The Office Name Game
Having a great office space was high on our priority list. We renovated our first office ourselves. Back then Tooploox consisted of 4 people only so renovation was a true challenge. We kept hiring more and more people so we had to move to a new space. At first, we occupied only few rooms but soon it occurred that Tooploox expanded to most of the building. We had more space for employees and more conference rooms that were initially numbered. However, this was not very convenient nor creative so we decided to give a unique name to each room.
The initial idea was just to gather proposals from employees and choose names via simple voting. It turned out that we stepped into chaos where some of the names made absolutely no sense so we had to try another approach.
A small team created a survey with 2 naming conventions:
- Fantasy/Sci-Fi planets and lands (Rivendell, Tattooine, Mordor etc)
- Names with included room number (example: 3. 3 Musketeers; 7- 7 sins; 9- Leon’s 9 lives) (because rooms had numbers before)
The winning idea was the first one so we could begin naming each room accordingly and create a sticker for each glass door.
Names might sound random but there is a reason behind every choice:
- Kaer Morhen (Witcher training center from the Witcher series) — a room used for onboarding, trainings and company-wide meetings.
- Shire (Peaceful land populated by Hobbits from Tolkien Lord of the Rings) — small, cozy room.
- Mordor (a distant, deserted land from Lord of the Rings) — at that time it was the furthest room in the office.
- Moria (mines from LoTR) and Batcave (Home of Batman) — two rooms located in the basement
- Wonderland — Looks like a rabbit hole
- Open space — has a special sticker with a cat in space
Some rooms already have names but still, wait for their graphics (Naboo & Tatooine). Other rooms have names like Chamber of Secrets (we had some Harry Potter fans on board) or Winterfell (who doesn’t like Game of Thrones?)
Back then we were sure that everybody knows all those fictional locations. As Tooploox grew, it turned out we were wrong. For many people Naboo or Kaer Morhen are just weird sounds ;) Not everyone had seen Star Wars (it’s hard to believe by it’s true ;) ), therefore new rooms in other offices received a different kind of names:
- Wars and Sawa in Warsaw (inspired by a story about Warsaw City)
- Shipyard in Gdansk (Gdansk is located at a seaside and is well known from building ships!)
As we grow, we need more rooms and more names! So how should we call the next conference room?
