New York Magazine
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The minute you enter Quirky’s new offices in the Terminal Stores Building at 28th Street and Eleventh Avenue, which they moved into just a week ago, you can feel the creativity—and a serious current of fun. The product-development company’s reception area features a high-school locker shielding the desk. Original notebooks and papers fill the closed cubbies, while Quirky products are displayed in the open spaces. Everyone I saw coming in to work was riding a bicycle they then left in a rack beyond reception.
Photo: Wendy Goodman
Quirky, founded three years ago by then-22-year-old wunderkind Ben Kaufman, has grown exponentially, hence the new 27,500-square-foot digs. When they came across the space, there was no electricity or water, but the beautiful original floors from 1880 only needed a good sweep. This is a view from the research-and-design laboratory, glowing under the Philips Color Kinetics LED lighting system. It holds a 3-D printer and laser cutter. All the conference rooms are transparent with glassed-in walls. The open floor space fills up with over a hundred chairs each Friday when the staffers conduct their weekly product-evaluation reviews. As an online “social product development” company, Quirky shares the profits of each product it produces with the entire team responsible for inventing and influencing the design of the product.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
Each Quirky conference room is centered on a table with a unique recycled base. This one, a gym locker, still holds students’ forgotten possessions. Ben said he spent around a year scouring for recycled objects for the office.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
The only walls in the office are glass, so all the work is truly transparent. This room is called Heat, for obvious reasons.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
There is a large, open test kitchen that serves both as a place to try out new designs, as many of their products are kitchen appliances, as well as a staff canteen.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
The main work space for the 70-plus staff is an open studio with continuous wood desks that were formerly wood bowling lanes. Phone booths like this one allow people to have privacy when they need it.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
Each conference room also features a different set of chairs to complement the table base.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
There is no mistaking the girls and boys restrooms here.
Photo: Courtesy of Quirky.
The Beefcake in the Backcourt- Big, fake, and fully able to outshine its surroundings.Big, fake, and fully able to outshine its surroundings.
Fall Fashion Features
- The Beefcake in the Backcourt
- Big, fake, and fully able to outshine its surroundings.Big, fake, and fully able to outshine its surroundings.