A temporary dancefloor and no plans for layoffs: Canva celebrates new Melbourne office through tech sector downturn

Canva has opened its new Melbourne office, a converted Collingwood warehouse boasting hundreds of workstations, an in-built kitchen, and, at the time of writing, a temporary dance floor.

Unlike other players in the Australian tech scene, the graphic design unicorn is projecting ‘party mode’ energy.

Not only has Canva unveiled its slick new premises, it is gearing up for its Canva Create event, where the company will today share how it is “reimagining visual communication for brands of all sizes.”

And for Canva’s global team of around 3,200 staff, there seems to be more cause for optimism: the company, now entering its sixth year of profitability, says it has no plans to contribute to layoffs tearing through the tech sector.

Speaking to SmartCompany at the firm’s Victorian hub, Canva’s global head of people Jennie Rogerson and head of design Andrew Green explained why the firm sprung for a new Victorian home, the concepts behind its creation, and why they are celebrating through the tech downturn.

Converted warehouse no “monument” to Canva

The decision to establish Canva’s new office in Collingwood was driven by cultural preferences as much as practical considerations, the pair said.

Unlike Cremorne in Melbourne’s inner-south, a hotspot for tech titans like Seek, MYOB, and a dense concentration of startups, the Collingwood space brings the company close to its core user-base, Green said.

“This campus is really an extension of what Canva is, physically manifested, like, it is in Sydney,” he said, calling the inner-east region a “really obvious” place to establish a base.

“It’s really connected to the human side of Canva,” he continued, pointing to the cluster of small businesses, architects, gyms, and cafes “just here in Collingwood, and so that made a lot of sense.”

The site succeeds Canva’s existing co-working operations, Rogerson said, with their prior arrangement “bursting at the seams” as roughly 300 Victorian staff reincorporated in-person work to their schedules.

Yet the company was determined not to build a “monument” to itself with the site, Green added.

The two-storey, 2,015 square metre space boasts a dedicated parenting sanctuary replete with games and toys, custom murals designed with Canva’s own software tools, and an upstairs space capable of hosting a light-up dancefloor.

But the site, previously home to Lululemon, bears the hallmarks of its prior occupants.

Floor-to-ceiling mirrors grace a wall in a large downstairs meeting space, an echo of its prior life as a workout studio.

The kitchen was there when Canva arrived. So too was the massive wooden table upstairs, where the company plans to serve free lunches to staff three times a week.

In contrast to the terrazzo of Canva’s Surrey Hills headquarters, the Collingwood site reclaimed a carpark for its outdoor garden space, with raised garden beds halfway covering the ‘Lululemon’ painted on once-reserved spots.

“We wanted to open an office that sort of took whatever space it was in, in this case, an industrial space, and with low, low, impact on the environment, just make it our own,” Green said.

There are no requirements for local staff to commute to the new space on a regular basis, the pair added, with each team free to determine to optimise their in-person work.

“We really trust our teams to know what works best for them,” Rogerson said.

At least on Wednesday, when ‘Vibe Team’ staff proudly showed off the site to journalists, many dozens of Canva personnel clacked away at workstations and populated meeting rooms.

Profitability makes Canva “masters our own destiny”

As welcoming as they were, the display of communal tables, work-from-home leniency, and fresh basil from the garden felt incongruous with broader challenges facing the tech sector, and the very real consequences for workers across some of the industry’s biggest firms.

In December, Adobe, the incumbent graphic design juggernaut and arguably Canva’s main rival, laid off around 100 people to cut expenses, Bloomberg reported.

Severe cuts have diminished teams at previously indomitable companies including Amazon, Meta, and Google, resulting in tens of thousands of redundancies worldwide.

On the smaller end of the spectrum, local startups, like restaurant ordering innovator Mr Yum, have also undertaken multiple layoff rounds to turn their operations towards profitability.

Is Canva contemplating its own headcount reduction?

Rogerson is clear in the negative: there are “absolutely no plans” to cut staff, she said.

As opposed to Adobe or Google, Canva is not a publicly traded stock, even if last year’s Canva Create event felt like a message to would-be investors as much as users.

That largely shields the company from the whims of retail traders and institutional backers, who may see a worsening economic forecast as bad news for growth-hungry tech stocks, and plead with founders to forego cash-burning expansion in favour of stable growth.

Naturally, being profitable helps, too.

“I think it’s super important for us to really be kind of masters of our own destiny,” Rogerson said.

“So we’re at our sixth year in a row of profitability, which is really important. We’ve been really fortunate for that.”

Hiring has not stopped, either. Canva has inducted 1,400 new staff members over the last year, including 270 since January, a representative said.

The company is currently looking for personnel to fill 278 roles worldwide.

Even so, the addition of new staff is lower than it could have been otherwise, thanks to a strategic review Canva undertook in early 2022.

“We launched something called ‘Fewer Things Well’, which has pervaded a lot of areas of our culture,” Rogerson continued.

“So we do things like fewer meetings well, fewer hires well, fewer goals well — that just means we’re really focused in what we’re doing.

“And I think that really ties into our hiring plans. So something that we’ve been really intentionally mindful about is really taking on new skills that we need in the team to get us to our goals.”

Canva was “really fortunate in the timeframe to make sure that we could weather that storm really well,” she added, while praising the company’s ability to reshuffle workers internally.

Speaking for the design team, Green said the “intentional” strategy created “also creates really good teams, because everyone’s engaged and they’re actually running towards something that they feel empowered to hit, and have support to hit it.”

Only a fraction of Canva’s employees will make their way to the Collingwood dance floor on Thursday evening. Given the optimism from the company’s top brass, the ones who do may feel cause to celebrate.