Contract Magazine - January/February 2019 - 39

Startup office design whisperers Nina Etnier and Brad Sherman
create spaces that embody the quintessence of their inhabitants, following
a belief that all companies-big or small-deserve great design
By Belinda Lanks

With a common interest in
designing for tech startups
like Casper, Food52, and
Bombas, Nina Etnier and
Brad Sherman launched Float
Studio, and have developed a
strong reputation for working
around clients' tight time
lines, modest budgets, and
rapid growth. They create
comfortable and functional
workspaces, that ultimately
reflect the client's brand.

It all started with a Band-Aid request. Merrill Stubbs,
the co-founder of the food website Food52, cut
her finger and, looking for a bandage, approached
the front desk of her coworking space, General
Assembly. Brad Sherman was manning reception.
After stemming the bleeding, the two began to
chat. Stubbs and her co-founder, the former New
York Times food editor Amanda Hesser, were
leaving General Assembly to rent their own office,
but they weren't sure that they could build it out
the way they wanted on a lean budget. It so
happened that Sherman was a designer who had
been waiting for an opportunity to architect a space
for a maturing startup, and he had some thrifty
tricks to cut corners.
Before coming to General Assembly,
Sherman had worked for a New Jersey-based
recycling company called TerraCycle, designing
spaces out of trash, when he got the itch to join
the startup world. It was 2012 in New York, where
"these really buzzy companies were disrupting
traditional industries," he says. "I knew I wanted
to get involved in some design capacity and didn't
know how or where. A friend of mine was working
at General Assembly, so I said, 'Hey, hire me
as a front-desk person. I want to be in the scene
in any capacity.'"
Stubbs ended up handing him his first
break after he handed her that Band-Aid. He charged
Food52 $25 an hour to design its first headquarters.
Through that project, Sherman began building
a reputation for applying his design-on-a-dime
mindset to creating residential-like offices for
hot startups. "One thing that I was noticing across
the board as these companies were leaving General
Assembly: They were all daunted by the task of
finding space and being able to afford to build it
out," he says. "This got my wheels turning as to how
to be able to provide a service to these companies
in a way that can meet their visual needs but without
breaking the bank."
After posting images of a large incubator
he had designed on Instagram, he heard from an
old college friend and fellow designer, Nina Etnier.
She, too, felt drawn to the startup community.
"There was so much energy to it," she says. "I had
my own idea for a startup that I was waking up
at five in the morning to work on pitch decks for.
I was going around networking and chatting up my
ideas and just sort of wanting something else and
different." She began freelancing for Sherman,
and the two quickly realized that their experiences
complemented each other. Sherman was resourceful
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