Jen Lucero and the business of staying friends

Before Jen Lucero helped start a company, she helped finish an Apple project. Jayson Whitmore, one of her future partners, remembered it as a punishing assignment. Yet when it was over, he, Lucero and Brien Holman were still friends. They could still make one another laugh. Whitmore took this as encouraging evidence that they might survive something considerably more complicated: owning a business together.

His account of the founding has an appealingly practical romance. The compatibility test had already taken place, with work attached. He asked whether the other two wanted to start a studio. They said yes. In 2007, Royale opened in Los Angeles. A business partnership began with three people who had seen one another under pressure and remained willing to spend more time in the same room.

Lucero would eventually become CEO. Her career, however, makes more sense when followed through the work that preceded the title: organizing production, building relationships and helping a group of artists operate as a company. The interesting question is how to keep that group recognizable to itself as the assignments, technology and responsibilities change.

A producer before the crown

Lucero entered the industry in 1993 at David Hwang’s Two Headed Monster. She subsequently moved with Hwang and designer David Sparrgrove to Helicopter, then joined the founding staff of V12 in 1998. Her early credits crossed advertising and broadcast: agency commercials, work for ESPN, HBO and Cartoon Network, and the public television documentary series The Human Quest.

Those are different audiences, formats and institutional temperaments. A children’s television channel and an advertising agency might both need moving pictures; getting those pictures made involves rather different conversations. Lucero’s early career put her inside that mixture well before she became a founder.

In 2004, V12 and Panopoly Pictures combined their design and production departments into Full Circle. Lucero was its executive producer, responsible for overseeing projects and day-to-day management. The venture brought live action, branding, motion graphics and animation together. The range of services sounds familiar beside the company she would later help establish. By the time Royale arrived, she had already worked through the everyday mechanics of a business that crossed creative disciplines.

Paper scraps, jet planes and a television joke

Royale’s early output suggests the founders were willing to make their own rules. For a film accompanying Flaunt magazine’s ninth anniversary issue, with Diesel as sponsor, the team used the magazine itself as raw material. Colors came from scanned pages; the people came from Diesel photography. The finished piece mixed collage with animation. Lucero was credited as executive producer.

There is something pleasing about a new animation company putting a magazine through a scanner. An open brief can produce endless discussion. A rule about where every color must come from gives the discussion somewhere to go. The film was distributed on a DVD inserted into the magazine, a small reminder that even experimental work needs a delivery mechanism.

In 2008, Lucero’s executive producer credit also appeared on JetBlue’s “Happy Jetting” campaign. Royale supplied design and animation, working alongside a live-action production led by director Johan Renck. The spots combined filmed people with graphics, keeping the animation connected to the campaign’s existing print design.

That year, the studio also created branding for Comedy Central’s “Indecision 2008” election coverage and collaborated with the internal graphics team on a deliberately extravagant Daily Show promo. Jon Stewart introduced the look with a joke about television’s graphics and anchors. A company founded only the previous year was already helping television make fun of television. Lucero, again, was its executive producer.

The smallest word in the company name

By 2015, the founders were taking stock. Their small Sunset Boulevard beginning had given way to larger projects, with more people and more responsibility. The company publicly embraced its full name, We Are Royale. Lucero, Holman and Whitmore had sat down together to think through what the studio had become and how to explain it.

The resulting manifesto included Voltron and Tom Selleck’s mustache. Corporate self-examination can sometimes yield a diagram nobody wants to read. Here it yielded an animated invitation into the studio’s humor. The founders were trying to make the culture visible through the same craft they sold to clients.

The word “we” had a purpose. In 2020, Lucero explained that the longer name expressed an intention to include others. Collaboration extended to clients as well as colleagues. That year’s WAR rebrand adopted the abbreviation clients had already been using. The visual language grew more martial, including a crowned lion and Nintendo-inspired Power Gloves, while the underlying explanation remained collective.

“We wanted to embrace the ‘we’ and make it inclusive.”

Jen Lucero · 2020

The name’s royal ancestry had a less corporate beginning: Holman’s affection for Elvis and the possibility of naming a company after Graceland. Royale emerged from that search. A studio with a crown, a lion and a taste for gaming could still put its central idea in a two-letter pronoun.

Growth has to work on Monday morning

Lucero’s public comments about hiring are often concerned with what happens between the idea and its execution. When Rhys Demery joined as executive producer in 2017, she pointed to his experience on both the agency and creative sides. She also singled out production workflow and his ability to fit into the team.

The combination matters. More client relationships bring more opportunities, but they also bring more things that need to be scheduled, discussed and delivered. Her explanation placed the internal operation beside the outward expansion. A creative studio cannot put its workflow on a cinema screen. It can certainly feel the consequences of getting it wrong.

In early 2018, Eric Zapakin joined as head of production, working closely with Lucero on the systems and strategies supporting design, animation, live action and visual effects. The job description gives a concrete view of her managing director years: the company’s variety of work needed a functioning production structure around it.

The leadership changes announced in April 2022 made her CEO, with Holman becoming chief creative officer. Jason Cook joined as an executive creative director alongside the newly promoted Loren Judah. Lucero described an intention to improve how the team planned, managed and executed projects, while opening routes for staff to develop skills and take leadership roles.

Her chosen phrase was “smart growth.” It is a modest phrase beside a coat of arms, but a demanding one to put into practice. It asks a company to improve its work and its ability to make that work. The promotion of an existing colleague sat alongside the arrival of someone new. Both were part of the same plan.

The people behind the appointments

Later in 2022, Asheley Hu Roe arrived as head of production. Lucero emphasized the breadth of her experience and her enthusiasm for the work. Hu Roe, for her part, welcomed the chance to work at a studio co-owned by a woman. She explicitly connected that ownership to the need for more women in industry leadership.

In August 2024, Lucero welcomed Erin Serletic as head of growth for gaming and entertainment. Her assessment included strategic business development experience, but also the clarity and enthusiasm Serletic brought to colleagues and clients. Across these announcements, Lucero kept returning to how a person worked with other people.

Long relationships show up elsewhere. Director and producer Tyrone Mackay had worked with Lucero and Holman on Apple projects before WAR existed. When the studio signed him in 2022, that connection already had a history. The company’s roster was partly a record of people who had worked together, liked the experience and found a reason to do it again.

Outside the little squares

Lucero’s memories also concern time spent away from a project. In November 2019, the studio packed Thanksgiving kits at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. She remembered the pleasure of seeing colleagues form an assembly line, doing something useful together with their hands.

For the studio’s fifteenth anniversary in 2022, the crew and their families went to The Parker in Palm Springs. There were pools, a formal dinner and a less formal garden barbecue. Lucero valued getting to know the team beyond the small rectangles of everyday video calls. The invitation included families, giving the occasion room for people’s lives outside work.

Another studio memory involved having IT director Aguren Balkov knighted at Medieval Times. Holman said the photograph occupied the studio refrigerator. It is difficult to imagine a more economical employee recognition program: a title, a ceremony and a fridge magnet’s worth of permanence.

A company that keeps making room

The work has continued into gaming and entertainment. Lucero is credited as managing director on the VALORANT film “Are You Ready to Fight?”, recognized as a 2022 Webby honoree in both art direction and editing. The distinction belongs to a credited team, with separate roles for creative direction, design, animation, production and editorial.

That division of labor is a useful way to read her career. Her name appears in executive producer, managing director and CEO positions while other people receive credit for their particular creative contributions. The finished images need all those jobs, including the ones that remain outside the frame.

Today, We Are Royale describes mentorship and room for experimentation as part of its culture. Its stated work connects brands with the communities around them, across strategy, design, animation and interactive experiences. Lucero remains CEO and co-founder, continuing a career that began in production more than three decades ago.

The founding story still offers a useful measure. Three people finished a difficult job and wanted to keep working together. Building a company gave that preference a name, responsibilities and a much longer calendar. The ambition Lucero has described since is to let more people develop inside it. The crown may draw the eye. The people underneath it have work to do.