Messaging app Slack has today expanded their corporate focus towards Australia, opening a new office in Melbourne which will also serve as the companies Asia Pacific HQ.
The office is located in the heritage Carlton Brewery site and has been designed by Breathe Architecture, a Melbourne based firm who has won several awards for their design, including several for the sustainable housing development ‘The Commons’ in Melbourne.
Slack CEO and co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, as well as CTO and co-founder, Cal Henderson were in attendance for the opening. Of the launch, Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack said
We live in a golden age of software. Work tools are finally benefitting from the type of exciting innovation we’ve seen in consumer apps for years. We’re making a big investment here in Australia to grow our own Slack team, but more importantly to help teams of all sizes be happier and more productive.
Slack will create 70 new local jobs by opening the new office, something sure to be appreciated by the Victorian Minister for Small Business, Innovation, and Trade, Philip Dalidakis who was also in attendance for the opening.
The office looks stunning in the fitout tour video, which shows open plan work spaces, round-table conference spaces and meeting rooms and of course, a comfy cafe for workers.
Slack is fairly heavily utilised by businesses in Australia, probably a motivation for opening their HQ here. Even before the opening of the local HQ in Melbourne, Australia businesses the likes of Telstra, REA Group, and SEEK are listed as some of the 10,000 Australian users already signed up to use the service.
Slack is positioned as an enhancement to team productivity with Slack saying that teams using slack see a 322% increase in productivity, a 48.6% reduction in email and best of all a 25.1% decrease in meetings. Part of the appeal in productivity is the integration with external services such as Dropbox, Trello, Asana, Google Docs, JIRA, MailChimp, Stripe and Zendesk.
Slack offers several tiers of pricing and functionality, from a free tier for small teams or groups through to a per user, per month scale with more options at a more corporate level.
While the new digs look impressive, there is one feature missing: A gift shop, where you can buy a pair of tasteful, official Slack socks or other Slack themed merchandise. Unfortunately you’ll still have to get those through the Slack online store.
You can try Slack out yourself by downloading it from Google Play .
Nice looking joint