Concierge for Business
If you look in the back of the average urban worker’s car, Kimberly Norton said, you’ll probably find a pile of clothes that need dry cleaning, rolls of film that need processing and shoes that need new heels.
Recognizing that rush-hour gridlock and abbreviated lunch hours leave thousands of errands undone, Norton six months ago formed Voila a Concierge, which is attempting to introduce the concierge concept to the office high-rise.
Concierges--from the Latin word for slave--have long been fixtures around European and ritzy American hotels, where they perform chores ranging from making dinner reservations to arranging big-ticket yacht rentals.
A concierge attached to an office building is a new breed, Norton said. Her fledgling service at the new Westwood Gateway high-rise on Santa Monica Boulevard is only the third business concierge in the country, she said, and more extensive than the other two (one is in the Pan Am building in New York and the other is in Denver), which function primarily to hail taxis and arrange for limousines.
Voila a Concierge will hail taxis, get film developed or arrange a catered ground-breaking party.
“The average person working, whether they’re male or female, a secretary or an executive, is in a crunch for time,” Norton said. “We provide a time-management system to accomplish everything from dry cleaning to shoe shines to coordination of special events.”
For the tenants of the 6-month-old Westwood Gateway--including Grubb & Ellis, Lotus Development and U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson’s local staff--the concierge service comes with the building under a contract with the developer, Bren Investment Properties. (Citing competitive reasons, Norton declined to disclose Voila’s fees.)
The developer deal is what sets Norton’s firm apart from the numerous small businesses that run errands and perform other tasks on an individual basis. “I was in a similar business working with individuals,” she said. “But we were waiting for the marketplace to explode so the developer would perceive it as a marketing amenity of the building.”
With the overabundance of office space available in Southern California, it may be that other developers are catching on to the marketing angle. Voila has agreed to begin a concierge service for an Irvine Co. building in Newport Beach and is negotiating with a third builder in Orange County, Norton said.
