October 20 2015 | By Matthew Flamm for Crain’s New York Business
A New Entrant Into The Shared-Office Industry Aims For Upscale
For the nine months that Jeffrey Fidelman headed investor relations for a startup based at a Manhattan WeWork location, he found the shared space a fine place to work. He just didn’t like bringing investors there.
“If I wanted to have a sophisticated sort of event, I was left looking for other places,” he said.
Fidelman still supports the shared-space concept that WeWork has come to represent. He just wants to try a variation. The independent financial adviser plans to set up in Blender Workspace, a new co-working enterprise designed to make the moneyed crowd and their solicitous hosts never want to leave.
Taking up the eighth floor at 135 Madison Ave., Blender will be the boutique hotel to WeWork’s lodging-chain experience, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Scott Sassoon, a luxury-residential contractor backed by private investors. He expects the 14,430-square-foot space to open in the first quarter of next year.
And though Blender will be different from WeWork, Sassoon and his partners envision a national network of locations—except that these will offer upscale design, obsessive customer service and event programming for a cultured crowd. Among the amenities planned are a lounge and events area served by its own elevator, offices with soundproofing and frosted glass, a café with a select gourmet menu (but no free beer on tap, a WeWork hallmark), a “wellness” room for meditation and quiet work, and a reception area reminiscent of a luxury hotel’s.
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