Mailchimp is leaving its longtime Ponce City Market (PCM) home in 2022 to join a new Old Fourth Ward mixed-use from New City Properties, the developer of the nearby 725 Ponce project, the Atlanta-based digital marketing company Saturday confirmed in an email to What Now Atlanta (WNA). The incoming, yet-to-be-named $1 billion development, will be just blocks away from PCM, at 760 Ralph McGill Blvd.
Mailchimp, whose workers have been remote since March amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, will occupy a whopping 300,000-square-foot space in its new headquarters, situated along the BeltLine’s Eastside. Mailchimp’s PCM lease, which accounts for 213,000 square feet, expires in late-2022. When Mailchimp joined PCM in 2015 it had only 300 employees and today boasts 1,200 team members.
“We are happy to have helped Mailchimp grow into the company it is today and equally happy that when more space was needed to further expand they decided to stay in the neighborhood, reinforcing the Old Fourth Ward as an innovation hub,” Jamestown, Mailchimp’s current landlord, said in a statement.
Mailchimp told WNA by way of a spokesperson that its move is in an effort to “better support our business and employees as Mailchimp continues to grow, and to allow for more flexible ways of working—whether in-office, remote, or a hybrid approach.”
Mailchimp will continue to occupy 48,000 square feet of space, at 530 Means Street, where its Support Team is located, as well as small offices in Oakland, Brooklyn, Vancouver, Santa Monica, Seattle, and London.
“This is the perfect spot for our new headquarters, and a blank canvas for us to design what the future of working at Mailchimp looks like,” Dan Kurzius, Mailchimp’s co-founder, said in a prepared statement. “We love being in the Old Fourth Ward right on the BeltLine, and we’ll continue our longstanding corporate citizenship commitment to the neighborhood and our hometown of Atlanta from our new headquarters down the street.”
The new headquarters will feature expanded collaboration and meeting areas and outside there will be dedicated open-air space with direct access to Historic Fourth Ward Park and the BeltLine.
“We are thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to work with Mailchimp on their new Atlanta headquarters,” Jim Irwin, New City Property’s President, said in a prepared statement. “When we first began work on the Fourth Ward project, we envisioned it as a place where world-class companies could successfully adapt to the evolving needs of their workforce. Yet we never dared to imagine that we would get to work with a company so committed to its people, to corporate citizenship, and to community service.”
Of its planned project, New City writes on its website, “it will be one of the largest and most transformative new mixed-use developments on the Atlanta BeltLine and will feature world-class architecture and imaginative blend of public and private spaces to seamlessly integrate into an already thriving community.”
[Editor’s note: this article was updated Sept. 5 with comments from Mailchimp and New City Properties]
4 Responses
So I wonder if New City is getting/taking tax breaks, and if the design is staying the same…
Seems like a terrible business decision to lease that much space given that their employee pool is going to demand remote work opportunities.
It’s 2 years out, and I’ll give odds this pandemic is long gone by then. As far as remote work….if someone wants to climb the corporate ladder, they had better work where they can collaborate and develop relationships beyond what your can do on a Zoom call.
This may be the defining conflict for many companies: the people at the top of the corporate ladder now know they can conduct business without the massive overhead of Class A office space. How many of those people give a shit about the next generation having office space so they can advance their careers? Especially if the Millennials aren’t even smart enough to demand the benefits of being in the same building with the higher-ups?