How Patch Is Changing the Coworking Conversation

As retailers and office spaces have transformed since the beginning of the pandemic, some properties that were formerly cornerstones of the community are now sitting vacant and finding themselves at a crossroads. A new coworking company in the United Kingdom called Patch has adapted its real estate strategy to adjust to the post-pandemic economy by targeting these spaces.

Founder Freddie Fforde told LoopNet that Patch is trying to be a meeting place for people, like the church or the working men’s club have been in the past. It’s why their building strategy is crucial to them, and why they chose a 19th-century brewery, the old Gray & Sons Brewery, for their first location. “We really care about distinct buildings,” said Fforde. “They don’t have to be old, Victorian breweries, but they need to have some sort of character and hopefully have played some role in the convening and meeting of people historically.”

The COVID pandemic accelerated the trend of working not only from an office or from home, but from other locations as well, ideally not too far from home. Patch hopes to fill a coworking need in smaller markets by setting down roots in small-town Chelmsford, Essex, and other similar cities yet to be determined around the UK. The company prefers to fill spaces with longstanding ties to their communities.

“Our thesis is that retail is changing, and a lot of the buildings that we are looking at had many roles in the community over a long period of time,” Fforde said. “Buildings that we are considering have to be distinct and have some kind of community purpose and value.”

For the first Patch location in Chelmsford, the team settled into a Victorian brewery built in the 1870s. Since its use as a brewery, the property had housed a department store and, from 2014 to 2018, a restaurant. It had been sitting empty for about three years when Patch came upon it.

“The great thing about this location was just how distinct the fabric of the building is. We did not have to do a lot,” explained Fforde. “We never really had to fundamentally transform the building.”

The team removed the kitchens and installed partition doors, walls, and furniture to create the first Patch location.

The speculative “build it and they will come” approach applied here, as residents of Chelmsford took to the space quickly.

“We did not have to make community. It was there, we just gave them a space,” added Fforde. “We had such a warm welcome when we started looking around, we found the most amazing building on the right terms and everyone in the community was really supportive of helping us come in and succeed.”

Rates to rent a desk at Patch start at £79 per month, plus tax, for occasional use, for either four or eight days a month, with extra half days to add on. Resident membership costs are set at £269 a month, plus tax, for unlimited access to the membership space and community.

Since this is a smaller space, there is a small kitchen to serve employees’ needs. In future locations, Patch wants to improve the food and drink offer, with at least a coffee shop on location.

Other perks include a kid’s corner, a library and meeting rooms.

What makes Patch stand out among other coworking spaces is that it is not just about a workplace, according to Fforde. It wants to be recognized as a destination on the high street for a wide array of non-work activities like wellness, business, and cultural events.

“We do not believe that life stops at 9 a.m. and then work happens, and then work stops at 5 p.m., and we go back to life,” he noted. “Everything is connected, and we try to create environments that allow people to access all that balance in one place.’’

If work is the anchoring economic pillar, other activities housed at Patch, such as yoga, crochet, or calligraphy, are bringing a different kind of energy into the building. One example is a woman who set up a crochet club. “Now, she’s so successful with it that she’s renting a desk with us and a studio outside full-time to continue growing her business,” Fforde explained.

Traditional office landlords often make the mistake of forgetting tenants’ personal needs, Fforde said. That’s why he hired Paloma Strelitz, head of product and creative director for Patch, who “has a background in architecture and really understands how people move around spaces.”

Strelitz previously studied and worked in architecture and design and is co-founder and partner of Assemble, a multidisciplinary London collective made of architects and designers.

Fforde hatched the Patch idea about five years before he quit his job in tech to work on the project full-time in June 2020.

He wanted to create a space that combined his two biggest passions: technology and people. He also wanted the company to be a solution for working parents. Fforde grew up in a single-parent household and was struck by the difficulty of trying to hold a job and raise children at the same time.

Besides raising a family, Fforde also noticed that commuting was an extra challenge for most adults. “Commuting was really the thing that was denying communities in local areas of access to opportunity, and opportunity [with regard to] both work and non-work activities,” he explained. “Our locations are where people live, so people can be judged for who they are, not on where they live.”

The first Patch location in Chelmsford opened its doors in November 2021, and Fforde said that it became profitable five months later. The team chose the city in the County of Essex for a few key reasons, besides the stately brewery building. Chelmsford was a city of an ideal size for the team, with a little over 100,000 inhabitants. “At the moment, we are interested in populations under 200,000,” explained Fforde. “We believe that people are excellent everywhere, and yet in the U.K., opportunities are just often only made available in large cities.”

Chelmsford was also a priority because of its proximity to London and to where Patch’s core team lives. “We are not going to be in central London, probably ever, maybe at the fringes, but the whole point is celebrating communities that are outside,” said Fforde.

While Patch has ambitions to be on every high street in the U.K., Fforde conceded that the company will have to “see how quick we are able to do that, while also retaining the quality of what makes us distinct. We don’t want to just be plastic replicated everywhere; our brand and our product is highly specific to each local environment.”

The team is striving for bigger locations in the future, from about 12,000 square feet (1114 square meters) to as large as 50,000 square feet (4645 square meters).

As Patch grows over time, it intends to repurpose buildings and make them more carbon efficient. While the company is now renting the Chelmsford location, determining whether to lease or purchase future buildings will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, according to Fforde.

The company is in the process of raising money from investors to open more locations in 2022 and 2023. The next Patch locations are yet to be determined at time of publication.

“Every town that we go to, the first thing we look for is where is the place where people used to go where they do not anymore,” said Fforde. “What has shut down, what has been made unavailable, and how can we bring it that energy back.”