Buffalo’s signature coworking space, CoworkBuffalo, has been consigned to the city’s legacy of cool ventures that didn’t last. But that doesn’t mean the concept is dead in Buffalo. A new coworking space in the town of Tonawanda quietly came online late in 2017..
Inception Buffalo is the brainchild of U.S. Itek president David Stinner and his wife, Dawn Stinner, who formed the idea after the information technology company closed its Niagara Falls Boulevard showroom.
“This was a nice space with high ceilings and bright windows, and we asked ourselves, ‘What can we do with this space?” Stinner said. “We knew that coworking is big in larger cities, so we decided to build out a facility dedicated to that concept.”
Unlike Cowork Buffalo – which never aimed for the corporate or events crowd – the 2,000-square-foot Inception Buffalo space mixes traditional open coworking space with a training room, meeting room and semi-private workspaces. Stinner said Inception Buffalo has been most successful in hosting training sessions, meetings, out-of-town business groups and other types of one-time events. That space can be quickly reconfigured for a variety of different uses, he said.
“The training space is actually one of the most successful functions of our coworking project,” Stinner said. “We’re booked about 50 percent of the time right now.”
There are other places in the region that offer a cowork-style experience, including the d!g space on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, though that space has been slowly taken over by permanent business offices. More inclusive real estate models that integrate coworking with housing, retail and personal amenities have not come to fruition yet in
Buffalo. That includes everything from global corporations such as WeWork to private projects such as Syracuse CoWorks. Stinner said work remains on popularizing Inception Buffalo’s coworking memberships.
“I think Buffalo is still a little behind the curve compared to larger cities and coworking spaces,” Stinner said. “I think people here are still understanding the benefits of the concept, where there is some collaboration but a lot less distraction than a coffee shop or working from home.”
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