Esguerra believes creativity should be something you can’t ignore. It must provoke the status quo in order to shift perspectives and take us toward a life driven by purpose.
My belief
I believe in clients who believe in themselves. I take jobs that matter. I believe brands can do more. I believe everyone is creative. Everyone may not be "A Creative," but we all share the capacity. Call it controlled chaos.
I love bad ideas. I love rants. I love dyslexia. I love passion, fire, obsession. It's not about awards, or praise, or likes, or shares, or ROI, or metrics. It's about humanity. It's about creating memories, big and small, that stick with you and remind us brands can do more. They can help us say what we've been trying to say.
Life matters. Let's make it count.
Bio
Snake catcher. Snow shoveler. Burger flipper. House cleaner. Knife salesman. Shoe salesman. High school dropout. Retail associate. Hotel receptionist. Soldier. Busboy. Waiter. Bartender. BFA graduate. Product designer. Interior architect. Graphic designer. Experiential designer. Creative director. Painter. Activist. SVP, Executive CD. Entrepreneur. Dad. And now, apparently, a guest lecturer.
Raised in a family of designers and fine artists, Alex is a natural-born creative whose work spans digital, interaction, graphic, fashion, illustration, interior, and product design.
Born on the Central Coast of California and raised in New York, Alex enlisted in the United States Air Force at 18 as a Pararescue Jumper. He left special forces training to serve as a command post controller in Germany during Operation Enduring Freedom.
He went on to study Product Design at Parsons The New School for Design, graduating near the top of his class. His award-winning senior thesis proposed a digitally structured urban recycling system to support the homeless community, built around an incentive-based rewards program and stored debit card technology. From there, Alex worked across product, graphic, interior, and experiential design at agencies including IDEO, Mother New York, R/GA, NA Collective, Optimist, and Wondros.
From 2010 to 2020, he created and led Love & Paint, an experiential art project that invited couples to take their intimacy to the canvas and share the stories behind it. He brought the work to Frieze London in 2013, in service of a simple idea: regardless of race, gender, culture, or sexual identity, sex is the great equalizer, the common source of birth, pleasure, and union. Alex then returned to the agency world as Executive Creative Director, North America at Jack Morton Worldwide, where he helped the West Coast office win pivotal pitches and was selected for the global creative team's accelerated growth plan.
In 2021, Alex co-founded DOG PPL, where he serves as CEO. He continues to find ways to bring people together, whether through art, brand experiences, or now, dogs. When he's not wearing the CEO pants, he's painting, or guest lecturing at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, which still surprises him a little.
“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have the time for things that have no soul.”
—Charles Bukowski