Female coworking firm opens pop-up at The Wing’s former SF site

Female-focused coworking firm Her Workplace is considering an expansion into the space formerly occupied by a similar group at Vanbarton Group’s 115 Sansome Street in San Francisco, following the model of its New York expansion.

Her Workplace is hosting a coworking and networking day on Tuesday on the second floor of the building. The offices were formerly leased by The Wing, with the former women-led company’s furniture and fixtures left behind when it departed in the fall of 2022. 

Her Workplace founder Marilynn Joyner tried a similar pop-up tactic in The Wing’s fourth New York City location before signing on for a month-to-month lease on the 11th floor at 25 West 39th Street near Bryant Park. She is in negotiations on a longer-term lease, with a possible profit-sharing model. If the pop-up in San Francisco goes well, she’d be open to a similar arrangement on one floor of The Wing’s former two-floor space at 115 Sansome. 

“The event is really going to be a test for us to see, do we want to keep going just like we have in New York?” she said.

Joyner has spoken with building owner Vanbarton Group for about a year, she said, but didn’t have the bandwidth to really consider an expansion until recently because she was getting the New York location off the ground. The San Francisco space and the New York space are the only two former Wing spots in the country that are still available, to her knowledge, she said. Most of the rest were demoed and turned back into traditional offices.

“Wildly successful” location

Her Workplace would be an “outstanding fit” for the building, but there are other possible takers circling the space as well, according to Richard Coles, founder and managing partner at Vanbarton. Some are looking to take one or the other floor and some are looking at leasing both. There are some traditional companies that like the natural light in the space and would retrofit it, but the bulk of the interest has come from coworking companies, as it’s already set up for that and the coworking concept is “at the forefront of demand” in the city, he said. 

“The gestalt that The Wing tapped into was so spot on for San Francisco and that’s only gotten stronger post-pandemic as people, women in particular, are looking for that sense of community, looking to re-engage, reconnect and reunite,” he said.

He added that The Wing location was “knocking the cover off the ball” before it shuttered. “Whoever ends up going in there will have much more success than even The Wing’s success.”

Coles said one of the main reasons the second and third floors have not been leased yet is because the ownership wasn’t sure if it would be able to keep the building since it was on the market as a short sale last year. But after retaining the building for $35 million in December, wiping out about $56 million in debt on the property it first bought for $83 million in 2016, Vanbarton has been more proactive about leasing, he said, looking for just the right tenant. 

“Our job is to curate the user roster in the building to make sure we have a first-class community of businesses,” he said. “So for us it’s less about the last dollar of rent and more about getting the right users in the building.” 

That doesn’t mean it’s giving out major concessions to bring tenants in, he said, given that the 14-story building is already about 80 percent occupied — quite good by today’s San Francisco standards. The company hasn’t done many profit-sharing leases either, though he wishes he had signed one with The Wing, seeing the firm was “wildly successful.”

Joyner would be looking for a significant discount to come aboard. The Wing was paying $60,000 a month for the 12,000-square-foot New York space, she said. Her Workplace is paying $8,000 a month, though that is still a trial run she arranged based off of her long-standing relationship with its owners, Thor Equities, from her decade as a commercial agent. 

As one of 18 female commercial agents in an office of 250 at CBRE in New York, Joyner said she always wanted a “third space” where she could learn from and find community with other women. The former tenant agent even joined The Wing for a short time before it filed for bankruptcy in 2021, but she felt the high price didn’t allow for the inclusivity and accessibility she wanted.

Agent to entrepreneur

When The Wing went under, Joyner thought there was an opportunity to create a new female-focused coworking space that would be more accessible to women and nonbinary people, using her savvy commercial background to make sure the company succeeded. As an agent she saw firsthand that The Wing didn’t have the knowledge base to sign appropriate leases, which contributed to its demise, she said. 

“They were signing traditional leases that were quite frankly not in line with the market,” she said, leaving tenant improvement dollars and free rent on the table. “They just didn’t have the significant knowledge of negotiating real estate deals and didn’t have the right brokers supporting them in that.”

She has 200 members signed up in New York, paying $195 a month, about half the price of what The Wing charged, she said. Members have access to the workspace itself, as well as the 75 in-person and virtual events Her Workspace has put on since January. There’s also a mentorship program. Men are allowed, she said, but “we just ask that you are an ally of women.”

She would like to be in 12 markets by the end of 2030 and also plans events in L.A., D.C., Boston and Chicago. But San Francisco seems like the next logical step, she said, since all The Wing tenant improvements are still in place and the city has many women who work in male-dominated industries. 

“It seems like there’s really no support for women in tech, and more specifically female founders,” she said. “There is just an ever-growing need for a space like this, so I’m really excited to get there because I think that if we do decide to stay we can make a really big impact.”

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