When preparing to move 1,300 employees into its new, Gensler-designed, 417,000 square foot headquarters, L’Oréal used Wisp to plan the phased move and smoothly transition employees into its new home.
L’Oréal’s new headquarters is more than just a change of address. It is a “House of Brands” spread over 10 floors in Manhattan’s new Hudson Yards development. The space reflects L’Oréal’s roots in innovation and improves collaboration among multiple divisions and more than 30 iconic beauty brands. To reinforce the connectivity of the new office, the design team devised a dramatic architectural statement by connecting the floors with two three-story staircases.
As the space neared completion, L’Oréal began to focus on a phased move. It was important that employees had a smooth experience transitioning into their new home and had an understanding of how to optimize their use of the space as designed.
Gensler provided up-front advising to prepare for day-one in the new space. This included the use of kiosks to display interactive floor plans — empowering occupants and visitors to easily locate colleagues, stations, conference rooms, and amenities.
To prepare the floor plans for wayfinding and reporting, strategic room numbering was devised and applied to support interactive capabilities and future floor plan changes. Each floor was divided into quadrants. This broke up the space and made it clear to occupants how the space was arranged. The numbering system supports mail management, disaster planning, and ongoing wayfinding for staff. This then informed the branded signage system used throughout the space.
The move was phased so that L’Oréal could focus on specific blocks of space at a time. Using Wisp’s move management features, each department was able to create its own proposed seating assignments. This increased engagement of the staff, streamlined activities, and saved significant time that would have been spent manually creating and finalizing the seating plans for over one thousand work stations.
Today, L’Oréal has expanded its use of Wisp beyond Hudson Yards to other brand locations. The company now benefits from organized space and occupancy data. With Wisp they can easily see who sits where, create scenarios for future growth and reconfiguration, and report on their space metrics.