Only two cities sit at the very top of the global urban hierarchy. Designer Noer Giovanda Poppy Haryadi has built a career inside both, and her path from Surabaya to Rockefeller Center to a London production floor reveals just how differently the world’s two “Alpha Plus” capitals shape the people who make things in them.
There is a moment Poppy Haryadi returns to when she talks about her career, and it takes place at night, in gold light, at the base of Rockefeller Center. It was New York Fashion Week, and American Express was launching its Gold Card collaboration with the fashion label Luar, four brand partners, one transformed plaza, a main stage designed to feel like the natural continuation of the runway show that had just ended across town. Haryadi, then in her first agency role at Shiraz Creative, had worked alongside the creative director and a senior designer on the concept and carried responsibility for the graphics across the build. Now she was standing inside it.
“I was standing inside something I’d actually helped design, at full scale, during Fashion Week in New York City, the city I’d moved to chasing exactly that kind of moment,” she says. “It felt like everything I’d ever wanted had somehow collapsed into one night.”
What strikes her about that memory now is not the design. It is that the design disappeared. “All the details I’d obsessed over just kind of fell away. What I kept noticing was the room full of people having a genuinely good night, and knowing I’d had something to do with that.”
It is a very New York story: the arrival, the spectacle, the private vindication in the middle of a public event. But it is only half of Haryadi’s story. The other half takes place three and a half thousand miles away, in London, often at a workbench rather than under stage lighting, hands on the actual materials, watching how an ink sits on a stock, occasionally packing boxes herself. Between those two images sits one of the more interesting questions in creative work today: what do the world’s two pre-eminent cities actually do to the people who practice in them?
Two cities, one tier
Urban geographers have a term for this. In the Globalization and World Cities Research Network’s rankings, the closest thing city-comparison has to an official league table, London and New York have for decades occupied a tier of their own, above every other city on earth. They are the only two classified at the very top: Alpha++ cities, in the network’s own notation.
Haryadi, whose academic path ran through business school and marketing before design, is happy to translate the jargon. “The GaWC framework ranks cities by how plugged in they are to the global economy, how much of the world’s business actually runs through them,” she explains. “Alpha cities are the major hubs. Alpha+ cities fill particularly big gaps in that network. And then there’s Alpha++, which is just London and New York, in a category of their own, because they’re integrated with the rest of the world on a level no other city comes close to. Everywhere else is a node. These two are the network. For someone in my industry, that’s not abstract; it’s why the same brands, the same agencies, and the same cultural moments keep flowing between exactly these two cities.”
The classification measures financial and professional networks, but as Haryadi suggests, any creative who has worked in both cities will tell you the equivalence is real in their industry too, and so is the difference. The two cities are peers that are nothing alike. They attract the same brands, stage the same caliber of cultural moments, and compete for the same talent, while running on different clocks, different temperaments, and different ideas of what good work even is.
Haryadi is unusually well positioned to describe the gap, because she has never really worked in just one of them. “In New York I was working with the London office. In London I work with the US offices in LA and New York,” she says. “So I’ve sat on both ends of the time difference.” Her client list reads like a merger of the two markets’ rosters: American Express, Walmart, NARS, L’Oréal, Carolina Herrera and Neutrogena from the American chapter; Netflix, Spotify, Tinder, Mubi and Ministry of Sound from the British one. Same tier of brand, wildly different working cultures around them.
And she came to both cities as an outsider, which, as it turns out, is the best vantage point from which to see either clearly.
The road in
Haryadi’s path to the Alpha Plus tier did not begin in either city. Her full name is Noer Giovanda Poppy Haryadi; she goes by Poppy, and she trained first in interior architecture at Universitas Ciputra in Indonesia, drawn to spaces, materials, and how a room makes someone feel. She worked as an interior designer in Surabaya, then founded her own small practice, HER Studio, working with property developers on residential projects. The studio is no longer running, but she is emphatic about what it gave her: the unglamorous, load-bearing education in clients, budgets, delivery and accountability that no design school offers. “A project doesn’t end when the work is beautiful,” she says. “It ends when it’s delivered, on budget, and the client trusts you enough to come back.”
From there the path looks, on paper, like indecision: a master’s in entrepreneurship at Oxford Brookes in the UK, a marketing degree at NYU, graphic design training at Shillington in New York. She spent years worrying that it read as scattered. “I spent years thinking I was behind,” as she puts it now. “Turns out I was just taking a longer route to the same place.”
The route matters to this story for a specific reason. By the time Haryadi entered the New York creative industry, she was carrying spatial thinking from architecture, commercial instinct from running a business, audience logic from marketing, and craft from design, a stack of perspectives that most designers her age had never needed to assemble. New York would put every one of them to work at once. London, later, would refine them. And the difference between how each city used that stack is the difference between the cities themselves.
New York: the city that stacks
Ask Haryadi what defines New York professionally, and she does not reach for a romantic answer. She reaches for a structural one: simultaneity.
At the peak of her New York period, her weeks looked like this. At Another Box Story, a studio specializing in influencer kits and launch mailers, she was designing luxury beauty gifting for NARS, L’Oréal, Carolina Herrera, Neutrogena, work where a single unboxing moment is expected to shape how a customer feels about an entire brand. In the same stretch, she was contributing as part of the Giant Spoon creative team to Walmart’s “Delivers” campaign, a nationwide activation that turned the retailer’s delivery trucks into themed installations touring concerts, marathons, conventions and city parks. Luxury beauty in one hand, the most mass-market brand in America in the other, in the same weeks
“Honestly that’s just what New York asks of you,” she says. “The hustle is the baseline there, everyone’s stacking things, and the city quietly expects you to keep up.”
This is the first and most concrete difference between the two capitals: New York’s professional culture is built on parallel intensity. The city’s creative economy is dense enough, and freelance-fluid enough, that stacking engagements is not the exception but the norm, and the effect on a designer is a kind of forced range. Moving between a Carolina Herrera walnut keepsake box and a Walmart truck wrapped in bandana print in the same week is not an aesthetic exercise. It is a discipline in reading audiences.
“The real answer is never what the brand wants,” Haryadi says of what those opposite registers taught her. “It is what their customer needs, and what it actually takes to capture that specific person’s attention.” A luxury mailer speaks to a particular, exacting recipient where every texture and structural choice carries weight. Walmart’s audience needs the opposite: immediacy, warmth, legibility, no barrier to entry. “When I am handed two opposite briefs in the same week, I am not really switching aesthetics, I am switching audiences.”
New York taught her something else, too, something that overturned an assumption she had carried through years of client work. She had believed that the bigger and more mainstream a brand, the more locked down its creative would be. The Walmart campaign, which she supported as part of the wider Giant Spoon team, proved otherwise: a brand of that scale being genuinely playful, building K-pop rooms and lo-fi gaming lounges and rodeo dreamscapes into the backs of its own trucks. “The boldness was not the risk,” she says. “The boldness was the point.” Safe work is forgotten; courage, done well, is what earns attention. It is a lesson she credits to the specific bravery American brands are willing to buy, and one she has carried into every brief since.
The pace has a temperament attached. “New York, in particular, I found the creatives are a lot more expressive, and the pace is so much faster; everything moves quickly, and you’re expected to keep up,” she says. “That was an adjustment for me, learning to match that speed and that directness while still doing the work justice.” New York rooms think out loud. Ideas are pitched hot, defended directly, and killed quickly. For a designer arriving from Asia via a British business school, the expressiveness was itself a skill to acquire.
And the city tests work in public, at full cultural volume. Haryadi’s New York chapter culminated in weeks like Art Basel Miami, technically another city, but in industry terms an away fixture the New York agencies dominate, where she was part of the Shiraz Creative teams behind two builds for American Express, Resy and Delta: the Night Shift afterparty pop-up at the Rubell Museum, and The Resy Lounge, a VIP space that ended up named one of the top five dining destinations in Miami that week despite technically being a brand lounge. Her takeaway from being on those teams reads like a thesis on cutting through Alpha Plus noise: “You don’t compete with the noise by being louder. Everything at Basel is shouting for attention, and if you try to out-shout it, you just disappear into the din… You win by being the room people are relieved to walk into.”
By the time she left New York, she says, she was no longer a one-format designer. She had built across events and packaging, across luxury, lifestyle and mass. “That’s the foundation everything since has stood on.”
If New York builds the foundation, what does London do?
London: the city that finishes
The instinctive stereotype, New York fast, London slow; New York commercial, London crafted, is one Haryadi mostly resists, because it flattens what is actually a difference in structure rather than ambition. London’s creative market is not less serious than New York’s. It is organized around different virtues.
The first is proximity to making. At Bespoke-ly / Not Another Bill, the London studio where she now designs branded gifting and PR packaging for Netflix, Spotify, Tinder, Mubi and Ministry of Sound, production happens in-house, and for the first time in her career, Haryadi found herself standing next to the machines, the materials, sometimes the packing table itself.
“When you’re close to how things are actually made, you see everything the screen hides,” she says. “How an ink or a foil sits on one surface is completely different from how it sits on another… On screen you can convince yourself of almost anything, but in your hands, the truth of it is obvious.” After years of working with outsourced production, the American model, where fabrication is a vendor relationship at the end of an email chain, the education was immediate and physical. She learned why a design that looked perfect in the file went soft in the material. She learned how big a logo should sit before it starts shouting. She even learned from the packing itself: “If it isn’t put together well, the whole thing loses its magic, no matter how good it looks on paper.”
The result, she says, is that the knowledge has moved into her hands. “Now I mostly design with it built in from the start, I can feel whether something will work in production before it gets there, almost without thinking about it.” It is hard to imagine a more London sentence. The city’s creative culture, heir to a long tradition of print, craft and workshop trades, still prizes the designer who understands the object over the designer who understands the deck.
The second London virtue is restraint as a register. Where her New York influencer work rewarded thinking “way outside the box, further than the brief or even the brand might expect,” much of the London work is brand-led and clean: gifting and merchandise for names that are already part of people’s daily routines, where the job is to feel like a natural extension of a world people already know. It sounds less glamorous. It is, she argues, its own discipline, and it can be genuinely ambitious. Her favorite proof is Ministry of Sound, the London club institution whose thirty-five years of heritage she helped translate into a design-led fashion range: scarves, beanies and typographic pieces built from the brand’s own visual language, made to reach OG ravers and Gen Z alike. “Taking something with that much history and translating it into a range that feels current without losing what the name actually means is exactly the kind of challenge I love.”
Heritage is, in fact, the quiet dividing line between the two markets. New York’s most exciting briefs tend to be about launches, the new card, the new fragrance, the new season. London’s often involve stewardship: institutions with decades of meaning that must be moved forward without being broken. Both are Alpha Plus problems. They just build different muscles.
Haryadi describes her London chapter in terms that flip the usual direction of transatlantic aspiration. “I didn’t arrive starting over. I arrived with a New York standard already in my hands, and I’ve been holding that bar in a new market.” The New York velocity did not switch off when she crossed the Atlantic; it became a differentiator. What London added was finish, the production literacy, the material honesty, the understanding of how a thing gets made, that turns speed into substance.
The relay: working the Atlantic itself
The most surprising thing Haryadi says about working between the two capitals is that the biggest difference is not cultural at all. “Everyone talks about the creative cultures, and they are different,” she says. “But the thing you only understand once you’ve actually done it is how much of the job is working across time zones, and how much harder that is than it sounds.”
When a team spans LA, New York and London, there is a narrow daily window when everyone is awake at once, and the work becomes a relay: hand something off at the end of your day and it carries on while you sleep. The system only works, she says, if everyone is willing to bend, the early call, the late one, and if communication inside the overlap is ruthlessly precise. “If you miss that window, a small thing can sit unresolved for a whole day and stall the entire flow. So you learn to be clear and quick, to say precisely what you need and when.”
This is the hidden curriculum of the Alpha Plus tier. London and New York are not just two markets; they are the two ends of the axis along which global creative work actually flows, and the professionals who thrive between them develop a specific meta-skill: adaptation. “To read the energy of the office I’m working with, match the pace they move at, flex how I communicate, and adjust to the register each project and each team actually needs,” as Haryadi puts it. “Working across LA, New York and London doesn’t just make you a better designer, it makes you a faster, more adaptable collaborator, and that’s the part someone who’s only ever worked in one market never has to learn.”
It also makes her useful in a way that has little to do with any individual design. Because she has genuinely lived and worked on both sides, she has repeatedly found herself in conversations with companies about expanding into the US, where the whole value is knowing what translates between the two markets and what quietly doesn’t. The expressive, launch-hungry boldness that wins a New York room can read as noise in London; the considered restraint that signals quality in London can read as timidity in New York. A creative fluent in both registers becomes, in effect, a translator.
What the cities make of a person
Strip away the geography and Haryadi’s account of the two capitals resolves into something like a division of labor. New York taught her range, speed, audience-reading and nerve, the willingness to hold luxury and mass in the same week, and the discovery that even the biggest brands can be brave. London taught her material truth, production fluency and the ambition hidden inside restraint. New York tested her work in front of crowds; London tested it in her hands.
Neither education would be complete alone, and her own test for a piece of work, formed across both cities, requires both: it has to hold up on screen and feel right in someone’s hands. A deck can be beautiful and still fail the second test. The first half of that sentence is a New York standard. The second half is a London one.
There is a temptation, in any two-cities story, to declare a winner. Haryadi will not, and her reasoning is the most honest thing in her account: the movement itself was the education. “The two cities have a really different energy, and I won’t pretend moving between them is effortless, it takes real adjustment every time. But that’s exactly why I can do it.”
That refusal to pick a lane is, of course, the pattern of her whole career: interior architecture into business into marketing into design into experiential, Indonesia into the UK into the US into London again. For years she read the winding route as a liability. The Alpha Plus cities, each in their own way, taught her to read it as the asset it was, New York by demanding every skill she had at once, London by giving her the craft to bind them together.
“Three cities, three completely different versions of me,” she says, “and somehow they all show up in a single brief.”
Which may be the truest thing anyone can say about London and New York. The two cities at the top of the world do not produce the same kind of creativity, and they were never supposed to. One builds you. One finishes you. The rare professionals who let both do their work end up carrying something neither city can produce alone, and an ocean’s worth of perspective in between.
Poppy Haryadi is a brand and experiential designer based in London. Her work spans brand activations, experiential campaigns, gifting and packaging for clients including American Express, Walmart, NARS, L’Oréal, Carolina Herrera, Neutrogena, Netflix, Spotify, Tinder and Ministry of Sound. She has contributed to that work through Shiraz Creative, Giant Spoon, and Another Box Story in New York, and Bespoke-ly / Not Another Bill in London, where she is currently based.
