How Do You Leverage Your Brand for Growth?
October 20, 2025
Missed the Global Workspace Association conference in Chicago? Here’s your inside look at ‘Branding for Growth’, a conversation packed with real stories and takeaways from operators proving that great branding drives great business.
The closing session featured one of the most insightful conversations on branding in the coworking industry, led by Grant Barnhill (Shift Workspaces), John Herring (Fuse Workspaces), Kelsey McKinny (Downtown Works), and moderated by Sofía Stolberg (Piloto 151 / PilotoMail).
Sofia Stolberg
CEO & Founder of PilotoMail
Sofia is the CEO and cofounder of Piloto 151 and PilotoMail. After launching her region’s first coworking space in 2013, she cracked the code to scaling beyond square footage through Virtual Offices and mail automation. Today, she helps operators unlock higher profits with her Freedom from Square Feet methodology.
If you didn’t attend the Global Workspace Association conference in Chicago last week, or if you missed the closing session, this recap covers one of the most insightful conversations on branding in the coworking industry.
The final panel brought together four operators to answer a central question: How does branding drive growth in coworking?
Panelists included:
Grant Barnhill, Shift Workspaces
John Herring, Fuse Workspaces
Kelsey McKinny, Downtown Works
Sofía Stolberg, Piloto 151 / PilotoMail (moderator)
What is branding?
Branding is the expression of your values and the way people experience your company.
For Grant, branding is a reflection of your values as a founder and as a company. Shift is a certified B Corporation so Grant shared that since 2018, Shift has offset 3,639,200 pounds of carbon emissions, planted 48,542 trees, and donated close to $500,000 in cash to underserved school-aged students in Denver and space usage.
John chimed in and agreed with Grant’s definition. Fuse’s call to action is to help “change the world”. Yes, it’s lofty, but they do so by engaging their local community and providing outlets for smaller businesses to give back to different causes.
Kelsey’s definition was also on point and in line with the trend towards brand-led hospitality that more than one speaker and panel at the conference alluded to. Branding, for Kelsey, is more than a logo or a color palette, it’s how you make people feel.
As for my definition? Branding is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. And beyond that, every moment is a branding opportunity.
What is brand‑led hospitality?
Brand‑led hospitality is the practice of aligning your brand with every member touch point to create meaningful, memorable experiences.
After intros and definitions, we dove right into the question: How does your brand enable you to target your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and create memorable experiences?
Every panelists agreed: if your branding is explicit, that messaging will help you attract people that care about the same things you do.
People that make their way to Shift care about sustainability, many times using it to attract employees that also care about a company’s carbon footprint. But their members also want a luxury work environment, complete with high-end charcuterie spreads, martini bars and surprise and delight moments on the daily.
Those that make their way to Fuse want Class A building experiences beginning with the parking, but also love that there’s a Do More wall at each space featuring ways to contribute to drinkable water for remote regions in Africa and local community drives for children in need.
And if you’re part of the Downtown Works membership base, Kelsey reminded us that you can successfully cater to the Dropbox’s of the world and to individual freelancers simultaneously. Their secret sauce? Providing premier coworking spaces with a strong community focus on the startup and tech ecosystem in San Diego. Downtown partners with all the startup organizations in the city, providing great pricing and resources for startups, free space for pitch competition winners, and raffle tickets to the best music venues in town. And the large companies? They want to be immersed in that ecosystem and appreciate that Downtown partners locally for everything, including the beer they serve.
The common thread? Messaging is important, but it’s much more than lip service. You have to connect it to every experience and make your members feel great and proud about belonging to your community. This, in a nutshell, is what brand-led hospitality is all about. It is where the real opportunity for operators in our industry lies because we are positioned to deliver these experiences in a way that landlords rarely can.
How does branding fuel growth?
Branding fuels growth by increasing retention, enabling premium pricing, and generating strong social proof.
Downtown Works has over 300, 5-star reviews. According to Kelsey, beyond delivering on your brand promises, it’s as easy as asking your members and visitors to provide you with a review after a great experience.
Shift boasts incredibly high renewal rates, with year-over-year increases. And they have higher than average office rents at $110 per rentable square foot. They can command these renewal rates and pricing, according to Grant, because their brand has enabled them to do so.
All 3 of our panelists agreed: if you want to use your brand to enable and fuel your growth, the key is consistency. And we couldn’t agree more. In fact, at one point, the panelists turned the questions back to me and asked me how we led through our brands, beyond the color purple you’ve all associated with our PilotoMail team by now.
What I answered is that we are constantly storytelling through our brands. I shared our genesis story at our coworking spaces. How my brother Juan Carlos and I were sitting at a cafe in the plaza across our freshly-painted building prior to opening our first location and witnessed the pigeons from the plaza dirtying our facade. It was at that moment that we said to ourselves: “If you can’t beat them, join them,” and our now iconic pilot pigeon was born. Every member’s experience becomes more memorable at our spaces through the lens of this story and the aviation metaphor that we adopted.
If you were at the panel, then you witnessed the very beginning of it, where I handed a Piloto 151 branded boarding pass to each of my guests, welcoming them onto the panel. And if you stayed until the end of the discussion, you saw that I handed them each a branded, hand-written thank you note for sharing their insights on stage with all of you.
Consistently reminding your members why you do what you do at every touch point, delivering on expected surprise-and-delight moments and memorable experiences day in and day out, is what it takes to leverage your brand for growth.
About PilotoMail
PilotoMail is a technology company that builds virtual office infrastructure and mailroom automation for the remote workforce. Operators use our software to break free from their square footage revenue cap and scalably grow their businesses.