You May Not Have a Desk Anymore but You'll Probably Get a Nice Locker
A locker used to be just a locker, a boring dull gray metal box with a squeaky door you might slam shut as the exclamation point to finishing a hard workout or marking the end of a long school day.
Not today. They've become fancy fixtures in a host of sports venues and corporate offices around the country. For athletes, lockers have long been the personal space within their office -- the locker room. It's as close to a desk as you can get and now they are increasingly more personalized. Meanwhile, in corporate America, employees are losing their desks as companies shift to open-office design and a locker becomes their own personal space.
These upscale offerings often are made from fine wood and include pops of color to bring flair to their surroundings.
"Lockers have changed a lot in 10 years," said Travis Hollman, chief executive officer of Irving, Texas-based Hollman Inc., a leading maker of lockers.
Hollman knows. The 42-year-old company started by his father has designed, built and installed lockers for numerous professional and collegiate sports teams as well as major corporations such as Google, Apple and Capital One. J.P. Morgan Chase was the company’s top office customer and third largest last year. In all, Hollman Inc. has done business with 45 of Fortune 100 companies.
The company built 450,000 lockers last year and expects to do more this year, anticipating revenue rising to $72 million this year from about $60 million last year. Planet Fitness is its biggest customer. But the corporate and professional sports work has more caché and creativity.
When Hollman redid the Dallas Mavericks locker room in 2015, Dirk Nowitzki, a power forward who has played for the Mavericks his entire NBA career, was so attached to his old locker that he took it home. “It just shows how personal these spaces are to people,” Hollman said.
The lockers incorporate a lot of technology. And it’s not just digital technology but also in the materials used. The wood is clad with NanoLam, a micro-technology lamination that resists scratching, mold, fingerprints and bacteria. The same technology is used in making electronic components. Hollman said the Mavericks insisted on NanoLam when his company redid the team’s locker room. “A staph infection could sideline a lot of players,” he said.
The same material found its way into the Georgia Tech football team’s new locker room, which was done in time for the 2018 season.
Georgia Tech's new locker room fits with the team’s desire to have as much high-tech as possible, Hollman said, which isn’t surprising for one of the top engineering schools in the country. Cabinets sized to handle laptops have power outlets and USB ports for whatever electronic devices players bring. Each locker has a video display that gives individual players their daily schedule, including when they are supposed to see the trainer, attend meetings, and what to eat in their nutrition program. The lockers were part of a $4.5 million renovation that not only gave current players a nice place but also provides eye candy for recruiting the next generation of players.
Michigan State’s football team had a different requirement. Head coach Mark Dantonio told Hollman to go to “Michigan and Ohio State and see what they have done and create something better,” Hollman said. So the Spartans have slick lockers with a magnetic laminate on metal doors that can be easily changed to reflect whatever the team wants on the doors as it competes with the Wolverines and Buckeyes for talent.
With the athletic locker rooms, Hollman’s lockers include special vents to keep everything dry. “The new locker rooms have zero smell,” Hollman said.
Lockers for companies don’t have quite the bells and whistles of the athletic teams and a lot of them aren’t in the company gym. Hollman is benefiting from the shift to “hoteling”, which entails employees reserving a desk ahead of time, and “hot desking” in which employees share desks. Companies have shifted to the open concept to pack more employees into the space to save on real estate costs. But like the college teams, companies need the space to look top notch when trying to recruit and retain top talent.
“Millennials like working this way,” Hollman said. “You get a locker and pick your desk for a day.”
Styles vary for each company. Companies, such as what Capital One chose for headquarters, opted for a palette bright colors that plays in a larger theme of its space layout. Google, of course, wanted more technology in its lockers. So employees have lockers with glass doors that are back painted with the color red. You can write on the glass and add some personalization.
Other companies chose to stick with the natural look of wood. Nike has birch veneer lockers with a variety of doors that include finished birch, glossy white veneer or even a chalkboard to draw up Xs and Os. Facebook has plywood lockers in its gym and throughout its offices, Hollman said, matching raw plywood desks. "It looks like a high school classroom to me," he said. "I don't think they are dumb. They are doing it for a reason."
Hollman said there's been a drive toward "soft or big textures" to give millennials and Generation Z to create a more natural surrounding compared to life spent with mobile devices. That may mean rough wood plank tables or velvety soft surfaces created with laminated wood. Demand for those textures started growing more last year, he said.
So far, the trend toward open office plans and the lack of assigned desks hasn’t yet trickled down to smaller companies, he said. But “it’s going to continue because the economics make so much sense,” he added, which for Hollman would mean more lockers to build.
Spaces is an occasional CoStar feature showcasing innovative interior design.
