24 Hours With… Kumar Manix, founder and creative director at The Spaceship
24 Hours With… spotlights the working day of some of the most interesting people in Mumbrella’s world. Today we speak with Kumar Manix, founder and creative director at The Spaceship.
5:30am The moment I open my eyes, my brain starts whirring. The mornings are when I do my best work and it’s when I feel energised to tackle the big stuff. Before that I catch up on all things social using my phone.
I sit down in my make-shift home office covered by my eight year old’s marvel sketches and start thinking about dragons and eSports.. While my day to day life is spent running activation campaigns at The Spaceship, I also have a number of tech start up projects that are in early concept development.
Today I’m trying to solve a start-up problem that affects nobody but me; how can I make a group of colourful dragons become the most playful and smartest virtual pet ever? Despite doing my best thinking in the morning, I come nowhere close to unlocking this particular secret.
7:00am After I emerge from my home office, I flick on the television. I religiously watch Fox Sports News in the morning. It’s my passion and a quick 30 minutes of me-time where I get to see the scores, watch the highlights and the ‘best-of’ action in one go.
Before I leave the house, I spend some time hanging out with my two kids Kiran and Ria. As I leave, I give each of them a cuddle and whisper, “Now remember, there’s only one Kiran and Ria in the world.” I walk out the door and wave goodbye to their little faces in the front window as I drive away. Sometimes, actually most of the times, they don’t come to the window. This ain’t no TV ad. Work with me.
7:30am I head to Deus Café in Camperdown. It’s on my way to the office, but also happens to be my absolute favourite café. I don’t even think about my order, it’s my standard go-to, their bacon and egg roll with a zingy tomato relish. Reality check. I don’t do this every day.
I use the (relatively) quiet time to check out Hype Beast and drool over the latest in the world of street culture and sneakers. Wifey has me on a budget as I seem to have too many sneakers to actually wear or do anything meaningful with them.
8:00am I have one person I call religiously every morning. A former colleague who I talk smack with about everything and anything. I clear my voicemail from the previous day and call those that I can call before 9am without upsetting.
9:30am In the office we sit down as a team and have a Sprints session. This is when we brainstorm ideas and bring them to life through visuals and storyboarding, presenting back to a client within three days. We do this often with partner agencies and new projects.
Over the course of a 30 minute session, I sniff the sweet fruit scented textas in a creepy way and my staff pull faces at me. I smash a cheeky mango smoothie (I’ve never been a coffee fan).
11:30am I head to the office of one of our entertainment clients along with my special projects lead Ben Rush. It’s for the launch of a new TV season and it’s one of the most innovative and exciting agency briefing sessions I’ve ever attended.
There’s champagne flowing, videos playing, guest appearances from talent and the room is filled with excitement. This has really set the tone for the show, and they are talking an open brief with big ideas.
1:30pm I meet Drew Parkes, my general manager at the Dickson St food court in China Town for lunch. Bit of a dive but as authentic as it comes, and I’ve been going there since my uni days. It’s a familiar setting with comfort food and I order the chow rice noodle combo from the same couple I’ve been ordering from for almost 20 years.
We spend 5-10 minutes debriefing on The Spaceship which quickly segues into one of my start up projects where Drew is a partner-in-fun. After much thinking and banging our heads together, we try to solve the unsolvable. How can we conquer Vegas with eSports? It remains unsolvable. The answer will come.
3:30pm My son, Kiran, has a basketball training on this afternoon, so I leave the office early to get there and take my coveted role of ‘Ball Boy’ on his team. He’s an eight year old basketball fanatic and I’m his biggest fan. My primary role, other than cheering, is to fetch the balls which seem to always miss the net and backboard.
5:00pm I go home and tag-team my wife into the evening parenting. She’s in the health field and fortunately she’s around tonight so we catch up on all things and plan the weekend out including Kiran’s basketball game, going to our beloved Rabbitohs home game and visiting my parents.
6:00pm My phone is fully charged and it’s time to do conference calls with clients in Asia. We talk campaigns and upcoming projects. It’s all systems go for a tour we are doing in a few weeks in Asia to showcase a new suite of games for our client XBox.
Some of our guest talent are coming from the US so we are working on their schedule whilst fans are already trying to guess and leak the big reveals.
7:00pm We have dinner as a family every night we are home. On the menu is salad with our favourite Japanese Sesame dressing and some thinly cut grilled steak. We have Nick JNR blaring in the background whilst we sit around the kitchen bench and chomp away.
8:30pm It’s shower time for my kids, and while I know I’ll never win a ‘Father of the Year’ Award, I can openly admit I do a bang-up job of shower time. It’s the only time Kiran and Ria are allowed to play with water pistols and super soakers with no concern for making a mess.
9:30pm It’s officially time for bed. I make it my nightly ritual to try go to bed the same time as my kids do.
As I turn off the light and settle down to sleep, I sit bolt upright and ask my wife a burning question: “Do you have any ideas how we can make colourful dragons more playful and smart to take over the world?”
She doesn’t. Maybe tomorrow will bring the answer…
Kumar, I think you could really benefit from 22 minutes of transcendental meditation in the morning as well as home-brewed Kombucha if you want to solve the colourful dragons dilemma.
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Nice to hear that you are still powering along mate. Nice to know you’re working with Drew as well.
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