MORRISVILLE -- MORRISVILLE -- E-mail marketer iContact has staked out a claim for having the most eclectic offices around.
Mannequins dressed as King Tut and Cleopatra are against a wall. One conference room is decorated with cigar boxes. Cubicles resemble thatched huts. And there are murals featuring, among other things: a red-white-and-blue New York skyline; an 81/2 foot silhouette of Bigfoot; and a 3D jungle complete with plush-toy snakes.
That's what happens when you hand 16 teams of employees a $2,000 budget and turn them loose to decorate the heck out of the place.
The thinking was that having employees do it - on their own time- would end up being more innovative and would be a great recruiting tool to "attract the best and the brightest," said Ryan Allis, the 26-year-old co-founder and CEO of the Morrisville company.
It's also cheaper than hiring an interior decorator.
Do-it-yourself decorating is just the latest iteration of iContact's quest for a singular culture in a pre-fab world. It's a place where the monthly massages are free and where Nerf gunfights erupt sporadically. Bagel Mondays are a tradition. The company also contributes 1 percent of its payroll to local nonprofits and gives employees 21/2 days off each year for volunteer work.
If all that seems a throwback to the days of the tech boom, well, so is the company's growth trajectory. It has grown from 220 employees in August, when it raised $40 million in venture capital, to 284 today. Revenue hit $39 million last year and Allis projects that it will reach $50 million to $55 million this year. The company's software enables businesses and other organization to create, send and track their electronic messages.
IContact's rapid growth triggered its move in October to more than 70,000 square feet of space in Morrisville - enough to hold more than 500 workers - in a building that's part of Lenovo's campus.
Hence the decorate-a-thon, which took the form of a company-wide contest that drew about 130 employees. First prize was a $250 Visa gift card for each team member; each member of the six other award-winning teams received $100 gift cards.
Seven judges were recruited from local nonprofit organizations - all of them iContact customers - to evaluate the contest on Tuesday. The 10 criteria included creativity, "unforgettableness" and geographic accuracy. The latter was a bow to the division of the offices into 16 geographic regions, ranging from the Andes to the United Kingdom, which dictated the themes the decorators followed.
Quality and permanence of work also was a consideration.
"We want to make sure anything that people do is here two-to-three years from now," Allis said.
Valerie Parham-Thompson, a database administrator, was among those who tackled the decorating process.
"It's important to me for team-building and to make our place comfortable and fun to work in," she said. A member of the Scandinavia team, she sported a Viking helmet for the judges' benefit.
Tiffany Orgen, an account manager, devoted about 30 hours to painting a mural of the Andes mountains.
One decorative flourish that the iContact employees didn't create themselves is a circular slide that connects the two floors that iContact occupies. A sign at the top cautions: "There's a big hole in the floor - so if you hurt yourself, it's not our fault!"
"There was a big debate over whether to spend $30,000 on a slide," Allis said. "[But] it's an investment in recruiting and creating 'a wow environment' for our employees."
