Black Stories/13: Remy Merriex

Remy Merriex is an Executive Creative Director and Executive Producer with over 20 years experience in Brand, tech, advertising, entertainment, and interactive technology design. He is well versed in developing and executing communication and design strategies across a plethora of media platforms; from Facebook and Twitter to Virtual reality and TikTok.

Growing up in a family that embraced and encouraged personal expression aided Remy in finding his place in the world as he explored spaces from astro physics to media production.

• Full Episode Transcript
• Justin James Lopez:
• Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Amazon's Black Stories podcast, where we highlight the stories of black designers, researchers, and creative minds from all around the world. I'm your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I'm joined by Remy Merriex, where we discuss the importance of recognizing those who support you in developing equitable mechanisms to support those that come behind you. Let's hear your story. Well, Remy, thanks for joining me. This is a really exciting episode for me and for the listeners for a number of reasons that we'll get into throughout this episode. But, for starters, let's talk a little bit about your current position, right? You shifted out of entertainment into tech, but talk to us about your position currently.
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• Remy Merriex:
• Yeah. So right now, I'm Executive Creative Director. And what that really means is that, it's my responsibility to elevate the quality and the storytelling of all of our customer facing communications in terms of campaigns and creative across the world. So, it's a lot of the show campaigns for our originals. It's helping shape and define the brand work with our head of brand. And it's really working hard to build a narrative about why Amazon Prime Video is a place that people should care about and what reasons they care for it and how they see us in the world, in the different places that we show up.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• I feel like that's a common theme with Amazon because they're spreading in so many different spaces. It's a constant battle to fight for relevancy of like, why would you come here for this? No for sure. So getting into this space, let's take a trip down memory lane, right? So getting into this space, when you were younger, I saw a previous interview where you talk a bit about this, of growing up in a really creative family, having a lot of really creatives from different spaces, whether it's music, whether it's art, and having that kind of infrastructure, is something pretty unique because none of the guests previous to you so far on this show have had that platform to start from. How much of that helped you make the decision to have creativity as what you do for life?
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• Remy Merriex:
• I think it had a lot to do with it I think. My family is filled with one of two types of people, either people who are professional creatives, meaning that's what they do for a living or people who should have been.
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• So, it kind of expresses itself in different ways in the family, but the best way I could describe it, and it's kind of like a very central feeling I have about my family, which is, they're the kind of people like, if you get all of them in a room, it's just loud and interesting and chaotic, but there's always stuff that kind of emerges from those conversations and the ways that we deal with each other. It's kind of group that will like break into song, you know what I mean? Almost like musical style. Yeah. And that kind of stuff happens on a regular basis, and by extension, a lot of the people that I have spent my life with that are not like blood relatives, including my wife and close friends that I've had for decades, a lot of them have those similar traits.
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• So, even one of my fondest memories of my brothers, because I have two brothers, one older, one younger and a good friend of mine is just driving down the street. I don't even know where we were going. This is like probably 20 years ago. And just breaking into song, singing the gummy bears theme song, which sounds ridiculous. But this is the kind of like nonsense that usually goes on around my house. So yeah, it inspired me or I would say it shaped me into thinking about things from a creative perspective. It isn't the only influence in my creative life, but I definitely think it was the foundational one.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• It's beautiful because what's interesting, and what I've heard from our interactions, previous and just in general, is a lot of what growing up in that type of family provided you, is that individuality, that freedom to be who you want to be. Yeah right? And I say that, loading up the question, right. I say that because you weren't always sold specifically on being a creative, right? At some point you wanted to be what, an astrophysicist.
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• Remy Merriex:
• Yeah. For a long time. I have a very technical side and that technical side, it's helped me as a professional creative, because it let me, once I really leaned into that side, it let me understand tech a lot better and be a better thinker in the tech space, through the lens of creativity. But yeah, I started very much wanting to be an astronomer, an astrophysicist, and that's still a very deep love of mine. So, I still have lots of people around me that are in that space professionally, but it's interesting because they seem like very different professions and obviously they are, but there are some interesting overlaps in the way that I've always thought about them. And one of the things that's maybe unusual about the way I've always thought about astrophysics and astronomy is, and cosmology in general, is that it's always given me a sense of peace, because from a very young age, I knew a lot about it. And like I said, something I studied pretty heavily.
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• And so, that sense of peace, I think, comes from this scale of that understanding of the spaces that we live in and have always lived in and the way that the universe around us works. And that is similar to the sense of peace that I get when I am creating things. And so there's some very interesting emotional thread between those two professions and those two ways of thinking, but I don't think I've really figured out the whole of it, but it has definitely occurred to me a number of times.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• Yeah. I think that it's interesting to draw those parallels and not make it such a mutually exclusive thing. And not just those two, but in many things like for me, for example, when I moved into more of the media creation, like graphics space, I said, I'm going to do this because I hate things like Math and Science an so on. And I realized it's all Math. So it was really interesting because it wasn't that I hated Math. It's like, I hated the application that I was using it for. And when I start to use it in this more, I think what we consider the connotation of creativity, in the creative way, that it became a lot simpler for me to swallow of like, yeah, of course I can understand these complex math equations that create these scenes.
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• Even from audio perspectives, all of things are really technical, but it just comes down to what's important to you because yeah, that's just something that's really really interesting to me, but drawing the parallel between like astrophysics and what you do now, I think that idea of finding something that brings you peace, is something that's a key takeaway for me, because we spend so much time, I heard this the other day, someone said, "You spend most of your time doing things you hate to pay for things that you don't need."
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• Remy Merriex:
• Yeah.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• And I was just like, okay, mind blown. I have to rethink life. But you shifted, right? And what was it that actually caused you to go, "You know what, maybe I don't want to," because you mentioned you still have this fondness for it, but you don't do it as a profession. So what was it that made you shift there?
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• Remy Merriex:
• Yeah, it's a good question. And I've looked backwards a lot, to see where that shift was. Because I don't think it was as obvious back then as it is more obvious it is now. I think there's two big points. And the first big one was, when I was about seven, my father, he was big on taking us on adventures, both big and small. So I either travel across the country or were like going 20 minutes away from our house, but they would always be like these adventures. And one of them when I was about seven was for, he took us to the set of Back To The Future, in the middle of the night. And they were filming the scene where the car goes back in time for the first time in the mall.
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• And I didn't know what it was, nobody had any context because the movie didn't exist at this point, right? But I think both seeing that as a kid and understanding something that I think I did not understand about creativity at that point, was that it didn't have to be something you did alone, and that up until that point, I'd always seen painters and artists and musicians, and there seemed to be this inherent loneliness in the thing that you were creating. But I think when I actually set foot on a set, I realized that this was this weird and very interesting amalgamation of human talents in like intention. And that changed my point of view about the scope and depth of creativity and like what it was as a profession to some extent, but more as a human endeavor.
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• And then later, so that was probably the first twitch that I got, that that was something I really wanted to do. And then later, I joined, this was probably about four or five years after that, I joined my mother on set because she's a costume designer and wardrobe designer for the first time and worked a summer on a set. And I was just, I think it was like day 0.5 that I was just like, I did not know this would be this much fun. It was like going into camp. And it's always, I mean, even in the most difficult shoots I've ever been on and worked through, it's always been that way.
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• There's always this sense of just immediate fun for me being on a set and like collaborating and creating with other people, that's never gone away, which is, I think I'm glad for, because it's also extremely difficult if you're doing things that you should be doing, which are like new and interesting things that nobody has done before, but yeah, that's probably the two points where the shift in my mind started like swinging.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• So, new and interesting things that nobody has done before. This is something I want to shift to now. And you have mentioned in the past that one of your favorite parts of the creative process is the pitch, right? And one of your favorite pitches was when you pitched to Lexus, to the Lexus execs, if I'm correct on that, recalling that to Black Panther. Collaboration with Black Panther and that experience. So talk to us about how you did that. Obviously not the pitch itself, but like, what was your thought process going in that and how was it received? Obviously we know the ultimate end result, but your experience in that space.
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• Remy Merriex:
• The simplest way I would describe it is that, I had had the good fortune, along with a few leaders in my creative team, to read an early draft of the Black Panther script. We went to Marvel studios and they took our phones, and our shoes, and our car keys, whatever else they could think of, and gave us like, I think like an hour or two to read the script. And so, after I finished that script that day, I was excited about the film in the first place, but after I read that script, I was like, if they make this film the way that this is written, it's instant hit. I would watch it like five times right away. And so that kind of steeled me that I needed to, it's interesting because obviously I worked at an agency at the time and the agency had a client, which was Lexus and working on behalf of a client like that, you're obviously trying to do the best for Lexus.
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• But I think after I read that script, I kind of had a split duty after I read it, because I felt I had to do something for these filmmakers and I had to do something for the people that come from where I come from and have the background that I have, because it would mean something to us. And it was one of those things where I acknowledged, in my own mind at least, that it might not mean something to people who were not black or like didn't work close to our culture, but for us, it was like, the thing I read, and this is probably the heart of it, and this is why I fought so hard to win this work, was I read not a recounting of our past, but kind of a retelling of what our past could have been, in a super fantastical, obviously over the top like superhero way.
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• But it was one of the first times I'd ever read something where we were not subjected to horrors. And like, we had a root that was deeper than that. And I think that just rang a bell with me. And I was like, I'm sure as a creative, I'm an overly emotional person, but when I read it, I was just struck by it. And so after that, I was like, "Okay, I don't know what it's going to take for me to build this into something great, but I am going to put my absolute, highest effort into doing so. And I went and hunted down all of my mentors, all the people that I respected and without, necessarily breaking any of the details of confidentiality, I just tried to mine for as much thinking as I could about how to make this, not just work, but make it ring a bell across the universe.
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• And so, that's how I started on that path, and when I think about pitches in general, and why I get excited, it's because I'm a super excitable dude in the first place, and so, I'm super passionate about things. And so I think when I see a pitch and see an idea that can be pitched into the world, what I get excited about, is there's something like new that I can introduce into the world and I can help like shepherd into the world. And that is extremely exciting when you see it before anybody else does. And granted, there's a lot of red tape and complexity between where you start at seeing a great idea and seeing a great thought move into culture and move into the world, to getting to actually ship that into the world. But that's all the fun part.
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• The most interesting part to me, is just that moment where I'm like, "Oh shit, nobody's ever done this before. Nobody's ever seen anything like this before." And all of the gifts and all of the skills that I've built up in my life and all the experiences that I've been able to have, put me right here, to make this thing big. And so that's why I think pitches in general are exciting to me. And honestly, I think when I'm really on fire, my passion is pretty infectious. And so I usually pull people along and the more interesting and more different and more new the thinking is, or the thought that we're trying to put into the world, the more people will fight against it, and the more fear there is. And so managing all of that is also part of the game. But yeah, that's how I think about pitches certainly.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• No. Yeah. Thank you for that. I'm not going to lie. Your overall energy is just super infectious, because I was, as you were just telling that story, I was getting really emotional myself. Just thinking about it and just like from my perspective and where I lie on the diaspora, which is like, for learning the history of how I came to be in the world period. The people that look like me, escape from a skin complexion thing, stereotype thing, it's like, we didn't exist until a lot of messed up things happened and it was just like, I felt all of that.
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• But one thing that I did want to touch on in that story is, and this is something that I personally deal with, and I think a lot of people do as well. Just kind of wanted to ask the question, are you asking the question, is like, sometimes it can feel like, even though it's the right thing you're doing, and even though it feels like it's super intuitive, it can be difficult to feel like you're not taken serious as a person that's black, brown, when you advocate for more diverse and equitable representation, because it's almost like people expect you to do that because it's a diversity thing and where you exist on the socio ethnic spectrum, how has that impacted the work that you do?
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• Remy Merriex:
• It's interesting. There's a saying, and it was that, like half of a book that I've partly written, which I don't know. I don't know if I'll release but I need to finish it, just so it's done in my own heart. It's a saying that I've had for a long time, but it's that being black is a whole second job. And I think that's doubly true in the last probably couple of years. Definitely since George Floyd was murdered, but just in general, as people become more aware of the just consistent and common injustices that black people have to like just experience on a regular basis.
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• I think the thing for me is, I don't particularly enjoy being professionally black. And what I mean by that is I love being black, but professionally black means that in addition to being a constant translator between your own culture and language and like personality you have, and translating that into like a corporate environment where people will understand you in their own ways, there's this need for you to, if you're doing what I think someone's who's like in my position should be doing, there's a need for you to both mentor and like, not just push a ladder back down so people can get up, but push a lot of ladders back down and try to find new ways for people to get into the industry and get the experiences that, you know will propel their careers quickly, but also do it in a way that is frankly unbiased and is not showing favoritism.
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• And I think that's all complex and it's not easy. But I think in some ways, when I think about what I do for a living and why I'm in this moment? I think that's part of the reason why I've been gifted with this ability to do any of this work, because I want to do it. I've came up in an environment where there were, it's a weird thing because I came up in an environment where there was a time when I started in this career, there were no black people around me and I was uncomfortable being the only black person in the room.
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• And that was years. And not just uncomfortable, but also, it was early in my career, so that was the lowest ranking person in the room. And the person that even outside of all the other circumstances, no one probably listened to in the first place. And then I realized somewhere along the line, there came this weird moment because I had spent so much time in spaces that were basically non-black or just exclusively white and male, that I realized that, there was this dude, He's still a friend of mine, this dude named Marcus came and worked with this agency I worked at and it was just us. It was like two of us. And it was like 150 people at this agency. And I realized that I had spent much time in that space where it was just non-black that I was all of a sudden uncomfortable when I was not the only black person in the room.
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• And that took a bit to unwind because I was like, it's not that I like hanging out with my own people, what is going on here. But I think it's just, you get used to certain kinds of situations and you get used to being the only one and all of a sudden, in seeing someone else put on the mask of, I mean, whiteness, for lack of a better term, you see yours much more clearly. And I think that was probably the thing that unsettled me. I was like, "Oh, so that's, that's what I look like." And it's a weird thing because again, I both understand the necessity of it, but I also, I think that was the point at which I started to realize that I needed to find a way to unwind that mask because, I started to understand what it was actually doing to my soul, which is, it was splitting me in a way that I did not intend to be split.
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• And ultimately it was affecting my work. Affecting how I saw the stories that I told and why I told them. So yeah, it's a weird, complex thing to be who we are in the spaces that we operate in. Like you mentioned earlier, the more northward I go, the more rare it is to see people like me in those spaces, which makes me even more determined to put people in these spaces as quickly as possible that come from my background. And that are just, it's not even really from my background, that are just not homogenous. The amount of homogeny, especially in tech, in leadership, it's staggering. And there's no explanation, or if you do get an explanation, it's one of the more offensive explanations you could find. So yeah, that's part of my dedication to kind of fixing that quickly as possible.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• I totally get that. I think the idea of being the only, and I've spoken at length about this to many people and I think previously on the show too, but like, there's almost this psychological trauma that's created there where, and I know you have been big into poetry. I used to do all through college and I think post-college too, I was on slam teams. Yeah. And there was this one thing where I kind of talk about this idea in this poem that I wrote that was called heritage. And it was like, when will I ever be free from this idea of me that's embedded with a we, every time I speak.
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• Remy Merriex:
• Yeah.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• And it was just like, it went over a lot of people's heads. I was like, it's like, every time I speak, I speak for everybody that looks like me, but I don't see them. And it's so hard.
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• So then when you introduce someone else, I mean, it's like, well, I thought I was the person, why do I need another? And it all almost creates for me at least, my experience is like, sometimes it can create this almost this abrasive nature initially for me, where I go, instead of welcoming that site to your point of like, you've been there by yourself for so long that you're like, "Why are you here?" And then you're like, "Damn. Have I become a part of the problem?" Almost, but as you continue to grow higher and higher right now, because now you're this director, you're a space moving, at some point to this VP space. When you think about the ladders that you push down.
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• Remy Merriex:
• Yeah. Right.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• How was your experience with the ladders being pushed down for you in climbing that?
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• Remy Merriex:
• That's a great question. I think the delusion of self-sustaining, pull up your own, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. If you had asked me this question like four years ago, I would've been like nobody. Nobody helped me do it. And then, I've grown and gotten smarter. And what I would say is, is a boatload of people. Like is a boatload to people, and the thing that's interesting about that boatload of people is, a lot of them, I did not realize they were helping me at the time and it didn't feel like they were helping me at the time. There're people that, and it's weird, some of them did it intentionally, meaning that they were like, they saw something in Remy, and they tried to find a way to move me along either in my own head or in very practical ways, like in my career.
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• And some of these people helped me along because they were bad managers or because they made me rethink things, because they were so bad at their jobs in some way or another. But yeah, there's a lot of people that helped me along and that's not counting my family who's put up with a whole lot of nonsense from me. And I think my family's had running gag that I'd be a billionaire or homeless, but not in between. So, and I think, there's a lot of that hat has helped me along and I try to think now about what things would've looked like if I actually had no support and actually had no helping hands along the way. And I can imagine there's just a lot of people that I could not see ever.
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• As a matter of fact, there was one cat, that got me one of my first tech jobs. I thought this guy did not like me at all. Like had no interest in me and thought I was like a waste of time. And it was another black dude. And it wasn't until like six years later that I just heard through the grapevine, because it was after I had moved on from this organization, and somebody mentioned that because he was part of my hiring loop, somebody mentioned to me that I had worked with them. They were like, "Yeah when we were interviewing you, he was the guy that was like, "There's no way we are not hiring this person." I will fight to the death, anybody that thinks that he's not ready for it or any of this other stuff.""
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• But as a personality, he let none of that slide at all. None of it came through. This guy was super, super hard on me. And again, looking back on it now, I'm like, I kind of get it. I get what you were trying to do. And it was never, even today, we've never had a conversation about it or talk through it. But I think I understand it. I mean, I think that looking back, I see a lot of those either helping hands up, or somebody like grabbing me by the collar and dragging me up.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• Yeah. One of the last things here is when you think about the ladders that you are now pushing down, you did mention this one thing earlier, this idea of trying to do that, but also presenting that in an equitable way where there's no bias, there's no nepotism involved, which is, I felt that. When you said that, I was like, "Oh man, I feel that." But when it comes to navigating that, how have you managed to balance those two ideas?
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• Remy Merriex:
• I think the simplest way for me to do describe it or how I think about it is, it's almost an equity question to a certain extent, in the sense that when I think about what a lot of people walk into their careers with, in terms of support, finances, education, even an understanding of how to be 'professional'. I think that you will find through social inequities, that quite a few people that look like me, do not have those skills and they were never taught those skills. They weren't passed down those skills, because we were specifically excluded from having those. And so sometimes when I think about what that bias that I'm, the intentional bias that I'm including, is to make sure that we have a set of standards that we're operating from and the standards are not intended.
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• When I say professionalism, I'm not talking about the clothes that you wear or even the way that you talk, it's more about the way that you work and how effective you are and how efficient you are and how you think about things. And I think that, you have a lot of people that come from, especially from white males, from educating environments, they just, they have been taught from very, very early ages, how to operate in these environments and these environments are specifically designed for them. And so when I see folks that don't have those skills or that I think those kind of traits can be sharpened in, those are the things I go after.
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• When I say that I'm mindful about bias, what I mean by that is, I have zero tolerance in my own self for, and I'm constantly checking it, for things like giving opportunities to people that look like me because they look like me or overlooking people that may have already had everything baked, because the other thing is, as much as I can say things about a systemic issue, like racism or systemic inequality, that doesn't apply to every individual and every individual must be taken on their own merits.
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• But I can say broadly speaking, if you ask me, there are not enough Black women in tech or in entertainment, there are not enough Asian women or Trans Pacific Islanders that are in these spaces. And there's a reason why that happens. And so my job, when I think about pulling people up, is to not just make equality for equality's sake or diversity for diversity's sake, because my profession is storytelling. It's really important to me that we have storytellers that actually reflect the real world. And the reality of the real world is that it is not completely in habited by White dudes. It is inhabited by this wonderful spectrum of humanity. And I think that we need more of those storytellers in these spaces. We need more executive creative directors and the creative executives on the studio side. We need more heads of studios to be people that do not strike off as homogenous across things in our industry, which is in a lot of cases what's been going on.
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• I think it's obviously changing in some important ways, but when I think about pulling folks up, it is that, and it is also if we're being really honest, it's also not just a social inequity based on race. It's also social inequity based on financial background and upbringing. So those things all factor into it in my mind, but all of it has to be very, very carefully measured against, am I actively doing something that is excluding folks because of some like broad perception that I may have. That's a big red flag and it's, even when I'm building other leaders, it's something I'm very intense about. Letting them know that they have to, it is not a one off thing where you go, "Oh, I'm not biased, and so I can just move on."
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• It's a constant revolving cycle where you must ask yourself, is this a biased decision? Is there something influencing my decision that is not fair. It has to keep going and going and going. And I think the more power quite frankly, that you get, the more intentional you have to ask that question because it's easier and easier for you to make biased decisions that you then ignore that they are biased.
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• Justin James Lopez:
• That is amazing. Amazing advice to walk off on, is right, as the higher you get, the more you have to be intentional about the biases that may be creeping in, because your decisions carry a lot more weight, right? And I think that, the last thing that I, I'm going to take that gem with me, but like the last thing is, that idea that you mentioned of shifting the conversation from a lot of times, it's ability, but may not be ability. It may be access. And when you look at it the wrong way, then you completely create this exclusionary boundary that may or may not be valid, because, what you're actually asking. And a lot of the things that you mentioned kind of hit home for me because I also come from a, I'm just going to say poor because I don't even think there was there like a social class for how poor we were growing up.
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• So it was just like, I get that. I remember going to college and getting to, I was the first person to go to college in my family, and getting to this elite university with all of these white, rich prep school kids that had so much more information. And I thought I was stupid, because I just didn't have the same books. I had outdated books. That's where I was studying from. And I didn't have the same resources. So when walking in, when they just inherently knew things, I registered that as, "Oh, they're just smarter than Me." And not realizing like, no, they had this book when they were three. I didn't get it until I was 17. So, it's one of those things I love that you hit on that aspect of it as well. Remi, thank you so much, so much for your time here and for joining me on this episode.
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• Remy Merriex:
• Oh Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me. This is fantastic. Yeah.
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