Summit Prague Relaunch: Czech out our new technology centre

Summit Prague is home to our Marketing Technology unit, where we have an ambition to be the most trusted provider of highly relevant digital marketing technology solutions for agencies and retailers, on a global scale. This year we have renovated, redecorated and revamped the office and the Marketing Technology element of our proposition, celebrating with a fantastic launch party earlier this week.

The Marketing Technology Business Area

For a number of years Summit has moved away from purely delivering marketing campaigns and evolved to ensure we have a technology offering which anticipates the changes in the digital landscape.

With the delivery of digital marketing becoming more of a commodity and digital talent increasing, retailers across the world have started to move away from agencies delivering marketing services and are setting up in-house teams.

The future of our marketing technology is to ensure we deliver best of breed solutions to take advantage of these trends, developed and aligned to the needs of the customer.

With the existing team and partners that we have in place today and our ambition for growth in the future, we are ready to take advantage of this significant change in the landscape.

The office relaunch is our first major investment into this office space, and is perfectly timed as we expand our Marketing Technology offering.

The Design Process

During the design process we spent a lot of time thinking about what’s important to us and what we wanted to convey in terms of ethos and values. We wanted it to be different, not like any standard office, and we wanted to incorporate our Changemaker philosophy into the design.

This year, the Czech Republic is celebrating 100 years of freedom to commemorate the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 following the end of World War 1. With this celebration we’ve themed the workspaces around important, innovative tech figures throughout history; inventors, innovators, people who have brought about change and who are influential in tech culture.

Each workspace based around an influential person has a description about them and a quote from the individual or about their work. Some of these individuals have appeared on Czech Republic postage stamps at one time, so in some areas we have copied the original stamp designs as well as creating our own.

The images below show one of our work spaces that reflects the work of Zdeněk Miler who created ‘Little Mole’ – the Czech Republic’s most famous and well-travelled cartoon character that even took a trip to the moon onboard the space shuttle Endeavour! The space also includes a quote from Zdeněk himself – “Walt Disney has used almost every animal in his cartoons, but one. I have chosen that one”.

Our meeting rooms have been themed around the history of Summit and are named after our other offices, both past and present. These include a London-themed room and an Albion Mills room to bring a sense of closeness; even though our offices are miles apart in different locations, we’re all still one family.

The entrance to the office is a living room area to reference a common link throughout our Summit offices reflecting family, being at home, and feeling comfortable. It includes a soft seating area, so Summiteers can take a break, collaborate in workshops and work communally in a comfortable environment.

Here at Summit we know how to host a good event, so it was important to incorporate this into the office. There’s a bar, as well as a projector and sound system to create a multifunctional area for us and our partners to use.

As well as decorating, we have knocked down walls, reconfigured the layout, moved the kitchen and made other physical construction changes in order to make it more functional as well as a nice space to work in. A lot of hard work has gone into the relaunch of this office, but seeing the end results it’s clear it was all worth it!

William Rungay’s Coffee Station

Within the office, we have also opened our second branch of William Rungay’s coffee franchise. William Rungay was the great, great, great-grandfather of our CEO Hedley – the first entrepreneur in the Aylott family. After creating our first branch in London we’ve decided to go international!

The Prague version of our coffee house is named William Rungay’s Station Café, and it features a tram mural on the wall as well as freshly brewed tea and coffee that is available for self-service.

The relaunch of our Prague office has been a positive experience for all involved and will make a great impact on our Marketing Technology aspirations, as well as Summit as a whole. We like to make our offices as interesting and exciting as possible as it provides a fun place to work, and we like to fascinate our visitors. A lot of thought, hard work and effort has gone into this relaunch and the efforts have really paid off; a massive well done to everyone involved!