Twisted Toast’s first month of operation was spent working out of our MD Louis Eksteen’s home in true start-up style. The plan was however, to always move into a professional office as soon as possible. We had already secured office space above Starcom at the Country Club Estate in Woodmead, but we were only able to move in officially from May. That didn’t stop us from getting in there early to start transforming it though!
We captured the entire process on a time-lapse video, which you can view below, but we’ve also got a writeup with pictures to detail the transformation!

The first thing we did was survey the lay of the land – we had an excellent central area for our desks, a really nice offset wall, and four offices adjoining the main area. We sat down, did a bit of brainstorming and figured out what we needed, and what we wanted.

We were particularly fond of the central workspace area, and liked the idea of an open-plan, shared working area. We stripped the desks of their dividers, got rid of the computers and phones, and rearranged them into a rough square. This was a lot harder than it seemed, due to the absolute nest of electrical wiring, computer cabling and telephone wires, but we eventually prevailed, and got our desk space into something resembling a semblance of order!
While we tackled the desks and cabling, Erik got to work on our offset wall. We’d identified that the wall, which is the first thing any visitor to the Twisted Toast office sees when first stepping in, ought to be redone in our corporate colours with our logo (it was a very, very red). In the picture below, Erik takes a brief break from applying a base coat to pose with Starcom MediaVest Group MD Gordon Patterson and Twisted Toast CEO Kim Browne.

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While Erik begun applying the Twisted Toast blue to the freshly-dried offset wall, our team of office reconstruction workers begun stripping out drywalling between two of our offices. We decided that we wanted to turn the two adjacent offices into a single “chill room” to house our coffee machine, couches and the like. It’s adjacent to our balcony and braai area, so it really works well!

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Above: Erik hard at work on the offset wall while the chill room begins to take shape.

After a quick break for lunch, and to let the paint dry, the team got stuck back into it. While Erik started on the decals of the Twisted Toast logo and the clouds, the rest of the team started prepping one of our walls for a paintjob – with a twist! We planned to turn the one wall in our office into a massive blackboard where we could brainstorm ideas, scribble random musings and have our guests leave us messages. After copious amounts of masking tape had been applied, painting began, with everyone, even some Starcom employees and a few friends who dropped by to say hello getting in on the action!

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By late afternoon the decal work had been done with the main logo painted along with most of the clouds, and the blackboard wall was coming along nicely!

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With all the painting done, it was time for the big reveal! Unfortunately, the decal hadn’t aherred to the paint quite as well as we’d hoped, so our logo came out with a couple of rough edges, which Erik quickly set to remedying.

The final product on display below, with the four founders of Twisted Toast!

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