Retailers offering free coworking space?

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Beth Buczynski

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Dec 12, 2011, 8:09:40 PM12/12/11
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Hello Coworking Group!

Someone recently told me about a few retailers/non-coworking
businesses in CA that are offering their space to mobile workers at no
charge. I'm trying to find out if this is a CA phenomenon or newborn
trend. If there's a retailer/non-coworking business in your area
offering up their unused space for coworking, please let me know!

Respond here or off-list at gonecoworking at gmail.com.

Thanks!

Beth
@gonecoworking

Liu Yan

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Dec 12, 2011, 8:57:32 PM12/12/11
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Haworth in shanghai is offering their showroom aka, haworth organic workspace, to the mobile workers for free. They initially asked us to consider to run the space as part of our coworking program, but we thought it is just rather a bonus to our community, not something we love to promote. Reasons:

1, we cannot have a full control of the space in terms of what we offer. The priority of the furnitute showroom/retail space is still to sell furnitures.

2, because of reason1, it is hard for us to allocate resource to run the space and cultivate the community.

Hope this brings in more conversations. In ikea china, they don't ban people to take an afternoon nap in their store, but how many people would consider ikea their home?

Same thing with coworking, we build community, the retailers build space.


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Craig Baute - Creative Density Coworking

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Dec 14, 2011, 11:23:02 AM12/14/11
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I haven't heard of anything about retailers offerring free coworking
in Colorado. However, I have heard of empty spaces working out deals
with coworking managers to open for free in their space and just take
the first revenue that comes in the door as rent, but membership is
charged.

Lui - Haworth is starting to look into the coworking movement. I
recently met with them at their Michigan HQs and they have started in
a coworking space in the middle of Michigan. Steelcase is looking to
turn one of their offices/showrooms into a coworking space in Chicago.

Craig Baute
Creative Density

Mark Gilbreath

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Dec 14, 2011, 11:51:55 AM12/14/11
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over the past several years i've had the opportunity to meet with most of the major furniture providers: Haworth, Herman Miller and Steelcase.  They are all quite aware of the Coworking and "3rd places" movement, so no surprise to see various of them dipping their toes into the water.  Its a natural thing for them to do as they observe changes in the work behaviors of their major corporate clients (eg steady shift toward mobility) and seek to apply their knowledge of what makes for a great/productive/healthy/highperformance space to the new places where work happens.    Steelcase has taken a number of experimental steps to understand this new world.   They've operated Workspring in Chicago for 2+ years (not a coworking space, but an incredibly cool collaborative workspace that can be booked for off-site collaborative meetings) and also operate the 654 Crowswell coworking space in Grand Rapids Michigan, in addition to having working partnerships with a number of cool coworking spaces and incubators in Austin (Link Coworking), Boston (Workbar, MassChallenge) and California (Blankspaces, Sandbox Suites, RocketSpace)



Mark Gilbreath
LiquidSpace
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Angel Kwiatkowski

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Dec 15, 2011, 11:36:25 AM12/15/11
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Beth,
Trada, a dev company in Boulder, CO has free coworking space. It's
targeted at developers but they welcome anyone who needs a place to
land. Cohere member Heidi may have worked there recently--ask her.

Angel

Susan Evans

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Dec 16, 2011, 2:51:32 PM12/16/11
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Hey Beth!

To add one more to the mix, I've also heard quite a bit how the Ace Hotel in NYC offers up its lobby to workers for free- it's worth checking out - http://www.acehotel.com/newyork/place.

S
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