Chicory's Growth: How the Best Place to Work in NYC Came to Be!

It’s hard to believe summer’s officially wrapping up. As the season turns, I always like looking back and reflecting on where I was a year ago at this time. Cheesy, I know...

Well, one year ago (almost to the day!) I walked into the Chicory office for the first time for my in-person interview. At the time, the office was located down in the Financial District and it was my first time in a co-working space. It felt fluid and busy, buzzing with energy. 

About a week later, I got a call and that was that: I was going to be part of the team! By the time I started a couple weeks later, we had a new office space here in the Flatiron District. Turns out this was Chicory’s sixth location. 

And earlier this summer, we expanded into our second floor at our current location. My, how we’ve grown! 

Naturally, I turned to Hillary, our human Chicory encyclopedia and Marketing Director to find out where the other locations have been and it looks a little something like this!

For context, when I started last September, I was the thirteenth employee. This month, we just hired our twenty-fourth employee! That’s not even counting the two interns we’ve had the joy of welcoming this summer, not to mention the many interns that have come before.

More people obviously means more everything—more connections, more coffee, more meetings and, definitely—a need for more space! We quickly outgrew our office on the 6th floor and have expanded our Chicory universe down to the 5th floor!

Now, our “Quiet Room” where we’d all hunker down to get things done between meetings and inter-departmental collaborations, has become home to our very own ping pong table. We’ve now got a full floor downstairs just for focused, hard work. (And, I personally can’t believe we once fit 20 people where a ping pong table stands today!) It’s honestly perfect, more room to get things done, but also, more room to have fun. Upstairs, we continue our lunch club tradition (which is now accented with Thai-day Fridays and Vegan Cinnamon Snail Thursdays). Plus, regional specialties splayed out on our snack table, brought back from all corners of the world where our team members have travelled—we’ve had Turkish delights, caramels from France and gummy lobsters from Boston! Plus there’s that ping pong table and our Nintendo switch—office rankings for Top Ponger and Fastest Luigi coming soon.

It’s exciting to see how, even since I began less than a year ago, the culture has evolved. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve always had our conference rooms named after drag queens and the Nintendo Switch was stowed away safely when we schlepped uptown from FiDi. But it’s important for us to turn inward as we expand outward. We have the amazing opportunity to forge this company from the ground up and I can’t wait to see where Chicory’s headed next!

Psst we’re hiring! You’re probably wondering how to join this incredible team: see what we’ve got available here.