When Wink was founded two years ago, the company tried to put down roots in a garage behind a gas station in Soho. At the time, around 40 Wink employees shared the space with a resident population of rodents.
“There was one bathroom for everyone, the heat didn’t work," Patrick Mahoney, Director of Public Relations at Wink said. "It was very ‘startupesque’.”
Earlier this year, that space, along with the adjacent gas station, were demolished to make way for yet another office tower forcing the Wink team to find another home. Call them refugees of progress.
Since then, they've scoured the city looking for an office befitting their success, yet true to their grungy, garage origins.
Earlier this month, the search ended and the team moved into a new garage in a new part of town — minus the rodents and plus a few amenities.
We caught up with Anna Lasker, HR Director at Wink, who was nice enough to show us around their new Chelsea space. Check it out:
This place is swanky! When did you move in?
Thanks! We started the moving process in late summer and officially opened last month.
How big is it? How many people do you have working here?
The space is about 14,500 square feet and houses our business, operations, engineering and design teams. Approximately 25 of us work in our new headquarters right now, but as you can see from some of the photos, there are empty desks we're looking to rapidly fill. Wink will be growing its New York presence by over 50 percent in the next few months.
I assume this place is totally smart-officed up and controlled by Wink?
It is! We even created a mock home in the back complete with a full kitchen, dining room and living area to showcase all the different connected devices that work with Wink.
This seems like a long way from a garage in Soho. What's your favorite part of the new space?
Having more than one bathroom. Just kidding (though that's a huge upgrade from the original Soho garage). Apart from the aesthetics, the sense of knowing that this will be a long-term space for Wink. To-date, we've been rather nomadic, moving from the garage in Soho, to a skyscraper on Lafayette, to temporary digs in the office of another Chelsea startup. We designed our new office to grow with us and you definitely feel that sense of permanence when you walk out of the elevator.
What's going on in this area?
Our QA team is responsible for testing the many hundreds of products that work with Wink (they've run close to 20,000 tests in 2016 alone). It's central to what makes Wink a reliable and smooth experience for our users. So, we built a lab that is dedicated to that purpose. As you can see, there's plenty of room to tinker, test and troubleshoot. Inside you'll find 3D printers that are used to quickly build test fixtures, real windows, doors and garage doors for the testing of locks and sensors and a ton of networking equipment for automated testing to ensure your Wink smart home performs under all conditions.
Images via Wink
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