Ryan Marx

Skateboarding was my main focus — it was like everything I did! But I actually went into a boat-building apprenticeship when I left school, as I was quite handy  at that kind of stuff (hard to believe now) and was good at woodwork, but I eventually ended up at Whitcliffe College

had a year-one introduction course that was basically just drawing people — like life drawing. At the time, all my friends were doing video filming and editing, and I saw them having so much fun while I was stuck in an apprenticeship, and realised this was my time to have fun, too. My friends encouraged me, said I was really good at drawing, and I should join the course. I became a student and had the time of my life. I was very inspired, design-wise, by Transworld [Skateboarding] magazine and David Carson — everything really revolved around skateboarding.

I then went to AUT, and, to be honest, I had to try really hard because my wiring wasn’t quite right for study. The year above me had some great designers who are still designing to this day, but in some way my class seemed not quite as good. The tutors were great, and we’ve hired students in the past from AUT who have been quite incredible and very creative. I just think it was my year really, but I was in a bit of a hurry, too. I needed to find some work really quickly when I left: I used to do commercial cleaning at night, as well as scanning court documents until two o’clock in the morning, just to pay the bills.

I ended up doing a whole lot of flyers, reading loads of books, and I used to do a whole lot of publication work for a place called Eon Design, which was a designer homeware store in Auckland that Simon James and Al Keating from Coffee Supreme came up through, too.

Then a woman from Parachute Music randomly approached me and said ​‘Hey, I’ve seen all your flyers and stuff, and would you like a job?’ I was like ​‘Hell yeah’, so I used to design all their festival stuff starting in 2002, and carried on for years building up quite a strange portfolio. 

When I decided I wanted to be in a real agency, I wrote Paul Dashwood a letter, and he said, ​‘Wow, I love your initiative. Come in and show me your portfolio.’ I had this big board of posters and weird things I’d done, and he seemed to find it really interesting and gave me a job. It was hard, really hard, we were doing identities for Sir Edmund Hillary and also had the Frucor account. Back then it was all about basically showing the client how much work you’d done. For Sir Edmund Hillary’s 50^th anniversary I did about 200 logos and we used to sell it as a massive workbook.

I had been at Dashwood Design for a while when a friend, Tim Checkley, said we should start a design company. He’s a great designer, very technical; he works with Serato now. He’s the most genius kind of character with an outrageously creative brain — I’ve never really met anyone like him. So we started a company and wanted the name to be the most anti kind of design name ever, so we called it Eagle Graphics. We got a studio in Kingsland, in Auckland, and started doing just nuts and bolts stuff for friends.

I became art director for Traffick, which was a skateboard company run by Justin Watene. It was quite big back in the day, and we got to do some really wacky stuff. That led to working with Kog Transmissions [a collective of musicians, composers and producers] and Midium Records who were all based in Kingsland, too; it felt like a real grassroots community. Askew One, the graffiti artist, wanted to do a publication called Disrupt Magazine, so we designed the first two of those with him in our studio. It led to getting more exposure, and we did the Hip Hop Summit with DJ Sir-Vere, created packaging for Primo, and we did a game! We actually made heaps of money and we didn’t know what to do because we never had money, so we just bought a whole lot of plants and stuff. We’d been poor for so long and didn’t have a mortgage or kids, just living in a one-bedroom flat in Mount Albert. It felt like we were on holiday all the time just doing what we wanted, and it was actually really weirdly successful

No, they’re great. We get everything out on the wall, even if it’s just the initial thought, so we can call it at the front end, see what we’re trying to achieve. We tend to just interrogate and talk and think, see how we can stretch it and pull it. Heaps of Blu Tack and big Post-it notes. I’m working in the garage at the moment, and I’ve got this big wall, and I can get everything up there, so when you sit back and look at stuff. You see the bigger picture — I like that.

Terrible. I went to The Pond, a freelance agency, and did a bit of stuff through them at the start. I’d be like the guy that goes into FCB [advertising agency] helping on a pitch and working the weekend, like 74 hours in three days kind of stuff. It was really hard financially, and I remember having to sell camping gear just to pay the mortgage — it was way harder than I had thought it would be. Then I had my first employee, Alan Hughes, and it was really helpful for me to be working with someone else — the left hand helping the right hand type thing. He was a really important part of Marx at the start. Then the Fracture Studio guys called us up as they had a lot of identity and print and stuff, and they asked us to share their studio with them on Beach Road in Parnell. They had all these projects lined up, and it was really consistent. I think it’s where we really cut our teeth with those guys. This was 2009 and it was all boys: just dirty and gross, but awesome.

We started doing packaging work for a Fijian company called Vonu Beer and worked on that for about a year consistently. They built a brewery in Fiji and eventually sold it to Coca-Cola, so we saw how you could add value to a brand through good design. We did a pop-up book around the story of the beer, and stuff like that. It led to a Samoan water brand, and we won some awards through Graphics magazine. We did an Indian alcohol spirit called Feni, in Goa, and had to study Mahena and Indian culture.

But there’s probably one key piece of work which really helped Marx, and I think it was the turning point. It was with Fracture, in 2001 or so, for Living Earth. It was really showcasing the product benefit and the narrative around it, and I had always wanted to create something like that which would really engage with a customer. The whole idea was doing a Jack and the Beanstalk type approach and bringing that story to the work. What do people want to do when they grow vegetables? They want to grow the biggest vegetables, so it’s a scale thing. We created this illustrated character, and it was all about his battles with growing the garden in a clean way, and we wrote copy around this. We were very influenced by Flight of the Conchords’ dumb humour, and it won a Gold at Best Awards and got covered on lots of blogs. And then the phone started ringing. People in Australia had seen the stuff and thought it was quite radical for the genre. (It’s not so radical now, but it was then.) The guys from StrangeLove called and asked if we could do stuff for them, and this Melbourne focus kind of happened for us. The Gold at Best Awards really helped spearhead it.

And then there is the Papua New Guinea story. This Russian dude called out of the blue, as he had seen the Vonu Beer stuff, and asked if we’d design some brands for him and asked for an estimate. It was a lot of work, probably around $400k worth over a long period of time, so we sent the estimate. He called back straight away and said ​‘Check your bank’ — and all the money was in our account before we’d started the work! And he goes ​‘You have to come to Papua New Guinea’, so I went to Port Moresby. Anyway, it was crazy in the end — kind of like mafia stuff — but we had money to hire, so it was incredible.

Marx really found its feet in 2013, and we got on some blogs like BP&O [Branding, Packaging and Opinion], and we tried to push our stuff hard to be noticed. We kind of figured out what we could do for people and approached work with a similar formula. We suddenly knew we needed to grow up a little. Janine Bickerton joined us (our general manager), bringing knowledge and business acumen: she set us up with systems, back-of-house support and general guidance. Janine has our back, and has always encouraged and empowered me. 

This turning point allowed us to bring Tristan O’Shannessy on board — he was at Milk before this, and we always wanted to work together. He’s such a good guy, with a great temperament, and a great designer. He got into design a little bit later, like an older student, and we were still feeling like we had a lot to prove, and were very excited about everything. It meant there were always two senior people on the jobs, and it was a lot of fun.

It’s very organic. You work with some great small companies: they grow and you grow with them. You’re servicing them, and you have to get bigger as they do. We never had a ​‘master plan’, just the desire to do great design, and to continue to do that we are growing in other offshore markets 

We look after such a varied range of clients, including some pretty big companies, and it has just grown from there. It has been a lot of fun, and still is.