Friends Work Here
What is it: Coworking for Brooklyn creatives brought to you by Swiss Miss aka Tina Roth Eisenberg of some of our favorite endeavors: Creative Mornings, Tattly, Creative Guild, and the TeauxDeux app.
Why you’ll love it: This is not your usual coworking space. It very much embraces our lives in the round, the heart and the head, or applied to our working lives, relationships as much as purpose.
Situated on the third floor of a former factory building, it’s a 3,000 sq foot open plan space that ticks off all the design boxes: exposed brick, wooden floors, light strewing windows, as well as playful pillows, colorful magazine racks, indoor swing, and outdoor deck. There’s even occasionally live music on the fire escape. But it’s not just for hanging out, the other aspect of the space is dedicated to the needs of the professional freelancer with dedicated workstations, a conference room, phone booths, and the ubiquitous whiteboard.
Actually, scratch that, though this space is divided into the loungy and the worky, the ethos is very much that magic happens everywhere – over potluck lunches, in the kitchen making coffee, accidental conversations between meetings. Those interactions build relationships, but also create a web of inspiration and motivation in which to work.
What you need to know: Since 2015 when Friends Work Here morphed from Studio Mates, this has become a co-working community targeted at creatives — designers, illustrators, filmmakers, developers, authors, writers, photographers, and the professionally multi-hyphenated. The fact that it's situated in the same building as The Invisible Dog Art Center and the HQ of Creative Mornings, means there’s a close ecosystem of talented people to be inspired by.
Why we think it's special: Coworking that puts its people at its core. That shouldn’t be unusual but often the business model and need to scale take over, and members become another cog in the purpose-finding wheel. Friends Work Here does not take a one size fits all approach but rather prides itself on bringing together people who fit in with its values — amongst these collaboration, curiosity, kindness. The friends in its name is no accident; Members are carefully chosen to give themselves and the rest of the community the best chance of flourishing. Calling itself ‘a seriously heart-forward community’, competition and ego are not going to work well here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be talented and invested in what you and the others around you are working on. Just that the work doesn’t get in front of being a person, even if the work is the reason you are there.
In their own words: “We welcome new members who are curious, take their side projects seriously, and who believe that collaborating is good for the soul. We love individuals who love what they do and continuously strive to grow and get better. We appreciate people who love the internet as much as we do. We want doers and kind souls.’
Something to take away from this space: Work doesn’t have to mean competition. Creativity can play nice. Both your practice and your life may better from it.
