Rich Akers: From Boy Band Member to Pizza Marketing Ninja
Gung Ho Pizza Marketing Ninja Rich Akers is an interesting character. He’s had a couple of different lives in China, which he refers to on his website as “a checkered past, including but not limited to stints as a professional dance choreographer, artist, boy band member, graphic designer, English school manager, and Westerosi political analyst (freelance).”
That boy band was called Unique. Here’s what he told his brother Royce about the experience, in a 2010 article for Vice:
“We were just a bunch of guys who knew each other from the dance scene in Melbourne, trying to get parts in musicals. We’d each been to China a couple of times and we were jealous at how easily impressed they were. They were crazy for the Backstreet Boys and even third-tier acts like Michael Learns to Rock. We looked at each other and thought, 'We can do this.' This was 10 years ago, when there were millions of people walking around with nothing to look at. Crowds would gather at car crashes or domestic arguments. Not that we did it in a super-exploitative sense, though we would have been crazy not to see that aspect of it. But yeah, the thinking was, with all those millions of people, our chances were pretty good.”
Unique may have been unique, but they never rose to the heights of a third-tier act like Michael Learns to Rock. It was after that experience Rich eventually started the career for which he’s best known in Beijing, as a “creative type,” doing marketing first for Lush and Pyro Pizza (now Sugar Shack) in Wudaokou, and now as the aforementioned marketing ninja and partner at Gung Ho Pizza, the back-to-back winner of the Beijinger Pizza Cup in 2014 and 2015.
Rich continues to express himself musically via his 90s cover band, Bye Bye Kitty. He revealed the secret of a good cover band earlier in 2015: “We’re not there to pull off the perfect rendition of a song, or to execute a perfect guitar solo. We’re there to engage the audience, and be a fun band. So we’ll jump up on the speakers, or our guitarist will take an audience member’s bottle of Tsingtao and use it as a guitar slide. I once jumped on someone’s back and sang an entire chorus,” he said.
When he’s not fronting his band, Rich and Gung Ho co-founders Jade Grey and John O’Loghlen have given the pizza chain a green edge, publishing a company environmental impact report, and launching a pizza box design contest to help reduce the waste generated by everyone’s favorite pizza delivery device.
On his way to the Dining Hall of Fame, he collected another accolade, an Outstanding award for Best Personality (Casual) in the 2013 Beijinger Reader Restaurant Awards, and co-hosted the Beijinger 2013, 2014, and 2015 Reader Bar and Club Awards.
In a 2011 interview, Rich looked back on how Beijing had changed between then and 2003. “Better food, better shopping, best of all though is the amount of people willing to come and stay for an extended period of time. Definitely not like the old days where people would come for a month and then you’d never see them again. I’ve made some great friends over the years and more and more of them are still around (or have returned)!”
Read about our other inaugural members of the Beijinger Dining Hall of Fame here.
More stories by this author here.
Email: stevenschwankert@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @greatwriteshark
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Photo: Judy Zhou
