How a group of female entrepreneurs found community in a dying mall
The slow decline of Cary Towne Center, the struggling shopping mall just off Interstate 40, has not been good for many of the big-box retailers that call it home. But the cheap rent in the mall has allowed some there to take risks.
Enter one of the Triangle’s newest co-working communities, which took over the 8,000-square-foot space of a former salon and spa at the mall earlier this year.
In a crowded field — with co-working companies from homegrown organizations like HQ Raleigh to large-scale national providers like WeWork expanding throughout the Triangle — this one hopes to stand out by going after a niche it thinks has been ignored: middle-aged women.
While it doesn’t banish men from working there, the space is designed with women in mind, said Leah Campbell, who co-founded the co-working company Vibe. She notes that many women, especially those whose companies don’t have a tech focus, feel intimidated by some of the co-working communities around.
They are industrial in design and some women find it hard to connect with the young workers at local startups, Campbell said.
“We were looking to start a co-working space that we would feel comfortable in,” Campbell said. “We felt that we wanted a different vibe, something that was a little softer ... and homier.”
“We want to be here for women who are not going to be comfortable in other co-working spaces,” her co-founder Nanette Mattox said.
Campbell proudly notes the things you won’t find at Vibe, including ping-pong tables, beer kegs or skateboards.
You will, however, find lots of couches and pillows, colorful artwork and, some days, bottles of wine in the shared kitchen space. They offer programming around meditation and topics like marketing and social media.
Many of the people interested in Vibe, Campbell noted, are building service companies and are often in transition, from motherhood back into the workplace or starting their own business after years of working for a larger one.
“We tend to meet with men and women in transition,” Campbell said. “They started one career and now they are going on their own and we feel like we have the support and programs here, especially the ones that are female-focused.”
In transition
Just like many of the women working out of it, the physical space Vibe occupies is still in transition as well. Located across from a Dave & Buster’s, Vibe only officially opened in June.
Before they started work on it, Campbell said the space looked like a hair salon combined with an Olive Garden. There were exotic murals on many of the walls and hair dryer chairs still installed in the floors. (They sold all that was left behind to fund renovations, though a few repurposed mannequins still hang around.)
But still, what you see today is just phase one, the two co-founders said, more renovations will come once they grow the number of people renting space. Currently, around 30 people co-work there regularly, Campbell said. Prices range from $70 per month for part-time access to $325 per month for a dedicated desk. A private room starts at $550 per month and day passes can be as little as $20.
Mattox, 61, and Campbell, 50, were in transition, too, before dreaming up the idea to start a co-working space together last year.
Mattox is a graphic designer who decided to become a freelancer when she originally moved to the Triangle. When she went to look for a permanent job in the area, she thinks her age kept many firms from taking a chance on her. “It is very difficult to get back into the workplace for a middle-aged woman,” she said.
Campbell was most recently working at a law office, but said she had been considering going back to school before she and Mattox hatched their idea.
Together, the two women make an interesting pair. Mattox is the serious one, more reserved and likely to chew over a sentence for a few moments before saying something. Campbell, on the other hand, is pure energy. Inside of Vibe, she is moving nonstop, joining or starting a conversation nearly every minute to see how she can help.
The duo, who met at a dinner party a decade ago, originally thought they would open a coffee shop together, but after balking at the idea of opening a shop at 5:30 a.m., Mattox said, “How about co-working?”
She had been fascinated by the idea for several years and noticed that there seemed to be an extremely large amount of networking and women’s business listservs and groups in Cary. “If all these women were trying to get together to connect with people,” she said, “then they probably would want to work together.”
Before committing to their own place, they wanted to test drive the concept, with a pop-up co-working session. It happened in the most unusual place for a woman-focused group u201 at a bar in downtown Cary, right underneath a gentleman’s club.
It was a strange location, sure, but women seemed to keep coming. There were drawn as much by the programming — sessions with experts on marketing and networking with female business owners — as by the personalities of the people who were showing up to a bar at 9 a.m.
Elizabeth Skibbe, who is starting an accounting firm, first got involved with Vibe at that bar. She said the group immediately created a nurturing environment for women embarking on new ventures. Skibbe, 40, previously worked in corporate finance but for the past eight years has been focused on raising her three children.
“This place offers a really great opportunity to collaborate, to hear different ideas,” she said. “It’s a chance to network and build a community but also to have a professional setting to meet clients.”
She added that while she had reservations about co-working inside an old mall, it’s actually been a great location.
“Honestly, when I first heard it was going to be in the mall, I thought, well, that’s kind of odd,” she said. “But the reality is that it is a convenient location and parking is a breeze.”
Isolation
When you talk to the people working at Vibe, the word isolation comes up frequently.
“The isolation (of home) will get you after a while,” said Sue Kemple, a 50-year-old marketing consultant.
“The fact that I connect with other women that do similar work as I do, I am not as isolated as if I used my home,” said Sadat Rafie, 51, a former software engineer for Starbucks turned burgeoning artist.
Cindy Uhlir, who runs her own consulting business, said starting a small business or working remotely can be a lonely experience for people at first. Vibe has the added benefit, she said, that it is bringing together a lot of like-minded women in their middle ages.
That was one reason she chose Vibe after looking at co-working options like WeWork.
“I think there’s a lot of women here that are trying to reinvent themselves and come back into the workforce or get out of the rat race and they know they still have things they can contribute,” Uhlir, 60, said.
“Which is really cool, because I know when my mom turned 50 it was kind of like life was over. You couldn’t do anything else and that wasn’t just true of women, it was true of everyone. You don’t see that today. People are 75, 80 years old and reinventing themselves.”
‘A place to land’
For Viviana Solorzano, Vibe become a place of comfort.
In early June, Solorzano, 40, found Vibe through a Google search for co-working space. She had grown tired of working remotely from home all the time.
She picked it out for the simple reason that it was five minutes from her house, but she says she felt a connection as soon as she walked through the door.
That connection was tested just a few weeks later when her remote job was eliminated.
“I was doing a one-hour meditation class (at Vibe) and I returned back to my computer and saw a message to give my boss a call,” she said. When a human resources employee also joined the call, she knew it was bad news.
She was stunned, but the meditation she just left helped. As she got off the phone, she felt the need to talk to someone — that person ended up being Campbell.
“Leah swooped in right away and she was consoling,” Solorzano recalled. “And then she said, ‘I am going to a women in business luncheon at Preston Country Club. You are coming with us; you are going to eat a good meal and you are going to network.’”
It was exactly what she needed at that moment, she said.
“This place gave me a place to land,” she said. “If I had been home alone ... it would have been much more bleak situation.”
What’s the future?
But there is one thing hanging over the head of the venture — the future of the mall it now calls home.
Every mall in the Triangle is currently undergoing transition, though Cary Towne Center has been one of the standout stragglers. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the parking lots sat mostly empty and the inside of the mall was marked by many storefronts sitting dark and lifeless.
“We’re hoping that, you know, they’ll see the value of having co-working here because some developers are doing that now,” Campbell said about the future of their lease. “They know that this can be a big draw ... we feel we’re well positioned to stay, because we are planning on being successful.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more.
This story was originally published July 27, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
