Six paint-your-own-pottery shops in Denmark use the app for opening and closing lists, courses on new ideas and daily handovers between teams.
Creative Space is a paint-your-own-pottery concept in Denmark. Iben Restorff opened the first shop on Gl. Kongevej in Frederiksberg in 2011, with help from family and friends. She wanted to create Denmark's first ceramics workshop: a place where people gather to use their hands and be creative together, away from screens and the pace of everyday life.
Guests paint ceramics that are ready a week after the visit, or shape their own clay, which is ready after three weeks. There are masterclasses and a baby workshop too. Today there are six shops, in Østerbro, Indre By, Frederiksberg, Lyngby, Odense and Aarhus.
In 2022 Iben's eldest daughter Kira took over the company with her husband Karl. The family is still closely involved in daily operations. Since the handover the focus has been on professionalization, structure and scalability, with investment in new technology and more streamlined workflows, and new locations are opening around the country. The staff are young and most work part time: Creative Space takes on people under 18 and students for around ten hours a week, and you apply by video rather than by letter.
Daily to-do lists guide opening and closing and show managers how every shop is doing.
Courses in the app take new ideas and initiatives out to the shops.
New employees follow the same to-do lists during onboarding, so the shop opens the same way every day.
Operations manager Emilie Overgaard had worked at Creative Space for six years when the film was made. District manager Signe Hansen had been there for three: she started on the floor as a shop assistant and became team leader, then shop manager and then district manager.
The teams are young. In a shop like Frederiksberg, the youngest is often 16 and the oldest 24. The narrow age range gives the team a strong bond, one you can see on the shop floor when they serve guests, and it reaches across the shops. Creative Space works for a team-oriented culture, where the team's performance is what gets praised and recognized.
As the company opens new shops, it wants to carry that culture with it and let it grow. They do it through the events they organize, their courses and their handbooks, to make the culture clear and as consistent as possible. There will always be some personality and variation, which they consider healthy. But the team culture works, so they want firm guidelines for it.
Before the app, instructions were lists and signs taped to the walls. Now they are in one place, and everyone knows where to look before starting a new task.
The app is not just something that is driven by us or by the head office. It is actually something that is driven by all employees in Creative Space.
The app is not driven only by the managers or by head office, but by all employees. Every day, staff post the updates that hand the shop over to the next team, and the internal communication and direct chat in the app are driven by the employees.
To-do lists carry the daily routine when the shops open and close. A shop manager can see how a shop is doing without being there, and at district level the lists give an overview across the shops: how far each list has got, and whether there is room to add more.
When there is a new idea or initiative, they make a course for it in the app to prepare employees and get the idea working in the shops. Having one shared platform for development and the creative side makes it something everyone does together.
The same lists are part of onboarding. A new employee opens the shop with the to-do list and follows it step by step, so training does not rely on word of mouth or guesswork, and the shop is opened the same way every day. Knowing what the next task is lets new staff get started on their own from day one, and it makes onboarding feel safer.
It also means a lot to us to bring the culture into our app so we can bring it to new departments and help it grow bigger and bigger.
For both managers it makes a difference that the app carries the Creative Space name and that the company produces all the content itself. Starting with an app took some adjusting to, but because it is theirs, it feels like their own tool and not something remote. The same culture runs in the app, maybe even more, because there is room for it.
Posts can carry videos, pictures and playful text, which is how they reach their staff best. The employees are very visual, and a dense block of text would lose many of them. Ideas travel both ways: creative minds can send something nice out to their employees, and employees can send things back to the creative team.
The app does not stand alone. Training works best combined with learning from colleagues on the shop floor. Training material can say a lot, but if it is not kept up in the shops, where you see people lead and the team at work, no amount of text or good videos will make up for it. It is in the shops that training comes to life, and support from the app makes it even better.
Organize daily operations and give managers the tools they need to run their departments.
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