It was two lines from an Observer article on coworking that made a lightbulb go off: One solution is for coworking spaces to trade on their own brands instead of the word “coworking.” Another would be for the coworking purists to come up with a new way to describe what it is they do so they don’t get lumped in with the rent-a-cubes. 

Our space has been under construction since December 2017. The team did an amazing job with a complete renovation wrapping up right about the time I was brought on board back in April. I knew my job would be fun because the great work everyone did would easily sell itself. So, I had a finished coworking space, it was like nowhere and no other concept I had ever seen in Bowling Green and it was sitting empty as my own little hidden treasure. We obviously did not want to keep it that way but we needed a name and a brand that reflected the space because it is exactly what makes us unique.

While researching names, I came across many great articles about coworking concepts and what has worked for others, but none struck me like the one above did. To trade on our own brand, which was not even established yet, meant that I needed to come up with what made our space desirable and efficient as a coworking space and then sell that. Following my online research, I asked our interior designer (Sarah Smalling Interiors) to give me the words she would use to describe our space:

Knowing that we wanted to stick with a four letter word, I began digging. These words fresh, elemental, biophilic, oldly enough began to remind me of a mint leaf. So for about a day, I let Mint cowork pay around in my head. “Mint Cowork, Cowork Mint, The Mint, I’m going to Mint.” All of this I kept practicing saying to see if it would work. Then I went back to the drawing board. What if I used ment instead? It is in so many of the words our space brings to life: achievement, commitment, advancement, enjoyment, refreshment, compliment, and elemental as Sarah stated.

And so we had it! Ment Cowork, where you can enjoy the ‘ment within a community for the success of your idea. It is a play on words but more importantly, it is a representation of what we aim to give our members. We want to give you a space to succeed in and achieve those actions that can be turned into real people, places and things. It is what the suffix ment does to words and it is what you can do to your career. It’s as simple as that and I like to believe it’s just ment to be. 

Written by: Hayley Hoback, Community Manager