Written by Darian Edwards
I wasn’t sure what to think when a friend and mentor reached out to me in late 2018 to ask if I was interested in joining the team at Playboy. Like many people, I have clear memories of my first encounters with Playboy magazine as a young teen. It was at a friend’s house, where a bunch of issues were kept in a wicker basket under the bathroom sink. Naturally I was tempted to spend time flipping through the pages and looking at the pictures, but holing up in my friend’s family bathroom would have raised some eyebrows. My curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I later found myself in hot water with my parents for ordering Playboy TV on pay-per-view without permission. So it’s safe to say Playboy was a part of my formative years. But at the time my friend called, the brand hadn’t been on my radar for some time. I really didn’t know what it was up to.
It was my wife, probably the smartest person I know and someone who never stops surprising me, who encouraged me to take the leap and consider leaving Nike for Playboy. When I first (half-jokingly) mentioned my friend’s proposal and moving to Los Angeles, her immediate response was “That would be amazing!” She then recounted Playboy’s rich history as a champion of civil rights and other important social causes through the decades. I had no idea she knew so much about the brand. Her reaction inspired me to do some homework of my own. What I discovered was that the core principles Playboy has celebrated since launching in 1953 — freedom of speech, social justice, equality and the freedom to enjoy sex — are still the foundations of the brand today. And perhaps most exciting, Playboy continues to evolve as our culture grapples with new challenges and embraces new norms.
Nike had long been my dream job, and it took me a while to get there. I grew up as a black kid on the South Side of Chicago and later moved to a small town in Colorado, where I was suddenly one of only three black kids in my high school. I’ve always been driven. I’ve always had the desire to learn and grow and the confidence that I would carve my own path to success. But just a decade ago there were still very few black people in the tech field in Silicon Valley. I had a beautiful portfolio that got the attention of major companies including Yahoo and Google, but I never made it through the second interview. The feedback was, “We don’t know if you’re a culture fit.” I didn’t even know what that meant. It made me wonder whether I needed to act more white in order to fit it.
Things began to turn around when I started working with a company called Orchestra. I was part of a small team that developed an app called Mailbox that was intended to reinvent e-mail for the mobile era. The app blew up. At one point more than 5 million people were waiting to use it. Soon the company was acquired by Dropbox. I was experiencing the kind of success that I knew would lead to more opportunities.
Around that time, a friend and team member from Orchestra who had gone to Nike told me the company was looking for someone who understood technology, sports and streetwear culture. Not many people had all that. He introduced me to a couple of marketing directors at Nike who wanted someone to help come up with concepts for an app. So while I was still at Dropbox, I was moonlighting at Nike. The truth is, I would have done it for free. The concept became the Nike SNKRS app. As they got serious about its development, I was informed I would have to join Nike if I wanted to work on the project.
Growing up playing sports in Chicago, I was a Chicago Bulls fan. Michael Jordan was my hero. Just getting e-mails from people at Nike felt surreal. Prior to this, my family knew I was achieving some success, but they didn’t really understand what I was doing. Now they could relate to Nike, and my success was more real to them. I started at Nike as a senior interaction designer, part of a small team called Brand Innovation. We were responsible not only for the SNKRS app but for such things as in-store touch-screen displays and the Nike FuelBand, the first wearable device that could track steps. From there I moved to the brand design team, working on everything from digital products to big category campaigns to activations; then came the opportunity to be a design lead and design director working on Nike Plus and then Nike Digital. We were involved in everything from apps to the Nike Plus Apple Watch to Nike.com to Nike retail tools.
The Nike culture is fast-paced and highly competitive, and I thrived there. But after five and a half years I started to think about making a change. Initially I thought my next move would be somewhere like Google or Yahoo, places I’d set my sights on in the past. But as I took a closer look at Playboy’s legacy and what the brand was currently up to, including its mission of “Pleasure for All,” it seemed like a great opportunity to take what I’d learned throughout my career and bring it to a place that was ripe for change, a place where they were not only building great products and inventing new technologies but also establishing a culture around innovation. Playboy was going to fill the next chapters in my career story. So in February 2019, my family left Portland and moved to Los Angeles.
Coming from the Nike campus with close to 7,000 employees to the Playboy offices on the 22nd floor of a West L.A. high-rise was a bit of a shock, but what really got my attention was (and is) the racial and gender diversity. To begin with, I’d never before worked with so many women executives and creatives. I remember in early conversations with the team they would refer to Playboy as a 65-year-old startup (this was a little over a year ago). At the time, I thought that sounded good in theory, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. But when I got here, it actually felt that way. I liked the tight-knit community of the office. I’d just come from an environment where you connected with HR via a hotline; now if I have a question I can walk down the hall to the People team or walk a few steps to chat with the person who does payroll.
Last year I attended a co-worker’s birthday party at the Abbey in West Hollywood. Among the guests was an artist named Candy Ken, who wore a robe and a G-string made of candy. I remember thinking how awesome it was that he felt free to be exactly who he wanted to be. At that party, surrounded by people like Candy Ken and my new colleagues, I felt inspired that I was with people who were living their truth and accepting that in others, no matter what that was. Playboy gives people the permission, the encouragement, the space and the inspiration to be themselves, whatever that is. Playboy is unlike any other workplace I’ve been in — people being confident, being bold, being comfortable in their own skin. I want to wear sneakers and hoodies and graphic T-shirts and be into hip-hop — and at Playboy that doesn’t mean I’m unprofessional. It doesn’t mean that because I look a certain way I might come off as a thug or a street punk. Playboy’s brand work over the past year and a half really represents what that’s all about.
As Playboy’s head of design and engineering, I have the opportunity to bring into our team designers, creative directors and engineers who use their talent and vision to reimagine everything — from the magazine and other products both physical and digital, to marketing campaigns — for the Playboy brand and our licensees around the world. We develop creative direction, design packaging, source materials and work with vendors and manufacturers. I stack my team with smart, down-to-earth people who are passionate about what we do and scrappy in their approach. And above all I value humility and integrity — they’re the glue that holds a team together.
On the digital side, we’re excited about the future of Playboy.com and the evolution of our print strategy into a digital-first subscription model. We have an amazing opportunity to lean into digital as a new way to interact with Playboy’s content, adding a new dimension and new points of engagement — and actual back-and-forth interaction–to our storytelling. It’s a unique opportunity to define what the magazine means to us and to shape how people experience Playboy.
We approach projects by clearly defining our goals, objectives and the purpose behind what we’re building and then use creative problem solving to quickly prototype solutions. We take a first-principles approach, asking a lot of questions and treating all potential solutions as assumptions to be tested and explored. We work closely in cross-functional teams to leverage expertise and insights from and across brand, marketing, creative, data and analytics.
In 2019 Playboy laid out a lot of what we call “breadcrumbs,” putting down a trail for our audiences to follow as we evolve the brand and activate our mission. We did it in a subtle “show, not tell” way that encourages discovery. In 2020 we’re poised to be more outward-facing in telling our brand story through strong campaigns that put a stake in the ground and articulate a new point of view on the right to pleasure.
We like to work hard and play hard. We’re at a place where everyone is fired up about the future we’re creating for Playboy and our consumers. We’re sprinting toward our goals and having fun while doing it. It’s an exciting time to be here, to tell people what we stand for and to begin to share more broadly and more loudly what we’re working on and what we’ve been so excited about. It took a lot to get me here, and I’m excited and proud to be on this Playboy journey. These latest chapters of my career are becoming real page-turners!
