Wow! What a year it has been! We have seen so many of you lovely lot passing through our doors in 2018 from the snowy beginnings through the Gromit challenge heatwaves to the arrival of a lovely new DeskLodge House! It’s all been happening!
The DeskLodge team are so proud to now have three locations in Bristol and Basingstoke and a team that has nearly tripled in size! We certainly have stayed productive!
Thank you to all you wonderful DeskLodgers from old friends, amazing regulars and residents to all our DeskLodger newbies for making 2018 a year to remember xx
Here’s what happened….buckle in…
January
A new year and a new start. We looked at Combating Loneliness in the workplace and how coworking can help. Alison Edgar also popped in for another inspiring Sales Coach Solutions workshop.
February
In February we shared the DeskLodge love and welcomed the Womens Tech Hub Founders and Stephenson Law social media events. Whilst chatting to PHD students about how coworking can help their productivity.
March
With March came the snow and lots of it! We celebrated Easter with our annual DeskLodge Easter egg hunt and celebrated our first International Women’s Day with inspiring talks from local women, it was a successful and empowering day which we hope to celebrate again in 2019! Our Basingstoke location also started filling up with lovely new DeskLodgers, with more unique areas being built all the time!
April
April was a busy month for events with regular meet ups including PHPSW joining us for another jam packed turn out! Natasha Ryan our amazing Sports Therapist also started her fortnightly massage sessions, helping our DeskLodgers to de-stress from all that hard work that they put in! We had a DeskLodge Quiz at the DeskLodge social and the big news of the month was the arrival brand spanking new coffee machine!
May
The sun arrived and stayed for months! We celebrated with a secret social event (my gosh it was hard to keep it a secret) where we co-hosted a Sofar Sounds event in our Oak Tree space. With live and relaxed, accoustic performances and a very chilled DeskLodge Social. Find out more (link)
We also focused on Mental Health Awareness Week, where we looked in to how to cope with stress in the workplace. Many DeskLodgers got involved sharing stories and starting a conversation about an often-taboo subject, whilst offering ideas on how they cope.
June
In June we shared a few secrets on how we build a coworking space and the both the Bristol and Basingstoke Teams got together for the first time to discuss the future of DeskLodge and the very soon to be lauched (and a very big secret at the time) DeskLodge House!
July
Summer was in full bloom and DeskLodge Bristol jumped head first into the Gromit Challenge where we asked DeskLodgers to join our Insta challenge to photograph and tag themselves and add the #desklodgegromitchallenge hashtag, with a chance to win £250 towards their chosen charity.
In Basingstoke the DeskLodge team sponsored and attended the inspiring Venus Awards, supporting and promoting Women in Business.
August
By August the DeskLodge Gromit Challenge was in full swing and saw teams of DeskLodge residents and hotdeskers battling it out to capture selfies with as many Gromits as possible with their eyes on the prize for thir chosen charities.
DeskLodge was also growing, with a not so secret DeskLodge House on the horizon, the Bristol team started to grow and we welcomed the super efficient, Sabrina McCue to the Bristol DeskLodge Team and the lovely Siobhan Knight was promoted to Office Manager! Which was all very exciting!
We also found out the shocking stats on how much coffee our DeskLodgers consume. Find out why DeskLodgers Love Coffee
DeskLodge House was certainly starting to make an impact and our amazing residents Sparkol created this super-cool scribe for us.
September
As the summer ended we threw our annual DeskLodge End of the Summer Party! This years bash was festival themed so we covered our DeskLodgers in facepaint and even had a surpirse dressing up party (thanks to DeskLodge creator Tom Ball buying out a fancy dress shop that day!) Find out what happened here.
The Gromit Challenge came to an end and saw three teams manage to get selfies with every Gromit Unleashed 2 Character which was just amazing! Residents Sparkol managed to get to the finish line first and donated their winnings to The Grand Appeal! It was a grand summer out!
We were so excited that DeskLodge House was well on the way to opening too and expanded our team to include Justin Sanders, who is currently based at DeskLodge House! How time flies!
October
In October we launched the Great DeskLodge Bake Off and invited DeskLodgers to bake cakes to raise money for the Bristol Giving Day. We were so impressed with how many DeskLodgers got involved in the Bake Off and we managed to raise £257.27! Find out who won the Bake Off in The Great DeskLodge Bake Off blog post.
It wouldn't be October without Halloween so we threw another party with more facepainting and dressing up and ended it with a gruesome Bristol pub crawl! It was, of course, spooktacular!
Things started to get even busier at DeskLodge Basingstoke and the super-fun Emma Mears joined the team just in time for a DeskLodge Team get-together and a round of crazy golf!
November
November saw the offical opening of Desklodge House with the big launch party due in January 2019 (Watch this space!). DeskLodge House has already created a buzz in Bristol and has it's own local celebrity (like our very own Gromit) The DeskLodge Cockral, who guards the doors to our magical new space!
With a new coworking space comes two more members of the team including the lovely Ellie Cheetham and Mel Joslin who are rocking the fun vibes at DeskLodge House, alongside Thanh and Justin.
We also bigged up the area local to our original DeskLodge space in Old Market, Bristol this month, read our blog post on our Top Eats in the area.
December
December dropped in with its DeskLodger's Advent calendar and Basingstoke's Naughty Elf causing mischief on social media. With Christmas Jumper Day and our Mulled Wine and Mince Pie socials in Bristol, the end of 2018 has certainly been a very busy and fun time!
With plans for a big, fun-filled, magical launch party for DeskLodge House in January 2019, we certainly aim to start 2019 with a bang!
Merry Christmas and Happy 2019
Love from Team DeskLodge xx
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