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‘We took up the ground floor’: Here’s how coworking helped this Melbourne startup go big, fast.

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Australia’s fastest-growing marketing and technology specialists, The Lumery have outgrown their first home at the LaunchPad coworking space in Melbourne’s Cremorne, as the company builds momentum by taking on new business demand from some of Australia’s largest brands, retailers and publishers.

Founded in 2017, The Lumery empowers brands to solve complex business problems and deliver on their customer experience objectives, through the end-to-end application and understanding of marketing and technology. The Lumery helps organisations with their ‘martech stack’, integrating software, data and analytics to form a complete view of the customer experience for their clients. It’s a service that has proven to be in high demand.

“Organisations were really struggling to get to grips with everything in the marketing technology ecosystem. They were looking for help to make sense of the confusion and how to drive growth,” says Raj Kumar, Co-Founder and Managing Director of The Lumery.

“The company took up two desks at LaunchPad in 2017 and got to work. Over the next two years the business grew quickly. A bay of desks soon spilled into an office, then two offices. And then we moved again to take up the ground floor of the second building,” says Raj.

How has coworking helped The Lumery?

A key advantage of the coworking model for The Lumery has been the flexibility it offers, reducing the risk of costly blowouts as the company rapidly grew. “All our office costs are baked in. It’s been fairly easy to forecast as we’ve grown our team,” says Raj.

Coworking, a shared-office model that began in San Francisco in the early 2000s, has gone through a rapid growth period of its own. As the market evolves, spaces like LaunchPad have shifted away from ping pong tournaments and yoga classes to focus on services that offer productivity gains.

“We realised there was a difference between coworking in the social aspect, and what growing companies need,” says Jeremy Ellis, a LaunchPad Co-Founder. “They want enough social atmosphere to keep their team engaged, but not so much that it becomes a distraction.”

It was this focus that had first attracted The Lumery as a client. “We were pretty specific about the type of coworking space we wanted to be in,” says Raj. “We looked at probably five or six different locations. We needed to be in a space that focussed on business growth.”

The Lumery’s experience also shows the coworking model is adaptable to a business at various stages of its lifecycle, from ‘starting up’ to ‘scaling up’. Increasingly, entrepreneurs like Raj Kumar see coworking as a legitimate model for larger organisations.

“I’ve seen significant businesses in coworking spaces, over 50, 100, 150 people, sometimes more. A lot of coworking spaces are moving to become environments that really encourage great work and productivity,” says Raj.

Sensing the evolution of the market, LaunchPad has also been building up a new set of services and spaces to cater towards larger, established organisations. With the opening of Orbit, a new specialty space for established ‘grown up’ businesses, the capacity of LaunchPad is expanding by 20 per cent.

As for The Lumery, the company’s recent growth strides and new client wins forms only part of the picture. Raj and the rest of The Lumery team are looking inward to nurture the company’s culture.

“Now we’re at a size where things like our vision, our culture, our identity – who we are and what we stand for – will become very important. We’re spending a lot of time, not defining it, but solidifying it, and being able to articulate it.”