Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Saatchi and Saatchi Marks 30 Years in Hudson Square With Renovation

 Saatchi & Saatchi relocated to Hudson Square 30 years ago, long before it became the bastion of creative companies that it is today.
Saatchi & Saatchi relocated to Hudson Square 30 years ago, long before it became the bastion of creative companies that it is today.
View Full Caption
Saatchi & Saatchi

HUDSON SQUARE — Creative companies are always looking to be trailblazers, but few can lay claim to trend-setting the way Saatchi & Saatchi can.

The ad agency was a pioneer when it moved to Hudson Square 30 years ago, one of the very first businesses to set up shop in the industrial neighborhood west of SoHo, at a time when the area was essentially a ghost town, inhabited only by the few lingering remains of the fading printing industry.

"I can't believe that when Saatchi first moved here 30 years ago, that this was seen as being a really suprising place to put an office," CEO Brent Smart said recently.

Hudson Square back then was a far cry from the lively hub of creative tech and media companies it is now.

Saatchi & Saatchi relocated in 1985 from its 34-year global headquarters at 625 Madison Ave. to 375 Hudson St., a move described at the time by the New York Times as "something of a surprise," given the "offbeat location."

"Talking to people who were here then," Smart said, "not only was it a bit culturally barren, it was kind of unsafe. It wasn't a great place to be."

Chief Financial Officer Bill Cochrane, who joined the company in 1982, and said when they moved to Hudson Square, they hired off-duty police officers to patrol the area between their office and the subway out of concern for employees' safety.

“When we moved here the place was still Gotham City," Cochrane said.

Now the neighborhood is home to approximately 170 architecture, art and design firms, according to the local business improvement district, and even more media and advertising agencies.

"The migration to this area has been fantastic," Cochrane said, "proving the vision of the Saatchi brothers as Madison Avenue disrupters.”

Smart describes the decision as "visionary," and said the neighborhood itself continues to feed the company's creativity.

"It's an incredibly inspiring place to me," Smart said. "I'd rather be where we are than where a lot of ad agencies are in Midtown, which I really consider a culturally barren place."

Now Smart is working to make the inside of the Saatchi & Saatchi office as inspiring as the neighborhood around it, with a gut renovation completely revamping the traditional office layout they've operated within for three decades.

"Everyone needs to feel inspired by their work environment, especially if you're a creative company," Smart said.

"We need to collaborate, we need to share, we need to partner," he added. "So you need a space that powers that."

They have replaced the corner offices, typically reserved for executives, with open spaces for employees to congregate, talk and share ideas. Each corner is designed differently, inspired by four different areas of the city: Madison Square Park, Central Park, SoHo and Midtown.

Smart said the new layout is partly inspired by the Parisian "cafe culture" of the 1920s.

"Someone once told me that the reason Paris was such an incredibly creative places in the 1920s was the cafe culture," he explained. "People would gather and think and share, and then go back to their apartments and create."

So they've created "communal spaces where you can share and be generous and inspire each other and then also go off and create," he said. "You need to create spaces where both things can happen."