in her sketchbook.
Her favorite proof came the night of the Gold Card x Luar launch, standing inside a build she had helped design while the gold caught the light and the city hummed around it. Beauty, she realized, was never decoration here. Instead, it is the reason people stay, and the fuel for everything they make. So look up often. The city is showing you how it is done. Even a bad day improves when you treat the walk home as research, and in her experience, the best ideas rarely arrive at the desk. Instead, they arrive somewhere between two subway stops, while the city quietly does its work on you.
Seven rules, one theme. New York asks for everything, yet it pays you back in energy, audience, and light. Poppy Haryadi built her career by accepting both halves of that bargain, and her advice amounts to an invitation to do the same. Work hard, but let the beauty in. Knock on doors, but keep your eye generous. Because the city that demands your best also hands you, every single evening, a skyline that proves the effort was worth it. You can see her work at her portfolio, connect with her on LinkedIn, and find more stories about creative life across the country at USAWire.
