Case Study: WeWork achieves scalable design and asset management for community-focused spaces with Airtable

How WeWork carefully approaches physical space design with Airtable

WeWork, the coworking company known for designing community-focused physical spaces, needed a way to codify and scale its detailed design process as it expanded — opening 8–10 new locations a month across dozens of cities and operating dozens of sites. To manage thousands of individual design elements (furniture, lighting, fixtures, etc.) and keep specifications consistent, WeWork turned to Airtable and its flexible database platform to serve as a single source of truth.

Using Airtable, WeWork built an object catalog with linked tables, lookup fields, single‑select status fields, and custom views so every item (and its manufacturer, finishes, lead times, and status) can be managed and updated in one place. Airtable’s setup reduced duplicate entry, let nontechnical designers self‑serve changes, and made reviews and blacklists simple to filter — enabling faster, more consistent rollouts as WeWork scales. Airtable also provides an API for future integrations, helping WeWork streamline the process of opening new locations.

WeWork

Adam Neumann

CEO and Co-Founder