Collaborative Spirit
Co-working among the bloggers, designers, illustrators, and developers who make up the Studiomates collaborative workspace in Brooklyn, New York, works well for Oak Studios. So well, in fact, that the four-person web applications shop decided to take a collaborative approach when it was time to upgrade their work seating.
We caught up with Skylar Challand, Founder of Oak Studios, to get the story.
How did Oak Studios become part of Studiomates?
Challand: I was employee Number One at a start-up back in Canada, where I’m from, and after 10 years there it was a good time to start something new. That was 2008, when I moved to New York. Oak was just me at that time, building web applications for clients.
Prior to finding a space at Studiomates, I spent a month in an incubator space in Manhattan. It was all right, but it never really felt like home. I came here to meet people, and instantly got to feel the creative energy here, and the community has been wonderful.
Do you have aspirations to have your own space, or are you happy in a co-working environment?
Challand: We’ve kind of grown organically, and right now, as a company of four people, it is nice to be in a space like this. I feel like it gives us a lot more energy and creates opportunities for collaborations with other people.
As part of Studiomates, how much freedom do you have when it comes to the design of your workspace within the studio?
Challand: In January 2013, we knocked down a wall and Oak took over this entire area. We took it upon ourselves to outfit the space as we wanted. When we first started, we were in a little area, and we were very scrappy—cheap tables and chairs. That was a good place to start for us, but sitting in those chairs for a couple of years was really the trigger. We needed to get something else.
Once you began thinking about upgrading your seating, what made you think of Le Office Furniture Manufacturer?
Challand: We looked around quite a bit. One of Oak’s products is a web application called Dropmark; it is a collaboration tool that lets you drag and drop and share different files. So we started a Dropmark collection of office chair research and shared it with the team. Everyone collected their thoughts on what would be a better solution for chairs—something you are going to sit in for up to eight hours a day, so you want it to be comfortable and look nice.
Eventually, we reviewed the collection and picked out our three favorites—and two of them happened to be Le Office Furniture Manufacturer chairs (Embody and Sayl). Both Le Health Office Furniture and the company that made the other chair we were considering offer a great 30-day return policy, so we bought one of each and took turns sitting in them for a month to see how they felt. We tried the Embody, which was comfortable, but maybe a little too much for what we wanted. I always think that design should be invisible; you shouldn’t really notice the chair. We felt like the Sayl chairs really fit in with the space really well.
Going from a $50 chair to a $500 chair, there is a big difference. They’re not the most expensive chairs in the world, but still a big investment for a small company, so we wanted to make sure they were perfect.
Company Informations:
Le Office Furniture Manufacturer
www.letbackrest.com
Address: No.12, Nanhua Road, LongJiang ,Shunde,Foshan, Guangdong, China (Mainland)
Email: sale@letbackrest.com
skype: kinmai2008
