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Animating the everyday life of an entrepreneur with Mailchimp Presents
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How we produced an animated series for Mailchimp about being a small business owner.
All In A Day’s Work is an animated series of comedy shorts revealing the ups, downs and sometimes-painful truths of life as an entrepreneur. Designed to live on Mailchimp Presents, It’s Nice That produced and created 12 episodes with some of the world’s most exciting animators and sound artists.
To create original content ideas that reflect the entrepreneurial experience, while aligning with
Mailchimp's aim to provide business entertainment.
We focused closely on one particular part of the brief, which was to highlight the emotional highs and lows of being a small business owner. Our idea was to develop a range of stories about a day in the life of various entrepreneurs. We then tried to get into the mindset of business owners to identify common experiences that we could bring to life. After landing on a tactile and organic-feeling creative direction for the series, we felt Buck, a multidisciplinary creative studio headquartered in New York, and Oscar-nominated animation director, Siqi Song, were perfect for the project. We created a synopsis for each story to make sure each one was distinct, and then worked closely with both teams to develop the scripts.
Season 1: All In A Day's Work trailer
Season 2: All In A Day's Work trailer
One of the biggest challenges of this project was the fact we couldn’t use any dialogue. Mailchimp wanted the films to be as internationally relatable as possible, so we had to avoid language and find other ways to communicate emotion instead. Buck, Siqi and ourselves worked hard to develop story arcs that could convey a range of emotional experiences through the character’s movements and sound.
For example, in Buck’s Lost in the Crowd an introverted entrepreneur battles with his social awkwardness by hiding at a busy networking event. And, in Siqi’s Unstoppable Rise, an exhausted and highly caffeinated baker accidentally falls asleep before a visit from a top chef.
With our stories in place, the directors then set about developing the characters and set design. Getting the styling just right required several stages of development. We also wanted to set each story in a different city, again to help the series be globally relevant.
To avoid cultural appropriation, we steered clear of stereotypes and looked at subtler details of each city to weave into the shorts when designing environments. For example, in Door to door salesman set in Tokyo, our sound designers Sounds Like These created a soundtrack inspired by 70s and 80s Japanese pop music.
Season 2 character development
- Total campaign reach of 2.5 million people on It’s Nice That
- Over 3 million impressions across all of It’s Nice That channels
- More than 120,000 social video views
- Celebrated press from the likes of Campaign and Trendhunter
- Winner of multiple Telly Awards and shortlisted by ADC Awards and ANDYs
The final episodes were hosted on Mailchimp Presents. To drive readers towards watching the series, we created two articles interviewing Buck, Siqi and Sounds Like These about what went on behind the scenes, as well as a supporting media campaign.
We’re extremely proud of All in a Day’s Work and the charm of each of the 12 episodes. The collaboration between ourselves, Mailchimp, Buck and Siqi made it particularly special and the fact we all put so much into the project contributed greatly to the final outcome.
"After paying close connection to each character it was a great experience to see them come to life and live out their day on screen,” says Ali Hanson, creative at It’s Nice That. “This was an amazing project for It’s Nice That to explore animation and fictional storytelling at a high level, and with a breadth of extremely talented people.”