Inside Lickability HQ
Making our office as lickable as our apps
We’ve been in our current office for almost a year without adding our own Lickability flair to it. Save for the logo on the door and the people inside, it could have been anyone’s office. But in the past few months, we’ve started redecorating the space to make it more our own.
It’s important to us to feel comfortable and motivated at work—that’s why we give every new employee the opportunity to build a workstation setup they love. We thought it was about time to do the same with the rest of our office.
Before this project, our office felt like a generic glass cube. Now it feels like a space where a bunch of creative nerds can come together to make jokes, make apps, and have a cider after work once in a while.
mb Bischoff
Step 1
The first thing we needed was art. We could have gotten any generic art pieces to liven the space up, but we wanted something that felt like us. So we started with fracture art of icons for apps we’ve worked on — some of our own, like Quotebook (r.i.p.) and Pinpoint; and some of our clients, like Aloe Bud and The Atlantic. It’s nice to have a reminder of the work we’ve done hanging on the walls like a motivational poster. Plus, they add lots of great color to the space.
Step 2
Next: plants, a staple of any office. But before you can have plants, you need something to put them in. So we reached out to Brooklyn-based ceramicist Marian Bull for custom, Lickability Red planters, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. Marian’s work added much-needed personality to the office. From there, we filled our new planters with (easy to care for, we hope) plants from The Sill. We’re going to try to keep these ones alive for a while.
Step 3
And for the bonus round: we got Lickability-branded enamel pins and hoodies for the whole team! Thanks to Pin Game Strong and Corporate Couture, we look just as great as our office does.
Profit
In the last few months, we’ve succeeded in adding all of the above to some of the small, already-existing details that make our office fun: our standard new employee welcome kit of chocolate, pens, notebooks, and baby succulents; a reliable supply of Sour Patch Watermelon, our favorite 3 p.m. office snack; and our frequent use of Coffee Runner, a Slack app that we tend to use more for snack runs than for Blue Bottle trips (though we use it plenty for the latter as well).
Our goal wasn’t just to decorate our office, but to decorate our office in a way only we could. We wanted to add life and personality to a space that was essentially just a tiny room full of desks and computers — and we did. We’ve always loved where we work, but now we love it just a little bit more.
Though some of these tweaks are small, they’ve really helped to add personality to our space. Our fractures hang like trophies from the projects we’ve been proud to be a part of, and it’s an exciting motivator to continue filling the walls with even more.
Michael Liberatore