Brief
A 36,000 sq ft London creative studio needed one system serving three audiences under one roof: members booking space, agencies and brands hiring Studios 1 to 3, and the venue running all of it. Before building, we benchmarked 12 of the most relevant creative workspaces and members’ clubs across the UK, Europe and the US. Not one ran a single member record across access, payments, community and events. That gap was the brief.
What We Built
One system, three faces. YOU, powered by DEPARTMNT.
— Member portal. Application, vetting and onboarding, every applicant reviewed personally so the front door doubles as curation. Tiered membership, studio booking against a token wallet, a catering wallet, event ticketing and a tap-to-connect member directory. — Production portal. A separate experience for agencies and brands: live session state, crew on site, time remaining, the Wi-Fi password. Hospitality ordered mid-shoot and delivered to the floor. Session history, hours and spend, exportable. — Admin CRM. Applications, access, bookings, token balances, kitchen orders with lead times, and every session’s spend assembled for invoicing. The member sees units. The venue sees the numbers. — Hardware. TapTech cards, wristbands and resin tags as each member’s physical key. One credential opens a door, books a room, buys a ticket and knows who you are.
The instinct on a build like this is to digitise everything. We didn’t. A production client spending five figures on a shoot wants their account manager on a direct line, not a booking form, so booking stays on the phone and everything around it goes digital. The same thinking ran through the rest: keep the Paxton access system already installed, settle payments straight to YOU through Stripe Connect rather than through us, and use NFC readers already going into the walls for wayfinding instead of buying an indoor positioning system. The build ran alongside an active fit-out, which forced a hard Phase 1 scope freeze. Least glamorous decision in the project, and the reason it held its dates.
Outcome
Phase 1 built against fixed September delivery dates, with a soft launch to a founding cohort on an open-day model. Hardware in production, payments coming online, Phase 2 in scoping. Official launch Q4 2026.
