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Don’t Knock the 'Creative' Hustle
August 8, 2023 Career Growth Creative Agency Networking Video Production
Guest Speaker

Nicolas Mejia

Head of Creative, Shop at Shopify

Nicolas (Nico) Mejia is the Head of Creative for Shopify’s Shop App. Nico has a diverse background and portfolio working as a bilingual creative leader for both agency and brand, spanning advertising, e-commerce, social media, UX, and brand strategy. He’s received multiple professional accolades for his work, including awards at Cannes Lions, Clios, London International Awards, and the Effie Awards.

Feed your hunger for career advancement

Hustle can mean different things to career creatives. For some, it’s grind-or-die. For others, it’s a constant curiosity to grow, willingness to get uncomfortable in order to solve problems, and a drive to succeed.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, special guest Nicolas Mejia, Head of Creative, Shop at Shopify, shares how his early career experiences and constant hunger for learning helped him evolve as a creative leader

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REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 4 

Episode: 5

Episode Title: Creative Leadership Through Difficult Change with Nicole Parente-Lopez

Guest Title:

Nicolas Mejia, Head of Creative, Shop at Shopify

Adam

 Welcome to Real Creative Leadership. Today’s topic is really interesting because most of us have started our careers with a sense of urgency. I know I did back in the day. It was like, “I gotta get ahead. You gotta get ahead, gotta get ahead.” And we feel this pressure to do, you know, what we call the “H word,” the hustle, right?

Today we want to talk a little bit more about that because I know there’s a lot of bad connotation today around quiet quitting and, and how we really should, you know, be presenting ourselves in the workplace. But there’s still a reason to kind of work hard at your career, and it’s maybe for different reasons than you think.

So while we’re taking the initiative and learning new skills and trying to grow our careers, there’s still a lot of little extra work we gotta put into things. So today we’re going to  talk about the creative hustle, if you will, and we’re going to put context around it. What does that really mean today and how is that different from what it’s been in the past?

So we’re gonna talk a little bit about that and we’re gonna talk also about, you know, how we can find the right creative strategies, how we can put the right work in, and spend the right amount of time on the right things. Today I’m excited to welcome Nicholas Mejia, who is the head of creative for shop at Shopify.

He’s a bilingual creative with 20 years of experience working across markets and on agency client and product teams. The catalog of brands he’s worked with reads like a Forbes list: McDonald’s, Amazon, Sony, Pepsi, Toyota, Nintendo, the list goes on. Hello, Nicholas. Welcome. And by the way, you actually go by Nico, correct?

Nico

Yes, that’s correct. Thank you so much for having me, Adam.

Adam

Well, this is an exciting topic. I mean, I know that I’ve had a lot of little side conversations with people on my team about this. What do you do? How do you get ahead without breaking your back and working, you know, 100-hour work weeks?

But first, let’s start a little bit about you. I want the audience to understand a little bit more about you. Tell us about your creative career and your relationship with creative leadership, and then we’ll get things going.

Nico

This will probably be a long answer, but just to give you all the context because yeah, my creative career has been quite a journey.

Fortunately I’ve been very lucky to have some incredible creative leaders and mentors throughout my career. I started really early while I was still in college, 2003. This was 20 years ago. SSP3 was the hot agency at that time, they were starting to submit to Cannes and starting to win, which in Latin America 20 years ago, it was not seen too much. Only Argentina and Brazil probably.

I always saw that agency as the last step in my career. I ended up being the first one, which actually worked out quite nicely because I learned so much from our boss, Jose Miguel Sokolov. He was tough, but he was such a good chief creative officer.

So it was a really good lesson when I was so young. From there, you start changing agencies, right? Like we do in ad agencies. I took the “I’ll double your salary” offer early on and went to B B D O, which I did for the money. I accept it was not the right move from a creative perspective. Then I ended up at Leo and Leo was also a really good experience.

From those experiences, I felt that I wanted to move to the US. So that’s another story to say for later. But that eventually ended up happening. I ended up moving to the US to work in Hispanic markets. Then I worked on general markets, and Andreas Ordonius, another Colombian that at the time was the chief creative officer of Beauty O Chicago.

He gave me an opportunity to go work with him, which was an amazing opportunity. From then, I went to Ogilvy. Also a great opportunity to work with Joe Shiroda and Tiro Ramirez, who, funny enough, he was my best friend. He’s my best friend from college. He did all his career at Ogilvy. I jumped around quite a bit, but we ended up working together at Ogilvy for a few years, which was super fun.

We did some really cool work. And then I moved to the client side. I started this MBA in creative leadership at the Berlin School. And one of the things I realized is that I wanted to be a little bit even closer to how things are done, more behind the scenes of things.

I think on an agency side, no matter how good a relationship you have with your client, you never get to go as far into planning a product or planning what’s gonna happen. So I guess that was my interest. I love tech, so I tried Thanks, Amazon, and ended up working out. I was there for four years and now I’ve been here at Shopify for a year and a half.

Adam

That’s awesome. What a journey. Yeah. Not just from agency to brand side, but also all around the world in different countries  and locations. That’s pretty exciting.

Nico

Yes, yes. I’m still in the Americas, I still have not embarked into Europe, even though I’ve been tempted multiple times, but yes, still here on this continent.

Adam

Well you mentioned in there that we were going to get back to a story and I want to start with that story. Cause it’s a really fascinating story and I want all the details. For our audience of I dunno, we can sound like old farts that are like, “Oh, back in my day we used to have to really work hard to try and get a job,” and I still think, see it, you know, it’s an issue.

My daughter’s in college, she applied to six different places for an internship and finally got one after 60 applications. There still is that, that challenge I guess of getting in. But let’s hear your story of getting a job in the US. And the whole story. And then we’ll, and then we’ll dig into more about Creative Hustle.

Nico

Yeah, I mean, you’re hearing in the nail there, I know it sounds like, “Oh, 20 years ago it was different, blah, blah.” But actually I feel like now it’s not that it’s easy, but there are definitely more people that have made it out of their countries. You have probably more contests in the US, in Mexico, in Argentina, in other countries in Latin America.

At that time, it was very difficult. Not a lot of people were leaving the country to work abroad. So you had to get creative around it. This was probably 2006 at Leo Burnett in Bogota. Leo Burnett, for those who don’t know, they used to have this international competition called Cannes Predictions.

I love it because I’m an advertising nerd. So pretty much what it was is all the leads from all the Leo Burnetts around the world will select the pieces that they thought were gonna win at Cannes, and they will select the top 50.

At the time it was pretty much, TV was up here. We didn’t have the million categories that Cannes now has. So pretty much those 50 pieces, 45 were TV spots. And the award, if you won Cannes Prediction, was a trip to Cannes the year after.

So my creative partner and I at the time, Christian Duran, he now works for Apple, were like, “Okay, this is it.” This is the opportunity to go to Cannes because obviously Cannes for our salary in Colombia was impossible. There was no way we could pay for it.

So like a bunch of nerds, we looked at all the results of the previous award festivals from the year, new year festivals and one show and Cleos. And we started looking at what pieces have done well, which pieces have not. Based on that, we literally did a spreadsheet with “Okay, this ad is gonna win gold.”

You get scored, not only if it wins, but what award it gets. And long story short, we won it, the two of us with different pieces, which was the craziest thing. Not that we copy pasted everything because we did it separately. It’s like an exam, right? This is like an SAT style.

We won it. Obviously so happy, best day ever. But then leadership was like, “Well, the award is for one person, guys. You have to decide who’s going.” We both need to go. So the spreadsheet continues, but now focused on how we make the amount of money that this trip costs work for both of us.

So we’re like, “Hey, how much is, I don’t know, at the time it was like $5K [for] everything. I don’t remember if that was the number,” but we did all the math and then we came to leadership and we’re like, listen, we can make this work. We can sign up as a student. We’ll travel on the cheapest airline. We stay in the cheapest hostel we can find, and we’ll, we can both make it.

So they were like, “Okay, if you guys want that, go ahead.” Of course the award is meant to be a nice experience, a nice hotel but all we wanted to do was go network at Cannes.

So we ended up going to Cannes the next year. We managed to network, we managed to meet a lot of people throughout those conversations. This opportunity of Leo Burnett Hispanic came up.

The guy that ended up hiring us, Jero Sorio, he was not at Cannes, but we had said a ton of interviews and breakfast with people. We had sent so many emails, only a few replies, but it worked.

And after we came back from the festival, he called and said, “Hey, do you guys wanna come work for the Hispanic Shop of Lapis?” So Christian actually went first because this was the crisis year 2008. No work visas. So they only authorized one and then they partnered Christian with another guy from Miami at school.

But as a backup, I had applied to Chicago Portfolio School to go as a student and be able to be legally in the US. I went back to Portfolio School after working. I was there for six months until they won another account, US Cellular at the time. And that’s when they offered me the job and when everything started.

But yeah, it was quite a journey to get there.

Adam

Yeah, not just the luck of winning stuff, but it sounds like you guys broke it apart, really thought through every little detail, and you were hungry. You wanted this really bad, and that’s why you were both pushing.

Nicolas Mejia

I kinda miss that feeling. The other day we had dinner with some colleagues in Toronto.

And one of them was saying, “What’s one year of your career that you miss or your reminiscence about?” I was telling that story. I miss that year because it felt so good being so, so hungry.

Adam

It just makes me think of even, you know, breaking in is so hard, but it’s not even just breaking in.

When there’s a down market and there’s, you know, I had one job opening for a director of design and it was like, 600, 700, 800 applicants. And even at my last job at Adobe, it was the same thing. 800, 900 people applied just for one creative director position.

So I think that there is still a moment of like, “How do you break through? How do you keep that hustle up and how do you focus on doing the right things?”

Back in the day when you were going through all this, you had a lot of hustle. Maybe we should define what you think the definition of hustle means. Because it’s not just, like we said in the beginning, working extra long hours just for the sake of doing it.

It’s more of finding that creative spark in things. So let’s hear your definition of what it was for you.

Nico

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah, I actually was like, I knew we were gonna talk about it, so I was like, oh, I don’t even know, the dictionary definition of hustle.

And that is all this forcefully accomplishing something. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s the definition of hustle I want to be attached to.” I think it’s more like, to move and accomplish things, no matter the costs. As a creative, I think it’s being willing to go places and try things, and go far.

What we did to be able to go to Cannes, right, just go the extra mile to try to make it happen. Because I think as creatives, if we don’t do that, it’s very easy to just turn on autopilot and just stay there. I mean, I’m pretty sure moments of my career I did that. But you don’t accomplish things if you are not on it. And this business is about connections. It’s about moving, it’s about learning. You really have to be this Swiss Army knife, a jack of all trades. If you’re a copywriter and you stay a copywriter all your life, it’s fine.

But your opportunities start closing and closing if that’s the only thing that you know. So I think that’s what it is. It’s this constant need of learning and connecting and being aware of what’s happening.

Adam

And when you put it in that context, for me that’s exactly it.

It’s that desire, the passion, the drive, maybe instead of calling it creative hustle, it’s more of creative strategy or creative insights, you know, zagging where others are zigging, right? It’s really just exploring the space, just like we do with creative projects. It’s doing that same thing around your career.

How do I get in over here? How do I try this? How do I get access to this? Or get in front of someone else who can inform my career. So from my perspective, as long as you couch it in that, that it’s not the hustle of you, you’ve gotta work a 100-hour work week. It’s more of the creative passion and problem-solving and just creativity at its core to apply it to your career.

So how has that changed from when you first started out, when you were in Colombia trying to make it to the US versus today, you know, getting your job at Shopify. What’s the difference for your creative passion now versus back then?

Nico

That’s an excellent question.

I think the basics of it haven’t changed, right? This relentlessness or this drive that you’re talking about to achieve goals and to keep evolving in you as a person and your professional career that stays. I think what’s different is the times of your life, right?

To give you an example, when I was at Leo in Chicago, this agency, Cornell, used to handle all the Toyota business, they offered me a job and it was a good opportunity and I literally packed my bags and left in days, right? Right now with a family obviously, being so impulsive obviously takes way more time, way more planning schools, jobs. The older you are, I think the more complex this gets. So that flexibility of the hustle could be limited in that end from a logistical perspective. But you can always find your way based on your interests, right? 

So for example, when I came to Shopify, the job originally was UX manager, and I do know about UX, but probably not at the level of having a title be UX, right? But then I realized the names of the positions are different based on your background. You could be an UX manager and be an art director. You can be a UX manager and be someone that is in production. But the basics of it was obviously always working with the UX and everything design, right?

So I think I applied for four different jobs here. And the recruiter at the time, he was “No, man. They don’t see it.” Because I did, my portfolio was super advertising, right? Big flashy TV spot, Super Bowl. But I didn’t have any websites. I kind of changed the way I was selling myself and the way I was showing myself. I was still thinking of my portfolio like an advertising background, creative, let’s just show the flashy stuff. And in reality, they didn’t.

I mean, of course they wanted to see the flashy stuff, but they also wanted to see the hardworking thinking that maybe at the time for me was not portfolio material, but it was telling a bigger story of the actual thing I’m capable of.

So I think just that process, opened my eyes to understanding the game a little bit differently. It was all about not giving up. I guess that would be the lesson at this stage and with what you’re mentioning about 600 applicants, being the 601st doesn’t matter.

Who knows if you stop applying because there’s 500 people applying, then of course never, it’s not, nothing’s gonna happen. Right.

Adam

Oh, I love that. And it, it really is, it’s that tenacity, right? It’s just no matter what, you just keep going no matter what. And I love even hearing of the differences from when you first started out and were trying to break in till today by rewriting your own story.

I think that’s a problem with, you know, I hear of a lot of people that they want to get this next job, but they’re still just showing their resume or their LinkedIn profile of the old stuff they’ve done. But I’m like, “We’re creatives. We tell stories and design and create pictures and we can easily tell a new story about ourselves.”

We could easily decide, you know, “Here, let me look at all the great skills I’ve learned and spin it, or, you know, be a little more strategic about how we show what our work is.” So, I love that. I think that’s pretty awesome.

Maybe a question for you though, because I think with the next generation. you know, obviously I said, I said the H word “hustle,” and it was a naughty word, but how do we change the definition so that people aren’t turned off and they’re more thinking of like, “Okay, how do we really focus on more strategic and disciplined work and staying unexpected and tenacious? How do we change that definition with, with other creatives?”

Nico

That’s a tough one. And I think it varies a lot depending on your cultural background. Latin America is super ingrained in the long hours. It’s like you know that you’re gonna work late, you know that they’re gonna order pizza, you know that you’re gonna be in the agency until 11. At least that’s how it was when I was there.

in the US when you’re pitching an account it is the same, right? You work weekends, you’re just ordering food at the agency. But I think you have to take a little bit more control of your life in that sense. And I think this is something that I learned with the pandemic.

It took me years to find out, but remote working gives me this crazy flexibility that I can organize my life the way I want to. Of course you have meetings, of course you have to be on for things, but you can do a walk one-on-one if you don’t have a document to revise or it’s just a conversation you can go because you’re like, “Oh, I don’t have time to like to move out of my desk.”

No, you can if you figure it out. Or you can wake up earlier, go to bed earlier and work out in the morning and it will change completely or day. It took me so long to just figure it out.

Adam

There are some agencies that I worked at where it was a very, like you said, late hour work hard kind of culture. And then there are others that are more tolerant and wanting, you know, to be flexible.

But I think it’s a matter of creating our own culture. What is the culture we want to create for ourselves in finding that passion and in finding that strategic discipline work?

Nico

That’s something that I try, keep alive with me even though I’ve been living in the us. Almost as long as I lived in Colombia, which is crazy to think about.

But one thing that is ingrained, at least in our culture back home, is this hunger. We’re so hungry to accomplish things. And also so passionate. Sometimes too passionate and we have to be careful, not to overdo it or over say things, but I think that part is really important in the way you bring it.

Adam

What helps bring you fulfillment? What drives your creative spirit? What keeps you pumped and excited? 

Nico

I feel like since I’ve been at Shopify, what has been interesting is also at, in the ad industry, we’re very close. We are advertising for people, right? We are just like, we have blinders and this is our world.

But interestingly enough, last week Config from Figma was also happening and my conversations in Slack were based on what they announced, what new features they announced for Figma, this chat that this person gave that was really good. And I was like, “Oh man, there’s so much more out there than just a small advertising world.”

So, I’ve always been a big believer that you have to get out of that little box and see what else is out there. The movies, music, museums, there’s so much. I live in Seattle and I miss a little bit of that culture that bigger cities had, like Chicago was great for that.

You can’t just stay like “Yeah, in that little universe because it’s too little.”

Adam

Well, that’s interesting. Even you’re talking about, continuing to push and try and, a lot of the talk today is AI and it’s just, maybe we won’t do a lot on this, but I’m just curious if, like, are you seeing people pushing limits with that in, in driving, a little bit of creative strategy in new ways?

Nico

I mean, at Shopify we’re all over. Toby, our founder, loves AI and he wants us to use the tool. He wants us to play with it. He wants us to figure out how to work quickly, work better. And I’m a geek, so I love that stuff. Actually, I took a mid-journey to Shopify and managed to get it with the help of a team to get licensing so that everybody could use it.

But it started out of need. So we were about to launch this app called Translate and Adapt, it’s a super cool feature that we created. What it does is if you have a store and you’re selling in Japan, you have to deal with their currency under their language, and also Adapt to the current market, right?

In the UK pants are called trousers. So this app will help when you install your, so will help you with all those things in order for your business to work in order locally. So when we were gonna advertise it, we didn’t have a lot of time, we didn’t have stock images that were working because we just needed generic products to show the idea, right?

We just needed these generic pants. So at the time, this was back in October and mid Journey was like, “I think, so I just went there and created a ton of us. It’s not shared with our designer. I was like, “Hey, let’s just use this as a placeholder.”

In reality we ended up buying a license to be able to use those images that we created and then it started spreading out. People were asking like “Hey, how did you do this? Like, is it possible to use your account for this?”

And now people like using it as a tool to help. I love that quote that is not, AI is not gonna replace us. People who know how to use AI are the ones that are gonna replace us. That, to me, is the key.

Adam

Well, Nico, thank you. I know we’re at time here, but I appreciate hearing all of your story and your personal journey and creative hustle. Maybe there is any last-minute advice you have for anyone like, of doing the right stuff of hustle? The creative strategy and the focus and the tenacity and not doing the wrong stuff?

Any last-minute advice? 

Nico

Keep this spirit of reinventing yourself alive and keep learning stuff. I know that it’s difficult when you feel stuck and nothing is working out, but as creatives, use your creativity in all the ways that you can.

Write a book, think of a movie. There’s just so many ways that you can use your creativity again. Get out of that little, I’m a copywriter or my director box and just explore all the things that you can do with a creative brain. And maybe you realize that maybe your future is not in an agency as a copywriter.

Maybe he’s a scriptwriter for HBO. I don’t know. But there’s just so many ways to use your talent that you just don’t forget that you have it. You have it in you. We’re all creative.

Adam

Well, thank you. Thank you for all that good advice. That’s even something I want to think about.

Yeah. What else could I really do with my life? 

Thank you, Nico. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. To learn more about Nico’s great work and to follow his career, you can follow him on LinkedIn. Thanks again for joining us.