Working together: Shared office spaces take off

It’s like the setup to a classic joke: An office manager assigns a toymaker, book editor, marketing director and a New York Times best-selling author to a four-desk grouping in a tiny space.

But instead of a punchline or antics worthy of “The Office,” the members of The Beauty Shoppe in East Liberty — a shared office building that offers membership on a month-to-month basis — ended up getting along.

Marissa Fogel, The Beauty Shoppe’s general manager, said the group takes walks during lunch breaks, meets for dinner some nights and schedules playdates for their children to play with each other on weekends.  

“That opportunity would otherwise never have been available to those four people in their individual silos,” Fogel said. “But now, suddenly, when thrust into this co-working environment, they’re exposed to these people who they didn’t have a choice of who they sat next to. They were assigned a desk and then out of it these kind of beautiful relationships developed.”

Friendships like those budding at The Beauty Shoppe are becoming more common in Pittsburgh, as demand for co-working spaces increases amongst freelancers, local small businesses and entrepreneurs.  

According to a June 2016 Forbes article, the popularity of shared workspaces has risen as millennials continue moving to major cities and the amount of U.S. freelancers soars. According to a Deskmag survey, the number of co-working spaces has risen from about 5,000 to 7,800 offices worldwide, a 36 percent rise between 2014 and 2015.

There are about 15 shared offices in Pittsburgh, including The Beauty Shoppe, which has two offices in East Liberty, as well as Revv on Meyran Avenue, which houses automotive industry giant Uber. There are also co-working spaces that have turned into startup incubators over the last five years, like Allentown’s Work Hard Pittsburgh.

Desks and small private offices at The Beauty Shoppe — which takes its name from the office’s past life, a beauty salon on Penn Avenue — range from a flex option of $100 for a month for its entry level office to full spaces that start at $350 a month. The Beauty Shoppe makes most of its money from membership dues, but it occasionally rents its conference rooms to out-of-towners looking for a space to meet. This price range is typical in Pittsburgh — Uptown’s HackPittsburgh charges $30 a month for membership, while Lawrenceville’s Catapult offers flexible desks for $50 a month.

Pittsburgh’s working spaces aren’t just for laptops and the business casual crowd, either. Sharpsburg’s La Dorita is a shared kitchen — meaning about 25 culinary startups share a commercial cookery. Gaston Oria, La Dorita’s chief operating officer, said that although he sometimes wishes he had a kitchen of that size to himself, La Dorita has saved him money and introduced him to peers who now give him business advice.   

“All of us, we [want] our own brick and mortar space, but the reality is much different.” Oria said, adding, “It puts you in contact with other people in your shoes that will advise you.”

According to Fogel, working in a shared office space has advantages over telecommuting, or a large, business workplace stuffed full of cubicles. Instead of 40 levels of similar-looking floor layouts like a traditional corporation’s office, The Beauty Shoppe looks like it would fit right into Silicon Valley, California, with a red-gray color scheme and floral arrangements scattered across high-top wooden tables. For about $100 a month, a small business or entrepreneur can have amenities such as high-speed internet, unlimited printing and unlimited coffee, not to mention a range of up to 200 people with whom to network and share resources.

“What we saw was less that there was a problem and more that there was just a desire. It wasn’t like working from home isn’t good enough,” she said. “It was more in the spirit of: How can we do the work that we’re already doing and make other people’s lives better while doing it?”

The Beauty Shoppe’s members aren’t limited to one business sector or area of interest — at different points, Fogel has housed a student going to mortuary school, a meat trader and a lawyer.

“We end up, I think, attracting a wide variety of people,” she said. “I know because we aren’t an incubator, we aren’t necessarily pushing business development as our top agenda. What we’re really pushing is: Come be a part of our community, come help enrich what’s already happening in Pittsburgh.”

But some Pittsburgh shared offices, like Work Hard Pittsburgh, see other opportunities than simply providing space for separate businesses to fraternize and occasionally network with each other.

Work Hard Pittsburgh, which is also membership based, is a cooperative of freelancers, entrepreneurs and activists who all have an equal share in the company. Josh Lucas, founder of Work Hard Pittsburgh, said each business has say in where Work Hard Pittsburgh invests its money, how it makes real estate decisions, and which new groups join the space.

“Even though co-working in the most traditional sense of it is part of that shared physical space, that’s probably the least important part at this point,” Lucas said. “It’s the idea that you can have a flat organization that shares ownership between a lot of different kinds of people.”

Lucas said that his model helps close the wealth gap, operating under the idea that to bring more people into the middle class, you need to give them ownership of institutions that generate capital. Work Hard Pittsburgh, for example, has helped grow The Epicast Network, a regional podcast aggregator that now has around two million total downloads, as well as wireless networking provider Meta Mesh.

Ray Jones, a clinical associate professor of business administration at Pitt’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, predicts this model is exactly where office spaces are heading. He said that co-working offices offer more opportunities for innovation and problem-solving than a traditional corporate skyscraper, as well as learning opportunities for young entrepreneurs.

Jones did add that co-working spaces pose risk, just like most business ventures — there’s never a guarantee that a new office relationship will lead to an idea or project worth pursuing. Q majority of new businesses fail, so the extra money spent on an office space could put an entrepreneur just starting out in a financial hole.  

Jones sees shared workspaces as the future norm for offices. He’s even working with his peers in the business school to sponsor a desk at North Side’s Alloy 26, one of Pittsburgh’s largest co-working spaces, so that Pitt business students can meet and work alongside potential mentors and employers.

“There’s something about that physical space and being in proximate location to others with interesting perspectives that makes you still want to use a physical space,” he said. “Otherwise, I could sit in my living room and do all my work. It is absolutely the future.”

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story reported that The Beauty Shoppe’s charges up to $350 for an office that holds up to 20 people. This is not true: The Beauty Shoppe charges a flex option of $100 for a month for its entry level office, and full offices start at $350 a month. The story has been updated to reflect these changes. Also, The Pitt News  referred NoWait as a restaurant reservations app, but it is actually an on-demand dining app. The two mentions of NoWait have been removed from this story. The Pitt News regrets these errors.