Jelby Make Work That’ll Make You Say, ‘What the F*** I Love That’
Joey Johnson and Shelby Tamura love making work that makes people say, ‘what the f*** I love that’.
The creative duo – affably now known as Jelby – first met in 2021 while working on the Coors Light account at DDB Chicago before joining forces with Mother LA as creative directors. They shared a similarly ‘weird and dark’ sense of humour and were into a lot of the same shows, movies, creative work, Pokémon cards, and, importantly, found themselves challenging a similar set of ideals within the industry. Who coined the nickname Jelby they don’t remember but are convinced it stuck because it matched their ‘overall love of weirdness’.
“I hadn’t had a steady partner for a couple of years and had been trying to find someone I clicked with creatively, which is hard!” says Joey. “If you don’t start your career together, it can be difficult to get suddenly mashed together with someone and be forced to make that work out. But because Shelby and I shared a ton of similar interests, many of our ideas were born out of a shared vocabulary in terms of references and tastes, making it really easy to start working together.”
Before teaming up on their first project together, Joey and Shelby were already in the weeds of a collaborative Google doc purely dedicated to random ideas. “They weren’t necessarily for ads even,” says Shelby, “just fake products we’d think up as a cathartic way to appease our rampant dark humour. And that sense of bonding quickly somersaulted into a shorthand for when we started working on official briefs.”
Throughout our interview, the importance of humour in nurturing the Jelby partnership is a consistent thread. In fact, it’s been part of Joey and Shelby’s relationship from the very beginning, with Shelby’s first message to Joey being what he remembers as “an incredibly biting joke delivered in a very ‘deadpan Shelby’ way” that he couldn’t stop laughing at. “Beyond that, I was drawn to Shelby’s commitment to figuring stuff out. She refused to accept something for what it was if it wasn’t working. She’d spend hours coming at it from different ways to figure out how to make it better, which is a big reason why she still inspires me,” says Joey.
“I remember Joey’s positive attitude and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy sees the world in vivid colour,’” adds Shelby. “Only to find that’s physiologically inaccurate due to Joey being colour-blind.”
As a duo, Joey and Shelby feel their qualities overlap a lot. To Joey, Shelby is the better and more consistent line writer, but thanks to his tendency as a kid to spend every waking hour inside, his mental reference library for film helps a lot when trying to pull a specific visual. “Our brains have more or less melded together by this point,” adds Joey.
“The second I start to think we have our trademark ways of approaching work that, in turn, challenge our perspectives to think a new way, we will very unintentionally switch hats and adopt each other’s methods on the next project,” says Shelby. “Perhaps this is secretly to indulge our own desires to show up as the smart one that says, ‘When you mentioned that thing, I actually thought about it this way…’. This iterative process of approaching ideas at new angles has become a productive way to simplify what-ifs and get to the core of an idea faster.”
Much of their creative process begins with the familiar concept of ‘man bites dog’, harnessing the power of flipping something people would expect from a brand on its head. “Every headline today is so shocking that it’s hard to really surprise people,” says Joey. “But simplicity helps. In a world where everyone's eyes are splintered across a thousand different screens at once, making something surprising yet easy to understand that forces people to say ‘what the f***’ and scroll back up to see it again is a big driving force for us.”
“To Joey’s point,” adds Shelby, “the magic formula has less to do with trying to make an idea edgy and more about getting to the core of it by first stating it in the most straightforward way possible. That’s when it highlights a truth in our reality, and it starts to feel f***ed up.”
What’s more, beyond their shared passions and interests, Joey and Shelby feel they balance each other out well when speaking about their work. Joey thinks out loud and, in his mind at least, ‘probably too much’. While Shelby is more likely to deliver the incisive single sentence that clarifies all of Joey’s out-loud thoughts.
‘Get Your Sh*t Together, Baby’, a 2023 campaign for Paid Leave for All, a non-profit fighting for paid family and medical leave for all US workers, is, in the minds of Jelby, a perfect example of their collaboration. “Everything about that campaign just clicked together incredibly well, partly thanks to great partners, but mostly because it started from that simple ‘what the f***’ idea everyone agreed to,” says Joey. “From there, it was about combining really ‘what the f***’ writing with ‘what the f***’ visuals to make something fresh and exciting. Which wasn’t hard because the truths about modern parenting in the United States are extremely ‘what the f***’.
“There’s a power in having the comfort to be vulnerable with your partner,” he adds, pondering the benefits of such a close collaborator. “Which only happens when you’ve worked together for years, or at least just sat camera-off on Zoom burping at each other in the pandemic. You’re not afraid to say the first incredibly stupid idea out loud, or be afraid to be wildly wrong in front of each other.”
“Honestly, it's everything Joey said. But I’ll also add that creatives go through approximately 23.45 billion thoughts while coming up with the idea,” says Shelby. “Most of those ideas end up not going anywhere but are still riffs that make us laugh or a visual ingrained in our heads forever. We both build that idea repository together, and one day down the road, I might have that synaptic connection back to a funny thing Joey said the other day, and suddenly, it inspires an entirely different way into a brief.”
