The Department Store originally opened in 2009 by co-founders Karen Walker and Dan Gosling. Now the two are excited to welcome New Zealand's largest creative workspace provider, ColabNZ.
“The Department Store has always been about ideas. We built the store on a foundation of always working with people who get it, and the ColabNZ team are our kind of people. The store has always stood for the best in fashion, art, food and beauty, and now we also stand for creative thinking,” explained Walker.
ColabNZ plans to open an entire level of shared workspaces in July 2016. The second floor will then be home to a custom-built individual work stations. The new layout will also feature two board rooms, an open-plan cafe space and a photographic wall. ColabNZ aims to be the home of a range of unique creative endeavours. Robett Hollis, the founder of ColabNZ, said he is very excited about the decision to expand their community into an existing space that is already build on forward thinking.
“The addition of ColabNZ only reinforces our vision, the same one we’ve had since 2009,” Gosling said. “We envisaged the store as an ever-changing home to the best ideas we could gather into one location, and the great aspect about ColabNZ is that they will fill the 2nd floor with an almost limitless amount of new ideas, all generated by forward-thinking people. It’s a perfect match.”
