Designed For Creativity: BRIGADE Breaks In Fourth Office In 10 Years
Since 2006, BRIGADE has outgrown three offices and is showing no sign of slowing down.
As our team continues to adjust to the new digs, we can’t help but reflect on the journey of insane growth that got us here. In 2006, our founder and Executive Creative Director, Kirsten Modestow, assembled a small team of motivated designers around her kitchen table. Since then she has grown BRIGADE into a team of nearly 30 humble and hardworking individuals, all of whom bring various skills to the now metaphorical table.
It wasn’t always roses and butterflies, though. Our recent, almost picturesque, exponential growth has been the result of years of grinding and hard work. For the first six years Kirsten and her band of designers steadily grew, each year producing more and better work for a growing list of clients while slowly adding new talents to the team.
The sink-or-swim moment came in 2012 when we left the humbling comfort of Kirsten’s house and set up camp in a small office space on University Drive in Amherst. Since then we haven’t looked back. In the following years our brigade grew in size and reputation, always keeping the work at the center of everything.
Within three years, much to our surprise, we outgrew our once luxurious office space. With clients like SVEDKA Vodka and Weleda, our work was gaining national attention. That meant new clients and new talented creatives knocking at our door. We had to expand again.
Naturally, we renovated a vintage car garage on Russell Street in Hadley to suit our needs. It was there that we realized and capitalized on the benefits of an open floor plan. Part of what makes us special is how much, and how well, we collaborate as a team. Kirsten noticed this immediately and made sure to implement a similar environment as we, once again, outgrew our space. This time it took no longer than nine months.
Kirsten made sure the next space we moved into was large enough, and cool enough, to accommodate her growing team without losing sight of the culture of hard work she had been cultivating since 2006.
“I wanted to give my staff a badass creative place to work every day – a place where they are happy, chill, and mad productive,” Kirsten said in a recent interview with The Daily Hampshire Gazette.
That is exactly what she succeeded in doing. We moved in to 195 Russell Street this March, hung up our hats in our newly renovated office and got comfortable.
“As we’ve done with all our offices, we designed the space to maximize creativity, innovation, and collaboration and we nail it every time – our new location is no exception,” Kirsten also said.
The entire space is designed for creativity. Whether it’s the open floor plan, the couches and comfortable chairs, the bright colors everywhere, the whiteboard walls, the other walls littered with work in progress and fragments of ideas, the trippy zebra-print rugs, the non-stop and extremely unpredictable playlist of music, the kitchen, or the bar, our team is guaranteed to never be bored.
One of the coolest features in our new space is the on-site photo studio we’ve set up, which will make producing high quality visual digital content (whether for social media, web, or any other purpose) much easier and quicker. This is great for us and even better for our clients.
In the end though, as it was in the beginning, it all comes down to the work we do. An office is only as good as the people who occupy it. And after ten years and four locations our motto remains bold enough for all to see on our conference room wall, “work hard, stay humble”.
We expect the future of BRIGADE to follow a similar trend. We will continue to produce awesome work for our clients and continue to expand – both in size and capabilities. We’re already exploring and experimenting with new ways to help our clients make their brands a little more badass using digital marketing.
Stay tuned to find out what other big things are happening at BRIGADE.
