Carvertise employees pose for company photo Thursday at new $1.2 million headquarters on the Wilmington rivefront.
A home-grown company that puts advertising on cars celebrated its sleek new headquarters Thursday.
Carvertise’s operations and dispatch crews moved under I-195 from its warehouse and production facility in Wilmington’s Browntown neighborhood to a $1.2 million, 15,000-square-foot home in the Shipyard Center on the Christina riverfront.
The space, renovated in a modern industrial design with whites and grays and a touch of blondish wood beneath exposed black HVAC ducts, bears no resemblance to the outlet store and bank that once occupied at 974 Justison St.
Most importantly, said CEO Mac Macleod during a Thursday tour of the space, the new offices will allow the company, which wraps cars in vinyl decal material, to continue growing.
It’s seen a 55% year-over-year sales growth in 2022 — Macleod won’t say exactly what revenues are — and the staff has grown from 20 in 2021 and then 3o in 2022, before hitting 55 right now. The building has room for 150, he said.
Carvertise wanted to stay in Delaware, where it began a decade ago when Macleod co-founded it with Greg Star while the two were students at the University of Delaware.
One of their first customers was ShopRite grocery stores.
CEO Chris Kenny remembers Alan Levin of the Delaware Economic Development Office asking him to take a chance on the two. Kenny, who also is owner of Delaware LIVE, did.
“I think the growth is amazing,” he said Thursday before the grand opening. ShopRite’s headquarters and flagship story now is just across the river from Carvertise’s new headquarters.
“They never gave up. They kept pressing and charging forward,” Kenny said. “It’s a really nice home-grown success story.”
Expanding nationally
Even though Delaware business now accounts for only 5% of the company’s revenues, and it boasts national work with Coca-Cola, Netflix, NBCUniversal, 7-Eleven, EA Sports, NASCAR and GlaxoSmithKline, Macleod said they wanted the headquarters to stay local.
“This area is the heart and soul of our organization, and we’re excited to invest and grow in the community that grew and shaped us,” Macleod said in a press statement. “It feels right.
After searching for the right space for a few years, Pettinaro showed the company the riverfront space, and Carvertise spent the next 18 months planning the renovation with Mitchell & Associates.
The time spent picking designs and sourcing materials seemed to move like molasses, MacLeod said. It was tricky to balance the design so it was elegant but not off-puttingly posh.
The two-phase construction flew by, he said.
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Pettinaro Construction did the remodel, sharing some of the expenses now. They will be loaded back into company’s 10-year lease in a deal referred to as a tenate improvement allowance, Macleod said.
Phase one was the front of the building, with executive offices down a dark corridor and dispatchers sitting in the windows fronting the building.
Phase two was the back two-thirds of the building, with conference rooms and offices running along one wall and offices on the other. The space between them holds desks.
Those who enter the building will find a chic staff kitchen worthy of a television food show set to the left, and the dispatchers sitting to the right in an open floor plan, surrounded by plants.
They handle the flow of the Carvertise’s cars.
Some of the wrapped cars are contracted to simply do their business while following their own schedules. Many of those are rideshare vehicles working with Uber or Lyft.
Others are marshaled in a technique called swarming. Then, the company arranges for multiple cars to follow routes around big gatherings, such as concerts, festivals and sports events such as a Phillies or Dallas Mavericks game.
“So, every home Lakers game, 10 or 20 drivers are obliged to drive on a set path at a set time around the Lakers’ games,” Macleod said.
That exposes targeted audiences multiple times to a product, he said.
“The business is shifting a little more away from just a novelty media format,” he said.
It’s also possible to wrap cars for a conference or event and have those cars pick up and drop off attendees, he said.
Carvertise CEO Mac Macleod talks about how popular its new sound-proof phone booths are.
Phone booth popularity
Near the dispatchers are three sound-proof phone booths.
“I am so surprised how much people use these,” Macleod said. “I would have never guessed. I always thought these were a little weird, like a little Batmanish or Supermanish.”
Then he found himself using them.
“If it’s a conversation that’s too sensitive to take on the floor, but you don’t want to hog the whole conference room,” he explained.
The biggest surprise in planning the office, he said, was the recommendation to add as many conference rooms as possible. Most companies don’t, he was told.
“Once you have the ability to walk five steps and have a private conversation in a comfortable setting, it does change the game,” he said.
Macleod is also somewhat inordinately fond of the office’s plants, stopping once to fondle the wide leaves of a banana plant.
He’s thinking growing bananas might be a great sideline, prompting several in the crowd to point out that he’d be competing with Chiquita at the Delaware docks.
The headquarter’s wide-open back room not only allows for expansion, but now can be used as a gym or recreation area.
“When you come back, there could be a pool table right here,” Macleod said, pointing to the center of the room.
It’s one more way he sees to interest future employees and to keep employees coming into the office, which uses a hybrid work schedule.
The company recruits in the greater Philadelphia, Delaware, New Jersey and Eastern Maryland areas.
‘”Our goal is to reach maximum capacity,” he said.
A friend gave this sign made with pieces of car license plates to CEO Mac Macleod.
Carvertise corporate culture
Different departments have different schedules, with some in the office more days than others. The ones who come in the least are sales, he said.
While hybrid schedules helped people cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, he’d like to see more of the staff in the office, to help build a culture.
“My position is we’re a work here physically first company,” he said.
At the back of the building are any-sex bathrooms, one with a shower. That allows employees to work out at the nearby gyms, walk or run along the riverfront or bike down the nearby Markell Trail and clean up before starting or returning to work.
The company now has 2,200 drivers with wrapped cars. About 550,000 have registered with the company as a potential driver and car.
Macleod said he once would have said that Coca-Cola was his dream client, but they now have a deal with them.
It’s now all downhill from there, he joked.
“We grow the account,” he said.
Macleod has really enjoyed watching the way employees use the space in the building.
With everyone in the wide-open warehouse and production facility, there were no walls, no privacy, few amenities.
“What this facility has allowed me to see firsthand is that when you construct an environment that’s conducive to work, it actually manifests in the physical results,” he said. “It’s not going to be ephemeral. It’s not a transient concept.”
He pointed to the high-tech kitchen.
“When people come here and congregate right there on that kitchen island for lunch, they’re actually talking and building bonds with one another that help when there’s friction eventually,” he said. “I’m seeing that firsthand. And I’m like, wow, I wish I could have done this sooner.”
Betsy Price is a Wilmington freelance writer who has 40 years of experience, including 15 at The News Journal in Delaware.
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