Experiment City

In 2018, we moved our New York office from the East Village in Manhattan to Industry City in Brooklyn. We wanted to be part of the largest innovation hub in US history and join the growing community of other experimenters and entrepreneurs that make up this incredible complex of designers, makers, manufacturers, distillers, engineers, technologists, fabricators, and trade artisans. This year, one year into our new home, we are delighted to have been featured as a nominee in Crain’s ‘Coolest Offices’ publication. And we are only just getting started.

Industry City demonstrates classic industrial architecture, repurposed for the economy of the future, all located on Brooklyn waterfront. Building upon its history as Bush Terminal, a turn of the century freight, warehousing and manufacturing complex, Industry City offers five acres of open space and one-of-a-kind offices. This is just some of what attracted us, but above all, we knew that the space could bring our innovation approach to life.

We believe that it isn’t enough to have innovative space, but that space should drive the behaviors of innovation.

Our Space & Design Principles

Our space at Industry City is in essence a “living experiment”. We co-created design principles with our team and our architects, Design Republic, helping to bring to life in a physical way how we work and what we do for our clients. This led us to come up with a design based on the following three principles:

EXPERIMENTATION CYCLING

Our offices were designed to be based on the idea of an innovation ‘sprint’ that you cycle through in order to achieve innovation with impact. First up, instead of a classic reception, people enter where we experiment with consumers and experts – our learning lab. From here, you move through ideation, design, production and back into learning – a full experimentation sprint. The space is convertible with rolling furniture, garage doors and mobile white-board “walls” designed for teams to ideate throughout the office in a flexible and functional but still inspiring way.

COMMUNITY CITIZENS

We wanted to be part of a greater ecosystem of innovators. Our conference rooms are named after famous innovators from Brooklyn and local artisans helped us bring the space to life, including Flavor Paper wallpaper and local suppliers for a range of materials from cement to gardens. We feel proud to be a part of such an exciting and engaging community and embrace this so that we are never confined to our office walls, both in terms of physical space and thinking space. We want to be a beacon for the Industry City community and for the wider neighborhood, connecting with these people in a way to make our ideas and their ideas stronger. We continue to work on initiatives that activate this community and our role in it.

CONNECTED COLLABORATION

Connectivity is critical to what we do – both in person and via technology. When we are in the space, we want people to be colliding, collaborating and sparking inspiration and ideas – capturing the power of the combined human energy. But they should feel o.k. about working remotely when that human energy isn’t needed, so virtual connectivity is equally important. With SPAN technology throughout, our teams and clients can use interactive screens to collaborate across offices, states and countries to connect with our global teams.

We believe that our space will enable a great leap forward in providing breakthrough thinking for our clients. But while this space rocks, in the end we all know that “BEHAVIORS EAT PROCESS FOR BREAKFAST”, so what truly makes this workplace unique, is how we as innovators show up, collaborate, and engage with each other and our clients. The space allows us to be constantly transforming as a living, breathing eco-system, superpowered by the fuel and the energy of the people around it.