Fashionphile Offices – Carlsbad
Ocio Design Group was engaged by Fashionphile, a luxury bag online reseller, to design their new offices located in Carlsbad, California.
Fires ripped through Carlsbad California in late summer of 2014, and this and other surrounding buildings were a total loss. This was a tragedy that effected all in the area. Several Fashionphile team members were evacuated (with pets) and staying with other team members for safety. But, it did mean was that when we bought the building a little over a year later, we had an empty shell to work with. Fashionphile is a fashion tech, ultra luxury handbag resale business. It is not your typical online retailer. Every day, hundreds of boxes of luxury handbags and accessories are shipped to us from individual people all over the world. Those clients upload photos of their ultra luxe goods, and we offer them a price. As soon as we get them and authenticate them, we send these people a check. From there, the bags go to photography and then up to a high security cage system for safe storage. As soon as an item sells, it goes to shipping and out the door. This is a fairly complex system, made smooth and easy because we were able to spend significant time designing and building out the structure based on a perfect business flow.
While our building may look like a cross between Willie Wonka for luxury handbags, and the female founded tech start up of your dreams, we are in fact a bootstrapped company. This means that every dollar counts. We were price sensitive about all aspects of the buildout and the furnishings. Instead of expensive furniture from traditional “business supply furniture outlets, we opted for a more residential look. This not only left us with a much more on brand look, but cost about 1/4 as much as the estimates we were getting. We never wanted to sacrifice style or function in our effort to save a dollar, but usually ended up with a better result. For example, because of the high risk of a “smash and grab” burglary in a glass building, we decided to build our secure storage area upstairs. This presented us with an issue, because although we were able to get our inventory up a lift from the photo area fairly easily and economically, the pricing on a conveyor system to get the hundreds of boxes down from shipping out the back door was ranging from $400,000- $750,000. It would be loud, not necessarily attractive, had the potential to break, required posts every x number of feet and cast dark shadows on our work space. We just needed to get the bags from upstairs, down. So after a lot of brainstorming, we contacted a playground company. They built us a massive standard slide for a tiny fraction of what the conveyor cost, with none of the potential issues! In fact, it works like a charm, is sleek and pink and if anything adds to the look of the building.
Our building has an exciting and inspirational feeling about it for all of us working there.
Designer: Ocio Design Group
Photography: Jim Pelar
