OFFICE SPACE

Custom suitmaker Indochino finds a new office tailor-made for its needs

Indochino looked long and hard for a new HQ. The Vancouverbased menswear maker thinks its new digs fit just right

Dean Handspiker, VP design for Indochino, is used to quick moves. When the Vancouverbased online custom menswear retailer opens a retail showroom—18 to date, eight in 2017 alone—the design team usually takes possession of the space on a Monday and the store opens on a Thursday. So when the company relocated its headquarters from Railtown to the corner of Robson and Granville streets over Labour Day weekend, the customer service team was at its new desks on Monday and the rest of the staff the next day.

Since Victoria natives Kyle Vucko and Heikal Gani launched Indochino in 2007, its head office staff has grown to 90, and Drew Green has replaced Vucko as CEO. The new 14,000-square-foot space over two floors is more than double the size of the previous one. The challenge, says Handspiker, was finding the right place. Indochino could have moved into an office tower, “but it didn’t quite fit our team, our demographic, our brand,” he observes. Then they came across an office occupied by Stytch, a cloud-based analytics company that was moving out.

“We love the new location and the energy of this corner and being close to the other retailers that we compare ourselves to every day,” Handspiker says. “The space felt like us. It was relaxed enough to be Indochino but projected a better image than our last space did.”

Indochino’s showrooms have moved away from heritage buildings with exposed brick toward a more modern look that Handspiker describes as “a techmeets-tailor feel,” pointing out that “we are a web company first and foremost.”

Even the colour scheme of blues and greys matches the hues Indochino uses. “It all came together for us,” Handspiker notes. “We probably wouldn’t have used as much light wood, but we like it because it is of the place. It is very Vancouver, and we are a very Vancouver company.”

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