NLV BUSINESS SEES ITS FUTURE IN PRIVACY BOOTHS
Workplace privacy is back in style, and at least one small Southern Nevada company is taking advantage. Cubicall, which designs and builds private workspaces that resemble phone booths, was incorporated in Southern California in 2017 by brothers Anthony and Nick Pucci. They moved the company to North Las Vegas last year.
Cubicall got its start after the brothers, with backgrounds in sales and marketing, decided to use an old phone booth as a private workspace at their former marketing firm.
“We thought there must be some just sitting in a field someplace,” Anthony Pucci said.
They actually found someone selling old phone booths that were sitting in an empty field in Texas, but they were too expensive and were not going to be easy to move.
The Puccis solved their problem by building their own.
“Once we built that first booth, we had clients at our marketing firm comment about it, asking where they could get one,” Anthony Pucci said. “We put a website up to see what would happen, and we sold five in about two weeks.”
Cubicall makes modular privacy booths, two-person meeting rooms and study booths that range in price from about $7,000 to $12,000.
The privacy booths can be for commercial or home use and are easily customized. A Superman-themed booth is on display at Cubicall’s headquarters.
So far, much of the business done by Cubicall has been with companies with open workspaces and little opportunity for privacy.
The company has filled orders for some recognizable outfits, including media titan Bloomberg and Blackrock,
a large investment firm based in New York City.
As businesses cope with the coronavirus pandemic and even after it passes, “I don’t think we’ll see as many of the densely populated office spaces,” Anthony Pucci said. “There will be more space and division. People are going to want solutions like ours.”
The company has also started making exam booths for health care customers, which they see as a big growth area following the emergence of the coronavirus.
Earlier this month, they announced a partnership with a company that specializes in ultraviolet lighting to equip booths with UV lamps that disinfect the pods after each use.
“The health care angle is a huge opportunity for us,” Nick Pucci said. “Hospitals, private practices, medical research — those are all opportunities for us.”
Cubicall’s move to North Las Vegas — the company has three full-time employees in addition to its owners — was done largely because of Nevada’s more business-friendly environment and tax code, the Puccis said.
“California can be a difficult place to do business, especially manufacturing,” Nick Pucci said. “There’s the cost of doing business and also a higher cost of living.”
The brothers also considered moving to Texas, Tennessee and Florida, but Southern Nevada seemed to make the most sense for them.
They are close to Los Angeles, the company’s biggest market, and view the trade show industry as another growth market, though conventions have been almost nonexistent in Las Vegas since the onset of the pandemic.
“When trade shows come back, that should be a big shot in the arm for us,” Anthony Pucci said. “We did business with one company that wanted to do a podcast from a trade show and wanted the space to be able to do that in a quiet area.”
Cubicall is “a great example of the kinds of innovative businesses that are now calling greater Las Vegas home due to quality of life, cost and opportunity,” said Jonas Peterson, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, which works to develop the region’s economy.
The Pucci brothers said that the reaction people have had to their phone-booth style workspaces tended to depend on how old they were.
“When you bring one of these into an office, it’s funny because all the older people will say, ‘Oh, the phone booth is back,’” Nick Pucci said. “But the millennials and the younger people will say, ‘Wow, this is a genius idea. I can’t believe nobody’s ever thought of this before.’ ”