Grownkid on why creatives will be the ones to survive the current job market

Grownkid, a NYC-based social club for Gen Z, has gained traction for their wacky, zeitgeisty events: ‘gym bros benching twinks n dolls’; ‘wrestling speed dating’, and the like. According to the founders, the meaning of life is play, and especially when you’re figuring it out as a 20-something, playing around and doing things just for the sake of doing them is essential. We chatted making up a job for yourself as a creative, internet aesthetics and how a playful energy will lead people your way.

Gael Aitor and Kayla Suarez, co-founders of Grownkid

Tell us about Grownkid?
Our goal with Grownkid is to make young adulthood more connected through community and play. We hold weekly events – each time something different, something unexpected – where the goal is to teach life and social skills masked as rebellious youth culture.

Recently, we've done an event called ‘wrestling speed dating’, where we’re teaching people that consent is attractive and mutual consent is important, and ‘fight your evil situationship boxing rave’, where the goal is to show that healthy conflict is key to a happy life and that you shouldn't ghost each other. There's a mix of more emotional types of events where you really tune into yourself and ones where you just connect and have fun. We try to have depth in everything.

We started off as a podcast; again, we had the same goal of helping 20-somethings live a more meaningful career and life. We realised we wanted to go deeper and so now Grownkid has really turned into its own culture and lifestyle brand: weekly events, a weekly podcast and soon, clothing.

What has been your favorite event so far?
I personally really love our 'yearn le bon' event, where we essentially listen to songs in a dark room with visuals. It's a lot of intentional listening to songs and the memories they evoke in us. Afterwards, people begin to talk about their own experiences if they've heard the song before. It's like group therapy.

How do playfulness and creativity show up across your brand and events?
The philosophy of Grownkid is the meaning of life is play; what that means is it takes playfulness to deal with life's challenges. Ultimately, a playful attitude allows you to overcome so much and have the courage to live a life of your own. We believe that play leads to confidence, confidence leads to care and care sustains community. And ultimately, your community is what gives you strength to go through day-to-day life.

Play and playfulness are very distinct. Play is the act of doing activities without pressure for results: it is simply playing around; it is exploring; it is trying things. When you're a 20-something looking to find your passion in this world, your career, a lot of it involves play because you don't know what to do, you don't know what the next step should be. If you play around and try things and do stuff for the sake of doing it, eventually you’ll find those little moments of light that give you a spark.

Playfulness is an attitude you bring to life. It is how you deal with challenges; it is how you deal with other people; it is how you learn to just laugh when things are out of your control. Being a playful person attracts people into your life. We're in this culture of nonchalance, of doomerism, so the person that is playful is just super magnetic, like a light in the world.

How does that playfulness and creativity come into your work as creative directors?
It's a balance of a creative direction that is tasteful versus one that will have reach. Now, more so than ever, it seems like the bad memes and DIY looking posts are what people are gravitating to – mostly because it looks like it was made by someone like them; it feels like they're discovering something as opposed to being marketed to. The branding behind Grownkid was always about how do we strike that balance of this looks DIY, playful and approachable, but also quality.

The branding, the mascot, the logo was done in collaboration with Chris Cadaver, who's a really great designer for Golf Wang and Heaven by Marc Jacobs, so he had already designed for brands that live in the same universe as Grownkid. After that, we went on our own, and little by little, we've come to refine our brand identity and what makes it playful, grown and unique.

What made you want to throw your event entry-level job?
I knew I wanted to make something that was a commentary on unemployment. I was playing around with a couple of different ideas, and then I was just like, ‘Okay, well, everybody's unemployed. What if we made an event to give people jobs because they couldn't find any, and we just made up the jobs?’ Then we kind of just kept going with that: like, wait, all jobs are made up, nothing is real; ultimately, it just matters about how you word things – apart from the very technical jobs, of course.

So we came up with this idea that we would hire people for a day under Grownkid LLC, have them do ridiculous tasks around the city, but then ultimately help them reword the task to put it on their resume. And if anyone ever calls and asks, we're like, ‘Yeah, we hired them, they did a great job’. There's nothing in the legalities (we read the law) that says you can't do that. So we got a little office, we had people do stuff around the city and people had so much fun with it.

Is making it up as you go a viable route as a creative?
I think as a creative person, if you have grit, if you have willpower, if you have persistence, you can will jobs into existence. That's certainly the reason that I've been able to have the jobs that I have, and all the jobs that I've had I've made up. Basically, I've never had a job that someone really gave me.

I believe that ultimately it's the creative people who have this delusion and this grit who are going to be the ones that thrive. What it takes right now is making up your job, willing it into existence, bothering people, cold emailing, figuring out what you can do with the tools that you have, and again, just playing around. People are finding side hustles, finding different contractor roles and finding things they wouldn't have even thought of because the job market is forcing them to get creative.

One piece of advice for early career creatives?
I would say the most important thing is to really give yourself time to play – in every form. You have to get out of your own head, out of the project, out of the piece you're working on.

You have to play around with putting together different ideas for the sake of doing it, even if you know it's going to fail. I am constantly doing things just because I want to see what happens. People in my life will sometimes tell me, "Why are you doing this? It's not going to work." And I'm like, "I just want to see. Just let me go through it; let me go through the steps because you never know where every step will lead.”

The three things most important to building a solid community?
Consistency. It's not a community unless it's consistent. You need ritual. You need to understand what joins you and you need a set of shared values. When people absorb those values, that is the identity of the community and ultimately of the self.