Knight Eady: Using Low Cost Tools to Create a High Value Workspace

Knight Eady is a Birmingham-based sports marketing and event management company.  Over their three years of existence, Knight Eady has grown from the initial two founders to a team of more than 20 employees.  And “Team” is the right word.  If you watch Knight Eady’s employees interact, it feels like you are watching a sports team in the locker room before the game – minus the “locker room talk”.  They are fun, passionate and focused and this culture is no accident.

One of Knight Eady’s core values is to create an engaging and contagious work environment.  Their interpretation of this is that they are all family and that the workplace needs to be a joyful and inviting place and their office space is designed to help them accomplish this goal.  However, because the founders hoped and believed that their company would outgrow their space relatively quickly, they were careful to stick to a limited budget when designing their space to their needs.

Knight Eady’s current space features 20 foot high ceilings with full height windows along one wall.  To maximize this natural light, the company utilized a primarily open floor plan, with the only enclosed spaces being two private offices, a conference room and a huddle room.

Because the space is open plan, the company added some small phone booth spaces for privacy and noise control. In order to make best use of the ceiling height in the space, they built a mezzanine level on top of the phone booths where two employees sit in a virtual sky box.

The company’s love for sports is reflected throughout their space.  One wall is decorated with leaves and a brick overlay to resemble the back wall at Wrigley field, complete with yardage markers on the barn door that slides open to reveal the huddle room.  In their conference room, one entire wall features a photo of the sellout crowd at one of their recent events, the Rocket City Classic.

Both in their original 1,580 square foot space at Birmingham’s tech incubator, Innovation Depot, as well as the new 3,200 square foot Depot space to which they recently relocated, Knight Eady placed bold typographic statements on the walls in their brand’s signature turquoise color.  

The floors of Knight Eady’s new space were originally covered in gray carpet tile.  While Knight Eady considered removing the carpet in favor of the underlying concrete, potential acoustic problems with that approach prompted them to instead replace some of the tiles with turquoise carpet tiles for a look reflective of their brand.

Knight Eady utilizes benching in their space rather than high walled cubicles.  It keeps the space open and interaction easy.  Further reflective of their family feel, they had a large custom farmhouse table built for the center of the space.  They can seat everyone around the table for a meal. 

As a real estate broker who loves working with dynamic young companies, I think Knight Eady did a remarkable job of using low cost tools such as color, theme and the open space culture to create the energy and feel they wanted in their workspace.