Look out Tacoma, Here We Come!
Our team is proud to announce our new Pioneer Collective location in downtown Tacoma. We’ve been working for the last twelve months with the owners of Courthouse Square to bring TPC to that beautiful, historic building, and we’ll finally officially open on July 8th. Now the hard work begins!
Why Tacoma
When people ask what the differentiation strategy is behind The Pioneer Collective, we answer that there wasn’t one initially. Audrey and I both had jobs at the time and weren’t sure the workspace would provide a serious business opportunity, let alone become both of our full time work. That made things very simple in that we just had to build a space where we wanted to work every day, then hope that other people liked it too. When John and Pat of Courthouse Square reached out to us early last year, we had no definitive plans to expand The Pioneer Collective. We’ve always taken pride in being a small, “mom & pop” business that focuses on providing excellent service. We don’t believe in expansion for expansion’s sake. The world has plenty of coworking chains. Our growth strategy, whether within our building, or our region, is that the opportunity would have to be beneficial to the team, to our members, to the neighborhood, and have that intangible feeling that it was “just right.” We also wanted to make sure our offering, operations, and finances were perfected and sustainable before considering expansion. Since opening The Pioneer Collective in 2015, we’ve talked to dozens of landlords, organizations, partners, and while some opportunities seemed attractive at first glance, when we pushed aside ego and the desire to keep up with the coworking hype train, none of them checked all the boxes for us.
Things were different when we walked into Courthouse Square for the first time. It was in a building and a neighborhood where we could picture ourselves coming to work every day, in a city we love, and perhaps most importantly, run by great people with a similar vision, that we’re excited to call partners.
The two locations will allow us to eek out some economies of scale, which will allow the company to continue to:
Provide health insurance
Live to work and work to live
Generous vacation and PTO for staff
Support great local vendors, arts, culture
Work toward a sustainable triple bottom line
The Plan in a Nutshell
We will begin selling memberships immediately. Just like at our flagship in Seattle, TPC Tacoma will offer a variety of flexible part time and full time memberships to fit a spectrum of needs and budgets. At launch we will have space for:
40 part time Communal Members (hot desk)
25 full time Communal Members (hot desk)
25 full time Resident Desks (fixed desk)
12 turnkey Private Offices for teams of 1-10
Unlimited virtual office memberships
We’re also building:
2 smaller meeting rooms for meetings of 2-6
1 large boardroom for meetings up to 14
1 large classroom
4 private phone booths
A variety of common work areas for deep work, collaboration
A podcast recording studio
A commercial style members kitchen with social areas for member events
How Will This Affect Our Seattle Members?
For most Seattle members, probably not at all. For those needing to do work south of Seattle, the new space will provide a benefit as they will receive a number of free drop-in days in Tacoma each month. Tacoma members will also get access to the Seattle space commensurate with their membership level.
We’re excited to bring TPC to Tacoma. Stay tuned for updates!